new media art

This book of electronic literature (e-lit) brings together pioneering and emerging women whose work has earned international impact and scholarly recognition. It extends a historical critical overview of the state of the field from the diverse perspectives of twenty-eight worldwide contributors. It illustrates the authors’ scholarly interests through discussion of creative practice as research, historical accounts documenting collections of women’s new media art and literary works, and art collectives. It also covers theoretical approaches and critical overviews, from feminist discourses to close readings and “close-distant-located readings” of pertinent works in the field. #WomenTechLit includes authors from Latin America, Russia, Austria, Ireland, Spain, France, Italy, Portugal, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Poland, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the US.

(Source: Publisher's Blurb)

Marie-Laure Ryan argues that dysfunctionality in new media art is “not limited to play with inherently digital phenomena such as code and programs,” and provides a number of alternative art examples, while also arguing that dysfunctionality “could [also] promote a better understanding of the cognitive activity of reading, or of the significance of the book as a support of writing.”

In my dissertation from 2013 I close read pieces by David Jhave Johnston, mez and Johannes Hélden among others, with an interest in multimodal analysis and media philosophy.

Back then, I chose to characterize Electronic Literature metaphorically as a literary diaspora in continuation of historical literary avant-gardes. The title of this years ELO conference made me think of e-lit as a new diaspora in itself – a culture, a movement, a family with historical roots, traditions and habits but already with several branches, new subdivisions and blends.

The title of the conference also gave me the encouraging thought that I am still an e-lit scholar, though my current research project “Technologies of the Face in Contemporary Art” belongs to the tradition of visual art and new media art in a broader sense In my paper, I will closely analyze a piece that has proved to be a threshold between my two research projects and explain why.

The installation The Aleph is made by Kim Yong Hun and was displayed in the ELO 2012 Media Art Show. It consists of two computer screens producing the images of two faces. These are composed of 10,000 photographs from the Internet of people’s private photos of faces tagged with the words “Funeral” or “Birthday”. Each pixel borrows a part from a singular photo and it gives a blurred expression in the overall facial image. The collective funeral face looks like a smiling ghost. The work seems to suggest that there should be something in common in the respective joyful and sorrowful expression.

The Aleph thematizes the relationships between faces, identity and data. The work reads all the data, but it is linguistic data arising from the labels of the images placed by the original owners. The program cannot decide whether an image looks like a “funeral face” or not. It is possible for contemporary face detection technology to determine whether a mouth is turning up or down, but the algorithm in The Aleph bases its conclusions on linguistic data. Wittgenstein described how we (humans) never read the face as a sign – we recognize it immediately as sorrowful or joyful, without necessarily being able to describe specifically what features produce these feelings. The machine as interpreter does not have this sensibility (it can only read faces as structures, because everything must be translated into data that can be compared with other data).

I will among other things discuss The Aleph in relation to the German artist Hito Steyerls essay “Proxy Politics”, on contemporary photography and the disconnection of the face on the Internet: “An image becomes less of a representation than a proxy, a mercenary of appearance, a floating texture-surface-commodity. Persons are montaged, dubbed, assembled, incorporated.”

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Electronic (digital) literature is developing in every corner of the world where artists explore the possibility of literary expression using computers (and the internet). As a result, innovations in this genre of literature represent unique developments and there is a growing corpus of scholarship about all aspects of electronic literature including the perspective of digital humanities. Contributors to New Work on Electronic Literature and Cyberculture, a special issue of CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture explore theories and methodologies for the study of electronic writing including topics such as digital culture, electronic poetry, new media art, aspects of gender in electronic literature and cyberspace, digital literacy, the preservation of electronic
literature, etc.

Digital technology has revolutionized the way we produce and experience art. Not only have printing, painting, photography and sculpture been transformed by digital techniques, but entirely new forms such as net art, software art, digital installations and virtual reality have emerged as recognized artistic practices, collected by major museums, institutions and private collectors the world over. Christiane Paul surveys digital art from its appearance in the 1980s to the present day, and looks ahead to what the future may hold. She dicusses the key artists and works, drawing a distinction between work that uses digital technology as a tool to produce traditional forms and work that uses it as a medium to create new types of art. The book explores themes raised by digital art, such as viewer interaction, artificial life and artificial intelligence, social activism, networks and telepresence, as well as curatorial issues such as the collection, presentation and preservation of digital art. (Source: Thames & Hudson website)

New mobile technologies shape the way, in which people communicate and perceive the reality. Our basic position is the nomadic cockpit (expression coined by the author of this paper) in terms of being armed with many of navigating and controlling mobile screenic devices (from cell phones and tablets to consoles, cameras, and various players). When we move around in our surroundings armed with such devices we perceive the data shown on the screen of such a device, meaning that both the visual and aural interfaces are integrated in our experience of walking or riding environment. Virtual data approaching from the remote context on the screen are related to and coordinated with our basic, non-mediated perception from the physical here and now, meaning that the digital technology, provoking one’s hands on controls activity becomes incorporated in the experience and understanding of our being-on-the-move. This paper aims to explore the way in which the present mobile culture enters some movements in new media art and e-literature that presuppose the interactions between the moving bodies and the words and images on the move. We are witnessing various projects in mobile and locative media that deploy mobile phones in order to broaden the presence of new media textual and non-textual contents and its experience. In this paper we refer to some examples of e-literary projects shaped for mobile screenic devices (e.g. Bauer's and Suter’s AndOrDada) as well as for new media ones, such as EDT’s The Transborder Immigrant Tool. The comparison between the use of mobile and locative media in e-literature and in new media art demonstrates significant differences between them with the regard to their tasks and applications. Rather than foregrounding the pure artistic (aesthetic) features the new media art refers first and foremost to activism, hacktivism, repurposing, tactical media, tactical biopolitics and to the use value of its projects as persuasively demonstrates The Transborder Immigrant Tool, which was created with the task of reappropriating wordily available technology to be used as a form of humanitarian aid. The Virtual Hiker Algorithm installed on the simple mobiles guides border crossers in the hostile desert condition toward the nearest aid sites (e. g. to the water and first aid points). When new media art project is displayed on the screen of one’s nomadic cockpit, we need to look at it not in terms of aesthetic practice but as the production of goals for the nomadic user to solve, puzzles that require it to enact its kinesthetic and proprioceptive features, in unusual conditions. On the contrary, e-literary projects formed in mobile and locative media are often about the demonstrations of technical advances in this field; they revolutionize the means of production, they invent the new genre in which the textual creativity is deployed (e. g. Aya Karpinska’s zoom narrative), they gain the importance in terms of avant-garde of the medium, but their tasks are not so transgressive and radical in terms of the social interventions. Unlike the new media art ones they do not enter the not-just-art (term coined by the author of this paper) in terms of an activity that seeks to change the very condition of life.

This dissertation has as its object of research new feminist hypermedia and it is located in the fields of hypertext theory, gender studies, and semiotics. This work offers close-readings of three recent feminist hypertext fictions written in English language exploring the problematics of gender, sexuality and multiple identities: Dollspace (1997-2001) by Francesca da Rimini, Brandon (1998) by Shu Lea Cheang and Blueberries (2009) by Susan Gibb. The aim of the study is, in the first place, show how feminist hypertext fictions can be analysed: categorising the work, interpreting its nodes and lexias, emphasizing the cultural references it evokes and studying the readers’ reactions to the hypertext. And in the second place, promote the study of electronic literature as a useful tool for literature courses as well as to demonstrate the beneficial aspects of hypertexts to work with gender studies literature.