Poetic fingerprints: digital literature’s countercultural and metamedial integration of vision and touch

This paper reflects on the transformations of reading and writing literature promoted by digital environments by presenting some examples created by Serge Bouchardon between 2010 and 2016: Hyper-tensions. Exploring antinomies such as functionality and controllability versus a loss of grasp, desire for transparency versus a need for opacity, willingness to leave and disseminate traces versus discomfort in the permanent exposure of disseminated traces, the three artworks deal with the integration of sense modalities like vision and touch. This is a core question at a special moment in Occidental history characterized by the fact of it being less and less dominated by writing, taking us to a new illiteracy triggered by the rising of an elite that expresses itself by means of programming of cybernetic data banks and computational facilities. Also, exploring the visual and gestural metaphors in Bouchardon’s works as a synonym for transparency, imperceptibility, and inoperability, I argue that this countercultural strategy is his way of subverting the increasing interest in tangibility and immediacy by digital media industries.