New media shaped textuality, narrative, codeworks and digital poetry are deployed in electronic literature as a practice situated in Internet and post-Internet arts. E-literature embedded in online ...venues has outgrown a hyperfiction phase and become conceptual. Instead of hyperlink-based storytelling, it has begun dealing with itself, becoming e-literature after the end of e-literature-as-we-know it, aligning with contemporary art, science, philosophy, economy and politics. Entering the “after the end” phase is of essential importance for a particular field. In its conceptual phase, e-literature addresses its fundamental principles, investigates the limitations of digital media, Internet, language, narrative, text, sign and code. Its projects are laboratories for playing with different hypotheses. However, the reflection on the technology that generates it and the experience stimulated by its projects significantly contribute to an understanding of e-literature. This paper is focused on the second experience as defined according to Benjamin’s concept of the second technology, a playful experience enabled through technology. Based on play, the second experience promotes exploration and blurring boundaries, which in the case of digital textuality means dealing with a vanishing text which is only conditionally legible and whose existence is limited to a particular time.
V sodobni kulturi se srečujemo z vrsto zamenjav paradigem, ki usmerjajo pozornost h kulturnim vsebinam s poudarjenimi vizualnimi, kinetičnimi, taktilnimi in performativnimi učinki. Te izrazito ...demonstrira umetniški performans, ki kot avdiovizualen, taktilen, proprioceptičen in motoričen investira uprizorjena telesa v gibanju, je časoven in procesualen. Čeprav je performans v jedru performativnega obrata od kulture teksta (ki predstavlja literarno paradigmo) h kulturi performansa (ki vpliva tudi na neumetniška področja), sodi danes tudi tekst v performans, in sicer v tisti modalnosti, ki vključuje tako napisane/izgovorjene črke in besede kot druge besedilne sestavine: praznine, »belo pisavo«, prečrtane črke in besede, odsotnost, izginjanje in bralčevo telesnost vključujoče aranžmaje. V tem eseju obravnavamo projekta Bit.Fall in CyberSpaceLand, ki funkcionirata kot performansa hitrega pojavljanja besed in njihovega izginjanja ter kot uprizoritvi vizualnih besedilnih aranžmajev. Prav tako pa se v teh projektih vzpostavlja igra verbalnih in neverbalnih označevalcev, ki sodi k razširjenem konceptu teksta, razumljenega kot besedilna storitev; ta igra spodbuja ne-samo-branje kot novo modalnost kompleksnega izkušanja teksta.
In today's world we encounter an expanded concept of textuality based on words-images-(virtual) bodies that are arranged with respect to a spatial and temporal grammar. The new media shaped text as a ...textual service follows the performative turn by deploying verbal and non-verbal components, blanks, empty space, and vanishing letters. Such a text challenges not-just-reading as a new mode of complex textual experience.
In his article "E-Literature, New Media Art, and E-Literary Criticism" Janez Strehovec explores the commonalities between electronic literature and new media art. Rather than deploying the ...traditional conceptual apparatus of e-literary criticism directed first and foremost to the new media elements of e-literature, Strehovec takes into account approaches from current theories in the social sciences and humanities. In doing so, he draws upon examples of new media art as a practice in which the novel's social paradigms change the way of art-making and challenge the very function of art. Close-readings of some new media art projects including Bookchin's Mass Ornament, EDT's Transborder Immigrant Tool, and Jodi's ZYX demonstrate that new media art is questioning the very ontological status of the field in terms of abandoning aesthetic and artistic functions in favor of their functions of use. In contrast, e-literature's interactions with society challenge the intrinsic possibilities of this field, especially in terms of blurring the boundaries between forms and revolutionizing e-literature's means of expression.
This essay attempts to assess whether the perceptual issues posed by the contemporary interface culture, and the constant attitude shift demanded by the new media between the "natural" and the "as ...if" modes, might be considered a significant challenge for phenomenological aesthetics as understood in terms of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception. To demonstrate how the use of a particular interface profoundly shapes the form and structure of an activity as well as enabling perception of a particular kind, the author does not focus directly on the state-of-the-art smart interfaces, but describes the experience of cycling in a large city, with the interface in the form of the bicycle upgraded with an imagined ride simulator. While the former enables a very particular entrance into the world of perception, shaped by its moderate speed and detachment from the ground, the latter enables techno-shaped perception in the "as if" screenic mode. The experience described raises questions concerning the kinaesthetic, proprioceptive and motor features contributing to the cyclist's mobile perception, as well as pointing to issues related to the reading of the city's network as a particular spatial configuration generated by the cyclist's realtime activity. This is the space-time-event-ridescape maintained and modified by the corporeal act of cycling. The spatiality of such a ride does not presume the notion of a space that contains the cyclist, but builds on notions of being-in-the-ridescape (as a kind of cityscape), in terms not only of full corporeal and mental engagement, but also of bodily literacy. The reading of the cityscape enabled by the combination of two interfaces, the bicycle and the ride simulator, is discussed in relation to de Certeau's account of pedestrian (walking) experience in a big city, his distinction between strategies and tactics, and the notion that each cyclist contributes a novel story to ridetext, which is viewed not as an aesthetic object but as the production of puzzles for the rider to solve. The paper concludes by questioning the capacity of phenomenology to accommodate the contemporary phenomenon of a "mixed" or "augmented reality" either in concept or in relation to the demands of the phenomenological reduction and the ends of the epoché.
Today we come across new media art projects as post-industrial art services that occur at the intersection of contemporary art, new economy, post-political politics (activism, hacktivism), ...technosciences and techno lifestyles. The artwork is not a stable object anymore, it is a process,
an artistic software, an experience, a service devoted to solving a particular (cultural and non-cultural) problem, a research, an interface which demands from its user also the ability for associative selection, algorithmic (logical) thinking and for procedures pertaining to DJ and VJ culture,
such as mixing, cutting, sampling and recombination.The art service is not so much the manufacturing of things as it is a process of reshaping the thing, moving it, repurposing it, connecting it and incorporating it into new contexts and relations. The service presupposes a problem, a
challenge or an order to be solved or carried out. The performer of the service is always faced with a certain task, challenged to solve it in a sequence of steps, chosen as economically as possible. The service therefore ends with a solution of the problem (or its removal) and not with the
manufacturing of a finished object. The service always implies an algorithmic procedure that has to be as rational as possible, economical, divided into phases, steps, instructions needed for it to be carried out. By defining the new media art in terms of post-industrial service activity,
the traditional concepts of aesthetic and autonomous art are left behind and replaced with novel theoretical devices, e.g. software, repurposing, remixing, recombination, rewriting and hybridization.
Strehovec examines the kinetic and animated web-based poetry pieces that are often developed in distinct time sequences and are usually programmed in java script, Shockwave, or Flash. Among other ...things, she asserts that the changing visuality of animated, online text has altering consequences for reading, writing, and visual poetry.
Drawing particularly on kinetic digital poetry as a kind of software language art, this essay suggests that such a scripting-and-programming-language based textuality is not a continuation of the ...poetry-as-we-know-it by other means, but a new medium with its own specificity set at the intersection of the literary avant garde, net art, software art, browser art and text-based electronic installations. It is of importance that this programmable medium applies an expanded concept of textuality based on the application of netspeak and the symbols of programming languages, meaning also that the language of the code is involved in new poetic dynamic structures with striking visual, animated and tactile features. Kinetic digital poetry runs in loops, the loop being the medium adjusted to the demand of organising text components in time-based sequences, which seems to be the mode best suited to the perception of contemporary individuals and to the demands of mainstream visual culture. One of the crucial tasks of this essay is to demonstrate a shift from traditional hyperfiction and hyperpoetry to more sophisticated forms and to the specificity of software language art devoted to a new audience. The institutions in which such a textual practice exists are the rooms of club-, DJ-, and VJ- culture, mailing lists, newsletters, digital arts conferences and digital art exhibitions, rather than university classrooms and libraries.
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