And Little is New
In a sense, digital literature - kinetic text - is a new version of old ideas. The new medium allows us to experience literature in a different way. This is similar, I think, to way our view of stories changed as society shifted from an oral tradition to a written. We weren’t confined to mnemonic devices to preserve or create a piece. With digital literature, we’re no longer confined to the written page or to lines of text. Whether we are trying to produce something new or to preserve old knowledge isn’t really important. What’s important is how the new medium affects the old and how the old affects the new.
Hermaticon might be the “new” The Waste Land. It’s confusing. It doesn’t seem to have a point. Maybe one day critics will point to it and called a masterpiece. Masterpiece or not, like The Waste Land, I’m thinking that if the author/creator annotated it, the notes would need notes. That being said, I plunged into Hermaticon. I tried the suggested spell and then proceeded to experiment with different keystrokes. The sense of bafflement I felt wasn’t reduced by a second or third visit. This experience paralleled my experience when I read The Waste Land.
I was left wondering how I was going to react when I saw the pictures and clips used in the piece. Would I view the advertisements differently because I saw them used in a different context? Or would I think of Hermaticon when I saw them? Would seeing them in the context that was intended, help me to understand Hermaticon better? Perhaps a better question would be, would it help me to start to understand it? Perhaps, like the notes to The Waste Land, seeing them would only increase my bewilderment .
posted by Anonymous @ 3:54 PM
1 Comments:
The move from predominantly oral forms of communication to writing is, of course, one of the key events in the development of so-called "Western" culture. There's some especially interesting work on the emergence of writing in classical Greece--as you may know, Socrates was somewhat skeptical about the cultural value of the invention of writing.
For me, the question of newness is only interesting if it helps us reflect on what we expect of literature or art in the first place. What kind of experience do we look for in the literary? How does the computer technology at our disposal allow us to enhance that experience? One of the areas of research I'm trying to pursue is the representation of time and the experience of time in literature. Narrative has a whole bunch of conventions for orienting characters and reading in time-frames. It strikes me that animation messes with time in interesting ways that are simply not available to traditional print novels and stories. At the same time, the "problem" of time is hardly a new one. You raise an important point about what, exactly, is new about new media art.
The comparison of Hermeticon to "The Wasteland" is a great one. Both have allusions to earlier literary works, both demand a kind of attentive reading, both are to some degree confusing. Playing out such comparisons can sometimes lead to productive research topics.
Great ideas.
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