"Interrogating the inscription technology"
A common theme of this week's works seems to be that they highlight their own "inscription technology", the medium in which they are conceived.
"Artist's Statement No. 45,730,944" does this the best. For me, it achieved what "Lexia to Perplexia" failed to do--effectively questioning the effects of technology, and the Web in particular, on our existence. It reveals how we are defined by people looking at us (our work); it explores how we understand and interface with the world (our neighbors) through the Web. And the entire work is a prolonged self-reference--another Web denizen's work calling for attention, just another cycle of uploading, waiting, and playing. (I imagine the sock-tasting is also a interesting reference, though not apparently one to the inscription technology!)
"Hollowbound Book" highlights the materiality of Hayles' book--particular it's bound nature. It expands this metaphor into the conceptual realm, holding that Hayles ties her various arguments into a single whole in a very similar way. Yet, interestingly, all of this reflection is done through interactive, electronic examples. It's a nice return--Hayles reviews such digital works in a physical book, only to be reviewed in turn by the digital.
I did not find "The Dreamlife of Letters" to be particularly enriching. Indeed, it is little more interesting than its original source material "poem(s)". However, what effect it does achieve beyond simply being a list of words, it achieves entirely through interesting animations and combinations made possible by the animation medium.
posted by Zach @ 1:05 PM
2 Comments:
I'm glad you found "Artist's Statement No. 45,730,944" to be a successful attempt to question the inscription technology with which it has been produced. I go back and forth about this particular piece--sometimes it seems really smart and sometimes really self-indulgent and familiar. (I mostly like all of YHCHI's stuff, but the self-referentiality of this one can get on my nerves.) What interests me about your response is that unlike Memmott, YHCHI use a fairly conventional modality, the linear progression of standard-English text elements--to convey their reflection on web art. Memmott's combinations of English, markup, and scripting languages is much more "in your face" as an inscription practice, and the hyper-interactivity of Lexia to Perplexia is even more emphatic. I wonder if there's a threshold of self-referentiality beyond which the strain on the reader is too much and we have to work to hard just to make the thing legible.
B.K. Stefans Dreamlife piece seems to be trying to explore the limits of animation as a meaningful inscription practice in itself, independent of syntactically coherent texts or even morphologically coherent words. I'm not sure how successful it is, but for me it remains provocative, and I admire the range of animations he achieves throughout the piece. Still, I think that if animation becomes too detached from textuality, we start edging out of the territory of the literary and into web art, which is certainly interesting but a different kind of artistic practice. That last sentence feels really conservative to me, and I probably can't completely defend it. . .
Certainly, there seems to be a spectrum, a grey area, where some of these pieces edge out of the literary. I think that's fine. Just because they are not (or are only barely) literary does not mean they are not still artistic and valuable.
That said, many people still don't take film and graphic novels seriously because they're not "literary". Perhaps some of these artists would appreciate the respectibility that comes with maintaining the "literary" label.
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