New Media Literature And Art: A Writer's Perspective

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New Media Literature (And Art) A Writer's
Perspective
For

• Presented by
• Thomas Swiss
• www.thomasswiss.com

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Work

• Fresh Icons
• The Dream Life

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Collaboration Writers Working With Others in New
Media

• To hear the critics tell it, one problem with
  emergent digital literary and art forms is that
  they don't yet have established stars.
• Where's our Shakespeare of the Screen?  Our Pixel
  Picasso?  How long before we have a Digital
  DeMille?
• In my experience, collaborative work redefines
  artistic labor in new and complicated ways.
• While the art world has sometimes been open to
  collaborative work, the literature world has
  always had a hard timeaccepting collaborative
  work, even in our digital age.

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The Critics Perspective

• Two different ways of generalizing about new
  media writing surfaced in the 1990s with very
  different implications
• 1. Transformations in the materiality of literary
  texts
• 2. The relationship between literature and
  technology and between literature and other arts
• These are, for the most part, old arguments
  played out in a new age such issues have been
  worried over by critics and writers at least
  since the invention of the printing press.

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Language as Image Materiality of the Text

• Visible, around the topic of new media
  literature, is a rift between particular
  ideological and historical representations of
  reading practices.
• The notion that the materiality of writing - its
  distinctive shape, its typographic or digital
  character -- should or even can be transcended or
  "slipped" is one that many readers and
  journalists have.
• But, many critics would argue literary language
  is not a window to be seen through -- not, as
  Marjorie Perloff writes, "a transparent glass
  pointing to something outside it, but a system of
  signs.

Two Examples The Problem
Shy Boy
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Art That Puts You in the Picture, Like It or Not

• Sarah Boxers comments in the New York Times
  (April 26, 2005)
• Interactive art is irritating. Let's count the
  ways at the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival .
• Alas, some cyberworks combine all the annoyances
  of interactive art (prurience, ritual,
  ungraciousness and moral superiority) to produce
  a mega-annoyance total frustration.

A Rebuttal? Hey Now The Narrative You
Anticipate You May Produce
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Distribution/ Venues

• From the Language Side
• Born Magazine
• tir web
• Drunken Boat
• From the Art Side
• To date most new media is designed for small
  screen and is a virtual object not a real object.
• Decisions regarding what to exhibit in museums
  are made by curators most of whom are 35 and
  above before they get in position of power.
  Museums are about preserving objects into
  perpetuity.
• It took well over 100 years for photography to be
  accepted on museum walls, about 30 years for
  video.
• Art history is the discipline that drives
  museums.

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And So...

• Like some other literatures before it, new media
  fiction and poetry are self-consciously
  experimental. 
• Now moving into a second or even third phase, the
  practices of and discourses about digital
  literature in the Age of the Web are increasingly
  mature and expanding... well, in some quarters.
• Looking at the rhetoric of and about new media
  literature as it plays out among texts,
  audiences, and institutions is a powerful
  reminder that the meaning of the term
  "literature" itself is always up for grabs - and
  that "new media" literature, whatever the future
  might hold for it, is currently the site of many
  important conversations, struggles, and debates.