Abstract
Whenever the program of a work, created by an artist, is run by a computer, the digital device necessarily plays a role in its updating process: because of the operating systems, the software and the ever changing speed of computers, the digital device may sometimes affect the author’s artistic project, or even make it unreadable on screen. Thus, readers do not know what they should consider as part of the artist’s intentionality, and what they should ascribe to the unexpected changes made by the reading device of their personal computer. Critics who are in keeping with a hermeneutic approach may ascribe certain processes, actually caused by the machine, to the artist’s creativity. What is more, authors lose control over the evolution of their work and the many updates it undergoes. Thus, the “digital” artist is given four options when dealing with the potential instability of the electronic device, which will be described in this article by close readings of The Dreamlife of letters by Brian Kim Stefans, Revenances by Gregory Chatonsky and La Série des U by Philippe Bootz.
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Notes
“Transitoire Observable” is a group of “digital” artists. It was created on February 6th, 2003 by three digital poets: Philippe Bootz, Alexandre Gherban and Tibor Papp. Several others have since joined the group. All of them focus on the global nature of computer-based systems and not only on the forms that their on-screen surface displays. (http://transitoireobs.free.fr/to/).
The term first appears in certain analyses of the history of technology: in certain contexts, technical progress has replaced religious eschatology and become a source of myth and transcendence. The “technical sublime” also plays an important role in science fiction literature and cinema (in the film Ghost in the Shell for example, a bodiless consciousness resists political domination by surviving on the Internet), and in posthumanist philosophy (for example How We Became Posthuman by N. Katherine Hayles); in all these approaches, technology is supposed to open the door to a new existence transcending the present time normality.
Balseiro and di Crosta (2007, p. 92) show that the reader of Underground is then plunged in a state of “semiotic fuzziness”: he can no longer “conceive the laws of contingency, namely the laws that link an interaction to its effects”.
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Saemmer, A. Aesthetics of surface, ephemeral, re-enchantment and mimetic approaches in digital literature. Neohelicon 36, 477–488 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-009-0016-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-009-0016-2