Digital Materiality of Chinese Characters in Text-Based Interactive Art

Abstract

This paper concerns the digital materiality of Chinese characters (漢字, Kanji in Japanese, Hanja in Korean or Hanzi in Chinese; literally ‘Han characters’) in text-based interactive artworks. As a logosyllabic language, Chinese is fundamentally different from alphabetic languages in terms of the nature of possible genres of literature. Simanowski (Digital art and meaning: Reading kinetic poetry, text machines, mapping art, and interactive installations. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011) has suggested that a work can no longer be considered literature when the letters it contains can no longer be read as words with linguistic meaning. He refers to these kinds of works as “postalphabetic,” which means they can be defined only as digital art, rather than literature. Although works that use European languages can play with this question by challenging the audience to make sense of their postalphabetic nature as a purely sensual experience, as visual symbols, or as traces of the fleeting semantics of the letters, the issue is further complicated with Chinese characters. The ideogrammatic nature of Chinese questions the possibility of stripping off all the meanings on the “letter level,” even if a character has been transformed or disintegrated. This issue has been addressed in the pre-digital era by the concrete poetry artist Niikuni, whose work disassembled and juxtaposed kanji characters. Likewise, in the late 1980s, Xu Bing addressed similar themes by creating hundreds of fake characters. In both cases, although the characters have been reduced to strokes and lines, their aesthetic values are obviously semantic in relation to the language. Using Kedzior’s (How digital worlds become material: An ethnographic and netnographic investigation in second life. Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, 2014) idea of digital objects as “material” but simultaneously “unstable and transfigurable” (p. 16), this chapter examines contemporary Chinese artworks in terms of the post/alphabetic distinction in order to identify a direction for the study of Chinese text-based interactive arts. The chapter investigates the possibility of a condition of “post-characters,” which differs from the condition of postalphabet in letter-based interactive art.

This is a revised version of two papers originally presented at the Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts (DRHA), Dublin 2015, and International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Hong Kong 2016, conferences.