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Digital Anthropophagy: Refashioning Words as Image, Sound and action.!
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Marta Pérez Campos!
[email protected]!
ABSTRACT This paper presents text and words as something material and its incorporation into interactive installations as an element released from its own meaning. Thus, text has lost its inner meaning to become a new representation tool, no longer related to signifier and signified, but to its own corporality and shape. The author compares the subversion of the colonized countries, which digested the european culture, with the digestion of text and its representation as image, sound and action. Roberto Simanowsky is a german scholar of Literature and Media, whose main interest resides in projects of Cyberspace and Literature. At the same time, he is the editor of a journal in Digital Literature and Arts.
1. STRUCTURE The author divides this article in three different sections. The first one introduces the topic. At the same time, defines and justifies the main concepts related to the presentation of text in artworks nowadays. Thus, the notions of devouring and digesting define the current appropriation of words, turning them into either image, action or sound. This process is defined by terms such as, digital poetry, remediation, post-alphabetical object and Oswald Andrade’s ‘anthropophagy’[2]. Nevertheless, this transformation and reconsideration of text already started in the 16th Century with the use of anthropomorphic alphabets. Cannibalism was a way of subversion against the colonizers, cannibalizing the other was the way to disrupt its hegemony. In this case, digesting text emerges as a method to strip away its power in a relation, where we only can be the receivers of its message. The appropriation of text seems connected to the colonialism, and its digestion and regurgitation emerges as a mechanism of defense. Therefore, the use of words and letters in interactive installations is far from being a remediation, text is the result of a deeper process in which we destroy its original meaning and transform it into a new representation object. Simanowsky presents the text as hyper mediated, because it is not a linear medium of information any more, now it is an image without substance, remaining only its post-alphabetical character.
1.1.Transforming text into Post-Alphabetical objects In the second part, Simanowsky presents some artworks, which exemplify this facts. One of them is Text Rain, by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv. In this artwork, the artists use letters in an accumulative way: if the viewer collects enough of them, she could be able to read a sentence of a poem, but she will be rarely able to disguise the whole meaning of it. The author also points out the conceptual character of most of these artworks. in Text Rain, the poem presented as divided letters
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is about the conversation between bodies and the creation of words through movements. Thus, this lost of meaning as text, comes back to them through the interaction of an unaware viewer. Words turn into action. Another example is The Messenger by Paul de Marinis, in which the whole meaning of the text is blurred by the exaltation of every letter and the annihilation of any possible sense. Every letter was in origin part of an e-mail, which has lost its meaning turning into a surreal skeleton’s dance. Words turn into sound. Finally, Simanowsky describes an artwork by Caleb Larsen named The complete works of William Shakespeare. This artwork looks like a decorative painting, a landscape composed by pixels which are not representing any proper picture but actually another sign: a character from the alphabet. Words turn into image.
1.2. Remedying Old Media In this last part, Simanowsky contextualizes this process into our nowadays currents of thought. He mentions Paul Levinson’s concept of remediation. Remediation as a way to ‘improve’ an existing media, for instance, photography should remedies the incapacity of representing reality in a painting. In this case it would apply to the rescue of materiality in a text. Adorno and Susan Sontag are also brought to the discussion due to their critic to mass media and the absence of intellectual contemplation. Together with many aesthetic theorists, all of them focused on the materiality of signs and putting aside its representative character.
2. CONCLUSION From my point of view, the author presents all his ideas in a deductive way. He starts explaining his general considerations about the topic and exemplifies them with several artworks, which reaffirm his thoughts. Finally, he concludes with a question about the importance of understanding and knowing the essence of these artworks to properly be able to talk about a ‘refashioning of words’. If we just consider them from a visual perspective, where words are just reduced to shapes and are not signs of any meaning, maybe there is not subversion and anthropophagy any more. Personally, I think that the author brings some controversial points to the discussion. The first one, might be this text is that, as a representation tool, text will not lose its connotation The author remarks some interesting consequence of this process: digital media seems to be targeted to the popular more than to the elite. Nevertheless, all these artworks are exhibited in art galleries and therefore not visited by most of people. From my point of view, the concept of remediation is not an appropriate one in relation to the use of text in some of the artworks. Text does not get ‘improved’ in this transformation, it gets blurred and transformed in some cases, but in works as Text
Rain, it might also be interesting to consider the size and typography of each letter and not only the division of a poem in letters which are falling down. A word might lose its meaning when its divided into its components, but probably the viewers will try to connect the letters again, and create words with them, going back again to the use of text as a representation tool.
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7.REFERENCES 1.
Simanowsky, Roberto. Digital Anthropophagy: Refashioning Words as Image, Sound and Action. LEONARDO, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 159–163, 2010.
2.
LaBelle, Brandon. Lexicon of the Mouth: Poetics and Politics of voice and the oral imaginary. Bloomsbury, New York, 2014.
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