Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory

Computers were once thought of as number-crunching machines; but for most of us it is their ability to create worlds and process words that have made them into a nearly indispensable part of life. As Jacques Leslie puts it, if computers are everywhere, it is because they have grown into “poetry machines.” The term “cyberspace” captures the growing sense that beyond – or perhaps on – the computer screen lies a “New Frontier” both enticing and forbidding, a frontier awaiting exploration, promising discovery, threatening humanistic values, hatching new genres of discourse, and alerting our relation to the written word. The purpose of this book is to explore the concepts of text and the forms of textuality currently emerging from the creative chaos of electronic technologies. The essays gathered here address several needs in cybertext criticism: they engage in a critical, though not hostile, dialogue with the claims of the first generation developers and theorists; they search for a middle ground between a narrowly technical description of the works and general considerations about the medium; they outline a poetics tailor-made for electronic textuality, and they relate cybertexts to the major human, aesthetic and intellectual concerns of contemporary culture. Within the general territory of electronic textuality, they focus on three areas. The first section examines how postmodern thought has theorised the textual products of the recent electronic revolution, and how, conversely, these new forms of textuality challenge postmodern thought and call for an expansion of the analytical repertory of literary theory. The second section debates how, in an age that ties the sense of self to a sense of embodiment, identity is affected by the power of electronic technology to create virtual doubles of the body, and how it can it be constructed through electronic writing. The last section gathers three “performance texts” which complete a feed-back loop between electronic and print culture, as they turn the critical investigation of cyberspace textuality into a quest for new forms of literary theoretical writing.

Cyberspace Textuality: Computer Technology and Literary Theory
By Marie-Laure Ryan
Contributor Marie-Laure Ryan
Edition: illustrated
Published by Indiana University Press, 1999
ISBN 0253334659, 9780253334657
285 pages

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Roy Ascott: Telematic Embrace: Visionary Theories of Art, Technology, and Consciousness (2003)

Long before e-mail and the Internet permeated society, Roy Ascott, a pioneering British artist and theorist, coined the term “telematic art” to describe the use of online computer networks as an artistic medium. In Telematic Embrace Edward A. Shanken gathers, for the first time, an impressive compilation of more than three decades of Ascott’s philosophies on aesthetics, interactivity, and the sense of self and community in the telematic world of cyberspace. This book explores Ascott’s ideas on how networked communication has shaped behavior and consciousness within and beyond the realm of what is conventionally defined as art.

Telematics, a powerful marriage of computers and telecommunication, made technologies we now take for granted—such as e-mail and automated teller machines (ATMs)—part of our daily life, and made art a more interactive form of expression. Telematic art challenges traditional relationships between artist, artwork, and audience by allowing nonlocal audiences to influence the emergent qualities of the artwork, which consists of the ebb and flow of electronic information. These essays constitute a unique archaeology of ideas, tracing Ascott’s meditations on the formation of consciousness through the intertwined cultural histories of art and technology from the 1960s to the present.

Shanken’s introduction situates Ascott’s work within a history of ideas in art, technology, and philosophy. Given the increasing role of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the creation of commerce and community at the dawn of this new millennium, scholars, students, laypeople, policymakers, and artists will find this collection informative and thought-provoking.

Edited and with an essay by Edward A. Shanken
Published by University of California Press, 2003
ISBN 0585465916, 9780585465913
427 pages

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google books

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