Session 5: 8th February Room 822

(500 word coursework summary due in this week)

Digital Art

I know I've finished a novel when I get to the last page, or do I? What do I do with a hypernovel in which the same page keeps turning up and I never know whether I've read all there is to read? How do I know when I've finished 'reading' a Duchamp (or even a Rossetti)? What is the work of art in the age of digital (re)production?
A Deposition

Objectives

  1. Explore literacy issues in relation to artistic production and consumption.
Preliminary Activity
    1. Read or read about Michael Joyce's hypernovel, Afternoon: A story. (If you use MacOS then go here and use the password girongi; if you use a Windows machine, go to Soh-young's site and there's a link on the Session 8 page)
    2. Before 25th February, read Soh-young's poem, The Foggy Morning. The poem has been arranged with all of its lines numbered (starting with the title and including the author). You should produce a response to one of the lines and mail it to Paul Dowling. Responses may be poems (your own or another's) or prose or anything else that can be rendered in plain text. You may respond to more than one line or to the same line more than once, but you should send each response as a separate attachment. Please give each response a title, which should be the word or words to which you are responding (it could be the whole line) and please indicate in your mail which line you are responding to. We will construct the whole as a hypertext in Storyspace (the environment in which Afternoon was written).
Essential Preliminary Reading
Dowling, P.C. (2004). Mustard, Monuments and Media: A pastiche.
Douglas, J.Y. (2001). 'Michael Joyce's Afternoon: A story read by J. Yellowlees Douglas.' The End of Books or Books Without End? Reading interactive narratives. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Additional Reading
Benjamin, W. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Chung, S-y. (2002). A Study of Literary Adaptation: Film reviewing and the construction of cultural value.
Hayles, N. K. (1999). How We Became Posthuman: Virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics. Chicago, University of Chicago Press.
McGann, J. (2001). Radiant Textuality: Literature after the world wide web. New York, Palgrave.
Olsen, L. (1999). Virtual Termites:A hypertextual technomutant explo(it)ation of William Gibson and the electronic beyond(s). Cyberspace, Textuality: Computer technology and literary theory. M.-L. Ryan. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Page, B. (1999). Women Writers and the Restive Text: Feminism, experimental writing and hypertext. Cyberspace, Textuality: Computer technology and literary theory. M-L. Ryan. Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
Coursework Title
What is a work of art in the age of digital (re)production?