[In this post: Lens -  please select it from the left column of the linked page, there's no way of directly linking it]

“The surface of writing is and has always been complex. It is a liminal symbolically interpenetrated membrane, a fractal coast – a borderline, a chaotic and complex structure with depth and history”.

(John Cayley, “Writing on complex surfaces”, 1) 

When I first saw Cayley’s article, I was hooked by its title. I thought: “Finally someone who realizes that writing is tri-dimensional, if not multi-. Especially if we talk about electronic literature, it must be so. Just think about all the media that you can embed, all the fonts you can choose, all the colors that backgrounds can have. Texts seem to become alive”.

But then, when I started reading, the name that kept popping out was Saul Bass. Who is Saul Bass? I didn’t know him either, as you are probably thinking. Then I checked his name up in Wikipedia (of course, where else?) and here it is what I’ve found:

“Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996) was an American graphic designer and Academy award-winning filmmaker, but he is best known for his design on animated motion picture title sequences.”

So what do a title sequences designer and electronic literature have in common? According to Cayley,  the use Bass made of graphics was one of the first examples of how a writing surface can become complex making letters, numbers and other geometric shapes material and interactive between themselves and with their background.

His distinctive feature was the rule, which was used not only to manage the spaces in which words appear, but interfered with the surface of writing and became a surface of writing itself (4). According to Cayley, Bass’s most successful work was the title sequence for Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest”, for its transformation of the green ruled background in a skyscraper’s façade ”in a continuum (italics mine) of retorical possibilities and signifying strategies that cross and recross from graphic to linguistic media and back [. . .] without loosing a grip on their specific materialities” (5).

 

 

 

As the sequence of picture shows, the passage from the initial green background to the final image of glass and steel reflecting the hustle and bustle of a crowded city is absolutely gradual and continuous while words keep moving up and down as they were elevators. Cayley points out that the link with Concrete poetry is almost obvious (5) but he doesn’t insist much on this. Maybe it could have been a good point to show that even when literature could only be printed, it tried to go out from the surface of paper and communicate something not only through the meaning of the words but also through their shapes, fonts and disposition on the sheet.  Anyway Mr. Cayley, I do appreciate your original approach to the subject starting from a kind of art, that is graphics, which personally I am not well aware of, but for sure its development in the same years in which Concrete poetry, computers and post-modernist avanguardist movements were spreading is not a chance. It’s part of the innovative and cutting-edge ambience of that years.

Graphics aside, in the second part of his essay Cayley deals with much more literary-specific topics, that is the Screen virtual reality experiment held at the Brown University Cave some years ago (about which you can read more here) and some other works which have been experimented in the Cave but that you can find on the Internet now. The only negative aspect of these latter, well, not negative, but a little bit annoying, is that you need the last version of Quicktime and, in some cases, you have to download a couple of sound files. But anyway, it takes no more than 5 minutes.

My favorite is absolutely “Lens“, as it perfectly matches the idea of “continuum” in the sense that words through graphics open different layers of text, which otherwise would have been hidden.

Cayley focuses mainly on overboard and translation, which are actually examples of texts emerging from and sinking in the page. Translation is conceptually based on Walter Benjamin’s theories on translation, and I believe that it’s a perfect way of rendering the metaphor of translation as a discovery of different meanings and senses from one language to another.

 

[In this post: Letters demand things; Young-Chae Heavy Industries]

When a text becomes a work of art, when we look at an ordered string of letters not for the meaning it carries but just as curve and straight lines combined together, are we still entitled to talk about literature? Or is it already something that trascends literature itself?

This is the question that I am asking myself since I saw Michael Madsen’s “Letters demand things“. I believe that it is a perfect example of how art and literature easily intertwine in the realm of the digital media. This project makes you play with the sound and the shape of the letters as if the reader is the one who can free them from the obligation of composing words that carry meaning. Letters want to live just as signs, they need to be looked at for what they are without the burden of something to communicate, they are longing for a sort of reification: “they now demand to be typed, spoken, traced, heard, and related to in specific ways. And yet, for all their demands, they only exist as reflections of human handwriting and visual echoes of muscles and air working in concert to give them life as sound waves”,  Madsen declares in his initial statement.

Art that deals with letters, words that lost their meaning.

This reminds me about Concrete Poetry and its attention for the graphic aspect of poems. But it was still labelled as Poetry. Boundaries are blurring.

Another interesting work which poses itself in between for being an artistic approach to words and poems, as its very creators say, is Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries. This artist duo set in South Korea but influenced by manifold cultures and traditions has exhibited its masterpieces in many famous museums and galleries, such as the Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Modern in London and the New Museum here in New York. They use a simple graphics, mainly just black letters against a white background, combine it with marvelous jazz music, and as a result you get a poem that line by line, and sometimes word by word, jumps, bounces and floats on your screen. No links and no hypertexts. Even though I feel less iffy about seeing it as literature than Madsens’s work, it is not “electronic literature” in its common sense. There are no links, no hypertexts, no different paths to choose among. The only choice the reader has – and they are absolutely aware of that – is pushing the  “Back” button. According to them, it doesn’t mean that the reader is a passive receiver because she has in her hands the strongest power of choice, that is to say Stop.

I believe that this power is the same as the one of closing a book when we do not want to read it anymore. Or better, it is more than just a power, it is an Inalienable Right of the Reader.

But is it what we really want from electronic literature? One can argue that what they are doing is miles away from what we mean with that. Personally speaking, I really like Heavy Industries’ works but I feel that there it lacks the “playable”and interactive part of electronic literature.

But there is a subtle mistake in all this reasoning: we should avoid a perspective which is too literary-bounded and take into account that one of the added values that media art has is combining different fields and perspectives, such as literature and art, so to create a unique intermingling matter. Sometimes we like it, sometimes we don’t, but its value lies in its capacity of astonishing and surprising us.

One thing that this research about electronic literature seems to desperately want to teach me is that I have to be ready to have my expectations unmatched and marvel at mundane things as it was the first time. Even if it seems hard to get rid of traditional concepts and prejudices, they sometimes are just a ballast to dump so…let the hot-air balloon of our imagination and creation fly.