I must confess what does not need to be confessed I haven't been
the most active, proactive, psychoactive component of this experience through
Electronic Literature. Besides any other reason, I have one to be writing
today. Definitely, electronic literature is a hit in my brain, a new
concept that offers many challenges and with the challenges, also a complete
new field of possibilities.
After last class
discussion I found out something quite interesting. We have already talked how
difficult is to categorize a work of electronic literature within only one
genre. On one side we see the technical aspect: "Is it a
hyperlink? Is it Flash Media? What is it?", nonetheless the literary
component is never ignored: Is it prose? is it only sound?, How is the sequence
of the image? And of course one thing that we cannot afford to ignore anymore:
coding.
For centuries, we
have relied on our reading experience virtually exclusive to written text;
images became just a matter of decoration in a book, only a recreation of what is
being read, something that can be removed without affecting even a fraction of
its totality. Pictures themselves, at certain moments of our history, had tried
to be as textual as possible. An example of it could be the Byzantine
frescoes, mosaics on walls and illuminations in books. Those works of art
combined text and image, they told stories and one of its main purposes was to
educate people about a new religion. Years before, the Egyptians found a way to
narrate stories in a very graphic manner. Perhaps hieroglyphs are even richer
in expression than the code of 26 letters we use now.
The change resides
in the use of a new medium, a faster, bigger and easier way to publish our
ideas, productions or communications. Audio, video, picture, global positioning,
and a huge bunch of other resources that allows an almost limitless creation.
The question is: How do we approach this? How can we systematically organize
the genres? Here is a huge problem: How are the critics going to do? ...
{[sarcasm] not really}...
Just think about
it, why do we call Nio a poem? Is it a poem or a vocal jazz interactive track?
There is one thing that is true; Nio has an artistic and poetic value that
enriches the spectrum of what we can do with all these new technologies.
From Cantabria to this contemporary art, a big question and the big answer
about human nature reside in our capacity to create art. The big proof
that we have surpassed technology is the fact that we do not only use it for pragmatical tasks but also as a creative space. We can make beautiful things only to satisfy
something only humans have, this is the capacity of create an object in order
to express our sentiments.
