Electronic Literature As A "Artistic Aestheticzation" Of Technology

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.