One is not after the novelty of
cyberculture, nor striving to reinforce the now tedious discourse of the Internet’s
redeeming potential as a computer web able to candidly unite all humanity into a global
village.
This wouldn’t be more than a chapter in the spectacular history
being successfully elaborated in the last ten years by the computer and software industry.
This narrative confers to the selfsame industry the power and the
mission to inaugurate a new era. But digital writing points to another direction. It
celebrates the loss of inscription by removing the trace from acts of erasure.
The
Book after the Book is a hypertextual and visual essay about cyberliterature and
the net_reading/writing_condition. Its main focus is non-linear narratives, which
reconfigure the literature/book relationship starting from the very notion of volume.
Works that provide programming language a textual appraisal, creations that resort to
videographic procedures in literary construction and play on the passivity and
participation of the reader.
Short animations intercept the reading of other artists
works playing with the textual condition of the on line image and, at the same time, with
the imagetic condition of the screen text. They are all images that perform texts and face
the strange passage imposed by the net. Deep down, on the back of the page, at the source,
a situation is defined: the Internet is no more than a big text. On the front, at the
screen, text reveals itself as image.
That strangeness introduces aesthetic dimensions that go beyond the
technical horizon of multimedia. It can be writing one more line in the History of the
Book. The History of Literature after the book. A History that, from the point of view of
material culture has run on very stable grounds since Renaissance. It is as surprising as
undeniable. From the Classic Era to present days, the book, as an object, has changed very
little.
It is as surprising as undeniable. From Renascence to present days, the
book, as an object, has changed very little. May be it has the most perfect design of all
cultural objects created since then. Anyway, it is the most stable format of all cultural
industry.
This stability is, at least, intriguing, in view of the symbolic value
attributed to the disposable product by the cultural industry. It invites the thought that
Literary History is also the history of reading and of the supports where the interaction
between reader and text takes place. They are more than content receptacles. These
supports are reading contexts where significations are built.
A gesture repertoire, a tactile
game between hand and paper (or mouse), a constellation of objects and vision instruments
define the position of reading in this world.
Unstable positions, no doubt. Here
Borges’ enigmatic Book of Sand. A book in which it is impossible to return to the
page which has been read. The book of books. The book of reading.
But are also historically elaborated
positions. We are in the imbricate territory of literary reception. And also of the
relentless lost illusions market which Balzac refers to.
One does not think of a world of reading without thinking
of a particular reading of the world. This presupposes not only a literary horizon,
but also special writing tools (like pens, pencils, softwares) reading machines
(books, computers, laser bar codes systems) and reading spaces (libraries, above
all) which perform a reading context.
That is our the subject. Let's talk about
the net reading/writing condition, let's say something about The Book after
the Book.
The Book after the Book turns around a bookshelf whose shelves, which accommodate cyberliterature and
artworks, are cut off by reading intervals. They are "empty pages ", fading from
gray to white, that hinder the return to the bookshelf, using the browser back button. It
is necessary to appeal to the web site tool bar in order to move between its books of sand
and zones of friction.
Not only each turn back implies in a new reading itinerary, but any
selection means to run the risk to change the path, to lose the starting point and to
redirect the reading route. The advance toward a selected work makes the reader exit The
Book after the Book web site.
Interesting paradox: here, in the space
whose substance is the memory,
what prevails is an architecture of forgetting.
The bookshelf functions now as node of a
network, a set of revolving shelves, a new reading machine....
The bookshelf is a critical map of
cyberliterature and of elements of its reading contexts, grouped according to some
aesthetic and epistemological questions.
Books of Sand concentrates on the
imaginary of the cyberliterature. It is a shelve about cyberfiction and poetry that
recreate narrative features and programming language in interactive environments.
Zone of Friction is an ample shelf, divided in others three fields (reversions,connections
and migrations). It faces the deconstruction of
the book, in the context of web art and the new media. It contemplates works that dialogue
with the programming technique of the Internet, resetting of the printed matter in on line
systems and works of art who have as center the narrative as format and the book as
object.
Collective Works congregate multiauthorial pieces,
a tendency that seems the great differential of the cyberliterature in relation to
printed literature (since they are works that generally become in network, impossible to
be thought in closed environments as the printed book and the CD-ROM) is
still more interesting as phenomenon.
Reading and (Un)Writing
Machines discusses cyberliterature and the Internet writing in the macroscale of
new contexts of reading and in the microscale of the reading supports. Its main focus are
devices and tools developed to process and to optimize the reading and the hypertextual
writing.
Digitalia groups theoretical works about the
questions of " the Book after the Book " (Literature, Reading and Media in the
end of century 20), including a stack of classic texts on hypertextuality.
