w h a t i s n o t t h i s
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. That would be only another
chapter in the spectacular history composed in the last decades by the computer and
software industry – a narrative that grants the industry the power and the mission
to inaugurate a new era.
Digital writing points elsewhere. It celebrates the loss of inscription by removing the trace from acts of erasure. What interests The Book after the Book is not the “new medium” as such, but the way in which the Net reconfigures gestures, rhythms and architectures of reading.
Digital writing points elsewhere. It celebrates the loss of inscription by removing the trace from acts of erasure. What interests The Book after the Book is not the “new medium” as such, but the way in which the Net reconfigures gestures, rhythms and architectures of reading.
w h a t t h i s i s
The Book after the Book is a hypertextual and visual essay on
cyberliterature and the net_reading/writing_condition. Its main focus is
non-linear narratives, which reconfigure the relation between literature and book
starting from the very notion of volume. Some works treat programming language as
text; others borrow videographic procedures for literary construction; many play
with the passivity and participation of the reader.
Short animations intercept the reading of other artists’ works, performing the textual condition of the online image and, at the same time, the imagetic condition of the screen text. Deep down, on the back of the page, at the source, a situation is defined: the Internet is no more than a huge text. On the front, at the screen, text reveals itself as image.
this estrangement introduces aesthetic dimensions that go beyond the technical horizon of multimedia. It may be yet another line in the history of the book – a history that, from the point of view of material culture, has remained astonishingly stable since the Renaissance. From the classical age to the present, the book as object has changed very little, perhaps because it is one of the most perfect designs ever produced by the cultural industry.
Short animations intercept the reading of other artists’ works, performing the textual condition of the online image and, at the same time, the imagetic condition of the screen text. Deep down, on the back of the page, at the source, a situation is defined: the Internet is no more than a huge text. On the front, at the screen, text reveals itself as image.
this estrangement introduces aesthetic dimensions that go beyond the technical horizon of multimedia. It may be yet another line in the history of the book – a history that, from the point of view of material culture, has remained astonishingly stable since the Renaissance. From the classical age to the present, the book as object has changed very little, perhaps because it is one of the most perfect designs ever produced by the cultural industry.
r e a d i n g c o n t e x t s
The surprising stability of the book is intriguing if we consider the symbolic
value that the cultural industry attributes to disposability. It invites us to
think that literary history is also the history of reading and of the supports
through which interaction between reader and text takes place. These supports are
not mere receptacles of content. They are reading contexts where meaning is built:
the page, the screen, the scroll bar, the browser window, the bookshelf.
A repertoire of gestures – the tactile game between hand and paper, mouse and cursor – and a constellation of objects and optical instruments define the position of reading in the world. They are unstable positions: Borges’s enigmatic Book of Sand, for instance, is a book in which it is impossible to return to any page that has already been read. It is the book of books, the book of reading. But these positions are also historically elaborated. We are in the intricate territory of reception, and also in the relentless market of “lost illusions” that Balzac evokes.
One does not think of a world of reading without thinking of a particular reading of the world. This presupposes a literary horizon, special writing tools (pens, pencils, softwares), reading machines (books, computers, laser bar-code systems) and reading spaces (libraries, above all) which shape a reading context. That is the subject here: the net reading/writing condition and the place of The Book after the Book in this constellation.
A repertoire of gestures – the tactile game between hand and paper, mouse and cursor – and a constellation of objects and optical instruments define the position of reading in the world. They are unstable positions: Borges’s enigmatic Book of Sand, for instance, is a book in which it is impossible to return to any page that has already been read. It is the book of books, the book of reading. But these positions are also historically elaborated. We are in the intricate territory of reception, and also in the relentless market of “lost illusions” that Balzac evokes.
One does not think of a world of reading without thinking of a particular reading of the world. This presupposes a literary horizon, special writing tools (pens, pencils, softwares), reading machines (books, computers, laser bar-code systems) and reading spaces (libraries, above all) which shape a reading context. That is the subject here: the net reading/writing condition and the place of The Book after the Book in this constellation.
t h e b o o k s h e l f
The Book after the Book turns around a
bookshelf. Its shelves, home to cyberliterature and
artworks, are interrupted by “intervals”: empty pages, fading from grey to white,
that block the use of the browser’s back button. To move between the
books of sand and the zones of friction it is necessary to use
the site’s own navigation, not the default history of the browser.
Each return implies a new itinerary; any selection risks changing the path and losing the starting point. Choosing a work throws the reader out of the site, into other domains. Paradoxically, in a space whose substance is memory, what prevails is an architecture of forgetting.
The bookshelf works as a node in a network, a set of revolving shelves, a new reading machine. It is a critical map of cyberliterature and of its reading contexts, grouping works by aesthetic and epistemological questions: imaginary and “books of sand”, friction zones, collective works, migrations, reading machines, unwriting machines, hyperclassics and an off-line shelf.
Each return implies a new itinerary; any selection risks changing the path and losing the starting point. Choosing a work throws the reader out of the site, into other domains. Paradoxically, in a space whose substance is memory, what prevails is an architecture of forgetting.
The bookshelf works as a node in a network, a set of revolving shelves, a new reading machine. It is a critical map of cyberliterature and of its reading contexts, grouping works by aesthetic and epistemological questions: imaginary and “books of sand”, friction zones, collective works, migrations, reading machines, unwriting machines, hyperclassics and an off-line shelf.
the reader is the double of the book