site of the other > 16/03/05
When Barthes proclaimed the death of the author back in the 60s, it was not the writer he meant but the author as organizing principle of a body of work. Not much has changed up till today. It is still the author as authority and origin around which we talk about the work of a writer.
A web site, though, challenges this construct. It is here not the writer who is on central stage, but the site and the very interface. The web site becomes the organizing principle that undercuts every claim to authority and origin, and the works themselves are located / written at the site of the Other rather than (the intentional ego of) the writer. Can we ever talk about authority, intent, origin, when talking about the web? Could we ever? Isn’t it all a myth, as Barthes claimed long ago, and a myth we have outlived today?
The melodrama of Cape Fear > 16/03/05
In Cape Fear, we find “evil” in the character of Robert de Niro threatening the family romance by tempting its teen-age daughter with sin (sexuality, smoking dope etc.). He is the stranger, the threat from the outside that throws the hegemony of the family unit apart or besides itself in a diabolical way (diabolos means “throwing apart/aside”).
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shifting grounds > 08/02/05
In an article at trAce from March last year, Tim Wright discusses the drifting of new media writing towards new media art as more and more writers incorporate hypermedia and technological possibilities into their writing - a shift he sees happening at Alt-X, ground-breaking site where the literati was supposed to meet the digerati but, as Tim says, "more and more, it appears that it is neither the digerati nor the literati who embrace and drive net.art and new media writing these days. That role has fallen to the modern art community, intent on filling its galleries and museum with interactive installations, online exhibitions and digital performances."
(in)tangibility and intertextual memory: reading an object > 02/01/05
How do we read objects? Does the reading of objects differ from the reading of texts? My contention here is that objects do not only tell stories but that they are always already part of a process of semiosis that undergoes changes depending on the object’s function and contextual environment. A totem pole is a good example of how living, dynamic culture undergoes such a process of semiosis when it is displayed within the Museum as institution. A totem pole in its native environment is not an everlasting monument but an enactment of the eternal return of the seasons. True, it is a phallic symbol but it is not a static object like a church tower or a minaret as it is erected in order to slowly sink into mother earth and thus to return to where it once came from. As such, it is part of a sexual economy based on the dialectics between the male and the female principle, between the phallus and the earth. The pole in its natural environment performs in other words creation as it metaphorically stages the sexual act of (be)coming.
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