Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 16, No. 270.
Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
Submit to: humanist@princeton.edu
Date: Thu, 17 Oct 2002 06:49:11 +0100
From: carolyn guertin <cguertin@gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: Call for works: Unfoldings
Unfoldings: An Exhibition of Information Art and Architectures
The Arts District, the City of Edmonton, Canada
February 2003
Unfoldings are intrinsic dimensions that open indefinitely outward,
potentially encompassing an infinite expansion of space. Like an inflating
balloon, the computer interface is also a phenomenon whose infinite writing
surface is situated in ever-present temporal and incremental space,
perpetually dividing itself to reveal new moments of present-tense textual
time, and whose spatial dimensions are performed via the instantaneity of
mouse clicks and real time navigation. A temporal surface like the
interface is a self-contained discourse network and an organic system; such
a system is also familiar to us in the guise of the body, a system that is
both frame and material for its own performative narratives. This
expression of embodied presence is the world we navigate in an electronic
text. Virtual architectures call for a reunion of the mind and body in
space-time to heal the rift that has existed since Ren Descartes tore them
asunder. The text like the body rejects Cartesian dualism because the
text-as-body and the body-as-text write themselves and their archi-traces
as fluid expressions of the experiential and aesthetic realms.
This kind of virtual architecture is an embodied fiction in both
cyberspace and the new media arts that inhabits a metaphysical dimension, a
dimension that allows us to insert ourselves -- like we do into memories.
Both Marcos Novak and Elisabeth Grosz call for an architecture of excess
for virtual space, one not contained or confined by the physical laws of
the real. Architecture of excess is a term that has traditionally been used
to describe imaginary architectures like Giovanni Battista Piranesi's
prisons, the Carceri d'Invenzione, or Hieronymous Bosch's visions of Hell.
Alternatively, Paul Virilio believes that there can no longer be
architectures of excess in a virtual age because we have moved into the
realm of 'post-architecture.' Paul Lunenfeld uses the term 'hybrid
architecture' to describe incursions of the virtual in real space, and
Marcos Novak uses the terms 'liquid architecture' and 'TransArchitecture'
to describe the new structures of and intrinsic to cyberspace. Once
architecture ceases to be material, there is nowhere to go but into virtual
constructs. Media theorists Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen call the new
virtuality 'electrotecture.' Electrotecture, they say, blurs the boundaries
between building and builder, between programme and programmer, between
time and space. This latter term is perhaps the most useful and descriptive
terminology for constructs inhabiting the digital domain. Such an intense
preoccupation with architectures demonstrate that structures have not been
left behind as Virilio's term suggests, but instead have indeed been
redefined as more fluid, flexible, multiple, hybrid and complex, in part
through the interpolation of the dimension of time as a living system into
their forms.
In virtual space, unlike Piranesi's Carceri, electrotectures are
infinite. The fold or the click is the systemic in the expanding
materiality of the somatic rooms of the interface. Unfoldings are dynamic
acts, the process of navigation in information space, and traces of
archi-writing contained therein. Unfoldings are both cartographic form and
behavioural dynamic, active motion and embodied context. They are
ultimately both the space of our interaction with the surface of the
interface and our interactive engagement with the mnemonic gestures they
represent and contain. Always operating within the framework of the visual,
unfoldings are an irreducible element -- gesture and membrane, link and
rupture -- between sensible codes.
__________________________
You are invited to submit your own interactive new media unfoldings
to a show in the Arts District of the city of Edmonton, Canada in February
2003. Preference will be given to original electronic works created
specifically for this exhibit, but previously exhibited works will be
considered. Submissions may be web-based or on CD-ROM or other portable
media for on-site display in a public venue.
The deadline for electronic or snail mail submissions dated no
later than 15 December 2002. Send the work and/or its link along with a
300-word abstract, biographical details, c.v. and/or website URL to:
Carolyn Guertin, Curator
Department of English
University of Alberta
3-5 Humanities Centre
Edmonton AB T6G 2E5
Please do not send works as e-mail attachments.
___________________________________________________
Carolyn Guertin, Dept of English, University of Alberta, Canada
E-Mail: cguertin@ualberta.ca; Voice: 780-438-3125
Website: http://www.ualberta.ca/~cguertin/
Assemblage, The Online Women's New Media Gallery, at trAce:
http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/traced/guertin/assemblage.htm
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