Removing the Goal Post
Symposium:
- ISEA98: Ninth International Symposium on Electronic Art
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More presentations from ISEA98:
Session Title:
- Work
Presentation Title:
- Removing the Goal Post
Presenter(s):
Abstract:
Revolution considered through a textual eruption of poetic play, whereby interactivity and digitalisation decentres the author, may be a way of also de-centering the polarisation associated with the term ‘Revolution’. A critique must emerge of the way new technologies are appropriated, read and thus written, becoming perhaps fetishized; a repetition of ‘toys for the boys’, where the immediacy of result and control take precedence over ephemerality and jouissance?
As Barthes suggests ‘As institution, the author is dead…but in the text…I desire the author.’ (Roland Barthes, Pleasure of the Text, Hill and Wang, 1975, p.27)
Therefore how does this desire form the interactive space in its image? If desire and fetish can be read for a vacillation and deferral rather than a projection and a goal, surely the uniqueness will be removed from new technology as the answer, to a re-reading of the materiality of existing and traditional creative processes. Perhaps the question then becomes whether new technology can shift the emphasis of practice into a reconsideration of cultural product, where the value of interactivity of process; between people, people and machines, person and materials or machine and materials, displaces that of finished article.
