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Symposium:
Session Title:
- La Plissure du Texte
Presentation Title:
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Presenter(s):
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Abstract:
Chair Person: Elif Ayiter
Presenters: Roy Ascott, Jan Baetens, Elif Ayiter, Max Moswitzer & Selavy OhRoy Ascott’s groundbreaking new media art work La Plissure du Texte (“The Pleating of the Text”) was created in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art moderne de la Ville de Paris during that same year. The title of the project, “La Plissure du Texte: A Planetary Fairy Tale,” alludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a famous discourse on authorship, semantic layering, and the creative role of the reader as the writer of the text. In 2010, La Plissure du Texte re-incarnated as a three dimensional, interactive architecture created in the metaverse and was projected into Real Life in Seoul, Korea during the INDAF new media art festival held at Tomorrow City, Songdo, Incheon, throughout September 2010.
Following Ascott’s original premise of distributed authorship, the fairy tale is now being told by a text driven architecture within which a population of robotic avatars tells the tale through endlessly generated conversations which are harvested from the Online Gutenberg Project. Additionally, visitors to the exhibit in the physical realm may also contribute to the generated text flow through SMS messages or via Twitter. Thus all pleated text – the generated, the contributed, and the stored – is simultaneously visible as a massive, ever evolving literary conglomeration. This panel will undertake a close scrutiny of La Plissure du Texte, taking into account both its creation in 1983 and its re-creation in 2010, discussing the work in its role as a landmark of New Media Art History as well as an art work which has shown the capability of regenerating itself as an entirely novel manifestation based upon the concepts of distributed authorship, textual mobility, emergent semiosis, multiple identity, and participatory poesis.