“Innovative practice has pioneered not only new media but also new ways of perceiving through a given medium, a practice that has localized art not as a way of representing but as a way of making.” Page 173 of Digital Poetics by Loss Pequeno Glazier.
After reading the article I choose this quote because it ties in with the most things I have actual experience with, which frees me in part from baseless conjecture. Some new ways of perceiving through a given medium are webcomics, which have shifted in a way that I think most of the poets we have read in this class wish to see. In the early days of the Internet comics from the Sunday funnies were taken, scanned, and put online. The product was un-innovative, ignored the possibilities offered by the medium, and were frankly a little stale. Soon though, the properties unique to the World Wide Web caused a revolution. The idea of the infinite canvas, the idea that the space on a webpage can be whatever dimensions you want it to be, was utilized, bearing works that couldn’t be read in print because they would be very ungainly physically, but also because without the medium the art lost the ease and accessibility that helped shape it. On page 175 of the article the “alt tag” is brought up as a facet that electronic poetry could take advantage of. The webcomics that are my personal favorites all utilize the Alt tag, or hover text. In a webcomic it provided the perfect spot for a second punchline, invisible while the comics is read, and only a mouse movement away from being revealed. Also on page 175 under ‘Enabling new tools for intelligence”, is the concept of community produced works. MS Paint Adventures text-based adventure webcomic that utilized this concept in a very raw way. The artist started a comic by drawing a single panel. On his website he set up a comment box and whatever viewers wanted the next panel to be of, he drew it. The experiment then led to another comic where he used comment input to create the single panels, while he had an overall story arc that he made sure the panels more or less followed.
Through interactivity and user-controlled navigation a lot of web-pages feel less like pieces of paper, and more like virtual worlds to explore. I like the idea of Wiki trees, the concept of creating topologies of your favorite websites and sharing them online to other users with their own trees. The content is the same as if you had typed in each individual site’s URL but the end result is a unique piece that can be viewed as a whole or as the sum of its parts. New videogames like Spore or Little Big Planet allow for users to create levels as they play them and then makes those levels available to other users to play and explore. This user generated content not only is free for everyone, but can buck the typical narrative. A platformer game can become a murder-mystery, or a racing game can have fantasy elements added. Because the content is free, the levels are viewed completely differently then content developed by the company that produced the game. Gamers make the levels themselves and like the boy in the article they twist conventions, like a platformer being tweeked into a murder-mystery. The ways of perceiving comics and videogames has changed due to the medium shift towards a global network that all can be involved in the creation of.
For your writing here to be a fine paper for a class, Tobias, all you would need to do it take your many fine, appropriate, and smart examples and make more explicit how they explicate the idea that "Innovative practice has pioneered not only new media but also new ways of perceiving through a given medium, a practice that has localized art not as a way of representing but as a way of making."
ReplyDeleteYou touch on and suggest some of the "new ways of perceiving" that web comics -- because of their composers' attentions to the medium in which they work -- make possible, but I'd like (in a fantasy universe where time was endless) see you make these new ways explicit and to talk about them and their consequences a bit more.
How might the shift in who determines what the next frame will be (for example) shift our sense of what counts as creativity, or the value of creativity? Or of the purposes of writing?