21st Century Writing and Hybrid Media: The debut of the "animated" text: Lesson 1

Friday, May 19, 2017

The debut of the "animated" text: Lesson 1

Henri Michaux-Mouvements Deux encres sur papier 1950 à 1951, from https://audioguide-app-expo-museum.com/

Lesson 1. The world's writing systems

Let us review the writing systems we have in the world. Point your browser to a slideshow over at

Slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/NancyNazarian/writing-history-progretion.

A. Writing systems in sci-fi films

Next part, watch an excerpt from the film "Contact" and from "The Arrival." These two sci-fi films feature a language technology that we can use as comparison to the language technology that we will be taking up from the writers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

1. Contact, 1997, "Ellie and S R Hadden scene," YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePa6eUxhkYo

From http://brothers-ink.com/2017/03/

Parts of the dialogue between Hadden and Ellie can be read here: http://staticmass.net/deconstructing-cinema/contact-movie-1997/

2. Arrival, 2016, "Movie's Language: Talking in Circles," YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qd8zT1YAUck

From http://www.blastr.com/2016-8-16/amy-adams-speaks-alien-first-official-trailer-and-12-new-posters-arrival

Science fiction usually employ what are called ''conlangs'' or constructed languages. This creation or invention of fictional languages is not limited to fiction but is also a method used for ''experimentation in the fields of linguistics, cognitive science, and machine learning, for artistic creation, and for language games.'' Check out the reference about artificial languages at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language.

B. Some questions to think about:

1. What kind of writing system do you use?

2. How different are the ways "advanced" civilizations communicate from the way we do today?

3. What components do you think are missing from our language?

4. What should human language be capable of?

5. If you haven't noticed it yet, there is an art work by Henri Michaux at the top. What do the figures remind you of?

6. Do you use anything in today's technology that doesn't belong to the conventional letters of the alphabet to communicate or chat?

7. How do you think today's technology has changed the face of communication?

In the next lessons, we will take a look at some of the ways artists and writers have tried to reinvent language in the 20th to the 21st centuries.

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Module Orientations

This module aims to introduce students to the current poetics proper to the 21st century literary arts. It will highlight the impact of hybrid media--a confluence of analog and digital technologies--in the production of the literary in:

1) the materialist treatment of text and languages using samples from various pure-print, print-visual, print-material and textual-digital works;

2) the relationships among human identity, the body, memory, and meaning in the context of hybrid media; and

3) the dynamic synergy among various media in the contexts of "total communication" in both analog and digital technologies in the production of artifacts of languages, memories, knowledges, meanings, and information.

The major literary, artistic, and technological crossroads that will be the major focus for this module are:

1) The re-imaginings of language and textuality beyond a logico-syntactic linear print dynamic among the historical avant-garde movements toward kinesic, spatio-concrete, materialist, and typographic deployments;

2) Conceptual writing and Machine writing, seen as a spectrum with two extremes in analog and digital modes, but with intermediary mixes and fusions in Cybertextuality;

This spectrum is further complicated by a modulation into a third and a fourth domain that have had the same global impact, but in some aspects share artistic concerns with the above:

3) Postliterate and Asemic writing and art and conlangs; and

4) Avatars, virtual reality, interactivity, and immersive narrativity as the frontier for a new kind of techno-literacy and self-fashioning.

It is hoped that this introductory module would supply students with a workable framework with which they can:

1) Comprehend the concurrent affinity of hybrid media poetics with their actual techno-mode of life or cyber ways of being and thinking ("Know thyself" + "I sing the body electric") via a mix of familiarization in textual genealogy and digital literary exploration;

2) Incorporate and recontextualize the same artistic practices in the execution of hybrid media and post-literate classroom projects representing their evaluative understanding through intellectual products that remediate beyond pure-print output; and

3) Envision, in class debates and in possible artistic projects, the future of (enhanced) "human" identity in the current proliferation of artificial and constructed semic and asemic languages ("conlangs") and prosthetic technologies (neural and corporeal augmentations).