final project musings

Something I keep coming back to when I'm thinking about my final project is a point that was made by Brian Kim Stefans in his essay on the electronic book review site we looked at a few weeks ago. His main point, although I'm sure I'm oversimplifying it here, was that "new media writers" are not thinking about how technology and the media they're using can increase the impact of words; language can get reduced to "a useful marker for the passing of time" or "a participant in a recombinant universe jointly occupied by sounds, images, videos and the user’s interactions." Language becomes just another element, equal to other elements like sounds and images. It gets used to make things more concrete or to help the reader/viewer to understand what the digital art is saying. However, electronic components like image, audio file, etc, are not solving problems with the language, not returning the favor so to speak.

Then, a little further down, he has this to say:

"Too often, the textual element of electronic art pieces seem to be clippings from the artist’s notebooks about how he or she wishes the viewer to feel when experiencing the piece - you are seeing this in time ... bodies move through space etc. The effect is something like that of the slogans on the walls of Communist factories, an attempt to reify an experience just in case you forgot that you weren’t working for a classless Utopia. This kind of writing demonstrates a lack of trust in letting words do what they can do, and which music and images can’t do, such as be contradictory, paradoxical, and - as the famous Eliza program demonstrates - psychologically ventriloquistic, suggesting the presence of another human in the room - in your head - when there clearly isn’t one. "

He states that electronic writing is making the claim that text is no longer considered better, more powerful, higher on the hierarchy, than other kinds of data.

Ok so where am I going with all of this...

I've been asking myself if my final project can avoid all the problems that Stefans finds with electronic writing--will my project be an art piece with words thrown in to explain it or will it be a piece that is using other kinds of data to have something to say about text and language? Are people going to look it at and think about why I presented the text in the way I did? Or are they going to think that the text is just text and if that text was taken out of the format I've forced it into it wouldn't really matter?

I feel like I keep struggling with this problem, and trying to understand how I can say something meaningful and "say" it in a way so that I don't look back and think hmm, if i had just presented plain text the reader would have made more interpretations, been more engaged, had more control.