CHArt Twenty-Second Annual Conference

No Thanks to the Dictionary: Visualising Language in the Post-Medium Age
Philip Klobucar, Capilano College, Vancouver, Canada

Like most fields of academic research and education, criticism within the liberal arts stands at a veritable crossroads owing to the many recent developments in digital communication and network technologies. While accurate and critical assessments about technical advances in this area often suffer from hyperbole and over-enthusiastic marketing rhetoric, it is clear that digital technology has had an intense and, in many cases, transformative effect on how research and writing is conducted in the twenty-first century. Such changes provide both literary and art criticism with an essential mandate to conduct further research into current media technologies in order to better understand and develop new critical methodologies and practices.

The proposed paper articulates several important theoretical relationships between information/knowledge representation technology and literary and art criticism by looking specifically at recent experiments in new media poetics. The study will survey a range of new electronic genres currently appearing in visual culture and literature, for example, hypertext fiction, VRML media, computer generated texts, word art, conceptual blogs, etc., comparing them to previous modernist and avant-garde experiments in art and writing, in order to assess the intellectual and creative possibilities such technologies may offer current practices in cultural criticism.

The methodical integration of abstract concepts with applied practice remains central to all fields of modern analysis, and at a tactical level, this premise continues to link the development of systematic thinking with functional expertise in writing, reproduction and research technology. Yet more theoretically, such a link also demonstrates the consistent basis of modern criticism in the visual presentation of knowledge as both a technological and semantic system. As this paper aims to show, advances in modern reproduction technology have been crucial to the parallel development of ‘spatial’ models of meaning in all areas of cultural production, as is especially evident in the persistent evolution of lexicographic resources, including dictionaries, information archives/networks, semantic ontologies, search engines and other modes of database interface. The most recent generation of such tools includes the construction of visually-enhanced epistemological networks, glossaries, archive maps, linguistic annotation and graphic models of language use.

That new tools and methods in knowledge representation technology continue to inform and influence intellectual content is hardly surprising, yet a critical understanding of this complex relationship is only now emerging within academic writing. Looking specifically at different models and techniques of ‘spatialisation’ within cultural production, ranging from Mallarmé’s poetry to N. Katherine Hayles’ Flash-based digital criticism, my work makes evident how central the ‘visual’ organisation of information is to cultural meaning in general. This paper will also demonstrate the important origins of specific digital media practices in prior experiments in typography, visual culture and multimedia. As I hope to demonstrate, some of the most interesting developments in digital writing and new media derive from very similar questions concerning language, representation and cultural meaning posed almost a century ago within avant-garde poetics and art.

Back to CHArt 2006 abstracts

Back to CHArt Home Page