Object and Identity in a Digital Age
CHArt 25th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Object and Identity in a Digital Age
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Ernesto Priego, University College London
Try to Get that Kindle Signed: The Comic Book as Cultural Interface
Digital technology has transformed cultural conceptions of authority, originality, value and the essence of the work art. It has also modified the organizational strategies of texts and the relationships between media and their forms of physical presentation and storage. Like other types of information, comic books can now be digitised and potentially be presented in different platforms. Historically hardwired to the printed format of the magazine and the book, the language of comics has seen a radical metamorphosis in the digital age, which has both unsettled and reinstated comic books' ontology as textual objects.
The case of digitized comic books and webcomics offers a unique field to interrogate the relationships between physicality and textuality: comics have a well-established love affair between media (language; information; text) and medium (materiality). An analysis of the textual strategies of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill in their Black Dossier (2007) and different examples from the printed work of American cartoonist Chris Ware will juxtapose the semiotic importance of materiality in these comic works with examples of webcomics from zudacomics.com and Marvel Digital Comics.
The case of printed comic books the relationship between information and materiality has very precise characteristics indeed -there is not one without the other-, but digital texts do not exist in a physical or material vacuum. The interfaces required to interact with the texts (computers, PDAs, mobile phones, et cetera) are and in turn create certain types of materiality, and the interaction with the devices themselves is in itself a physical reality.Taking this into account, I will discuss the term ‘cultural interface’ (Manovich 2001) to explore the specific functions of the printed comic book as an artefact in relation to the computer as an integrated device for the creation, publishing, storage and reading of digital comics and the consequences this has for the digital/physical debate.
Ernesto Priego is a PhD candidate at the Department of Information Studies, University College London.He has a BA in English Literature and MA studies in Comparative Literature from UNAM, Mexico, and an MA in Communication and Culture from UEA Norwich. Before coming to London he taught 19th and 20th century European, English and American literature, literary criticism and critical theory to undergraduate students at UNAM and UIA, Mexico, as well as in other private and public institutions.
As an essayist, translator and poet he has published in English, French and Spanish, receiving literary grants from Fundación para las Letras Mexicanas and Fondo Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, Mexico.
His main interests revolve around book history and print technologies, electronic publishing, psychoanalysis, forms of inscription and identity formation, cities and maps, comic books, collecting, memory and narrative, technology and the body, film, photography, pop music.
He is the author of Not Even Dogs (Meritage Press, San Francisco, USA, 2006) and ...And the Wind Did Blow... (Meritage Press, 2008). His most recent published poetry book is The Amazing Adventures of Gravity & Grace (Otoliths, Australia, 2009).