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The
lability of digital works, mainly due to the
changes undergone by programs and operating
systems, as well as to the increasing speed of
computers, has been taken for granted by a certain
number of critics over the last years. The artists,
therefore, have four options when dealing with the
potential instability of the electronic device
which will display their work:
-
In keeping
with “the aesthetics of surface”,
the artists simply ignore this instability.
- The “mimetic aesthetics”
takes into account the instability of the
electronic device, but it also tries to reduce its
impact by providing the work with a stable
experimentation frame.
- The most radical approach, the “aesthetics
of the ephemeral”, consists of
letting the work slowly decompose, accepting that,
through its changing forms and updates, unexpected
mutations may even, sooner or later, lead to the
obsolescence of the artistic project.
- The fourth approach, called the “aesthetics
of re-enchantment”, mystifies the
relationships between the animated words and
images, between the sounds and gestures of
manipulation in a digital artwork, in order to
advocate an “unrepresentable”,
something that words can not describe and yet, that
one can “feel” by experiencing the
work.
The poems La Série des U and
Passage by Philippe Bootz seem to
perfectly fit in the aesthetics of the ephemeral:
the author was among the first ones to theorize
both about the lability of the digital device and
the eventual obsolescence of digital creation, and
also one of the first ones to experiment them in
his poetic projects. Yet, in these digital poems,
the mimetic aesthetics, the aesthetics of the
ephemeral and of re-enchantment alternately
intertwine, merge or mutually exclude one another,
so that their conflicting relationships allow us to
raise a certain number of fundamental questions
about digital poetics.
1. The lability of
the electronic device: four approaches
2. La Série des U
3. Passage: Present/future
4. Passage: Past
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