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The Sonnet in the New Media (General Issues and Slovene Examples)
Aleš Vaupotič, Ljubljana
Intermedial transitions and new media
By applying the Rosalind Krauss' notion of postmedia1 (that
revises Clement Greenberg's description of modernist tendency
towards the purity of art forms) to the development of art and
media after the »algorithmic revolution«2 Peter Weibel acknowledges
the impasse in the history of arts and of communication media in
general. In his essay Die postmediale Kondition (2005) he points
out that the current state of communication media is marked by the
second phase of the postmedia condition, which is defined by mixing
of media (Weibel, “Die postmediale Kondition” 12)⁠ . The first phase
has foregrounded the specificities of media by establishing their
equality, however the second phase is dominated by the mutual
interpenetration of the principles of different media in a single
cultural object. Lev Manovich in his recent monograph Software
Takes Command (2008) refers to this phenomenon with the notion of
»deep remixability«, which relocates the remixing from the content
level to the level of media languages, i.e. »fundamental
techniques, working methods, and ways of representation and
expression« (Manovich, Software Takes Command 28, 128)⁠ .
The term »new media« was defined by Manovich in 2001. In his
elaboration of five »principles« of new media as »general
tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization« - numerical
representation, modularity, automation, variability, and
transcoding – he presents an argument for the »novelty« of the
computer media, which for the first time in media history becomes
1 Post-Medium Condition (Krauss)⁠ .
2 (Weibel, “Die Algorithmische Revolution. Zur Geschichte der interaktiven Kunst”)⁠
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programmable. He notes that transcoding focuses the »computer
layer« and the »cultural layer« of the new media object, between
them the influences are streaming both ways (Manovich, The Language
of New Media 27-48)⁠ . Manovich, following Alan Kay and Adele
Goldberg seminal article Personal Dynamic Media (1977), refers to
the computer as »a metamedium, whose content would be a wide range
of already-existing and not-yet-invented media« (Kay & Goldberg;
Manovich, Software Takes Command 83)⁠ .
The significance of the sonnet form in Slovenian literary history
The new media context that the sonnet form has found itself in
demands an examination of its reconstruction or simulation in a
crisis ridden field. In Slovenian cultural memory however the
sonnet doesn't only refer to a literary form in its literarytechnical aspect, but even before that evokes a series of
particular sonnet works, namely the sonnets by the Slovene romantic
poet – the »national poet« - France Prešeren (1800—1849). Marko
Juvan points to four reasons for the fact that Prešeren's sonnets
and his Sonetni venec (1834, the title uses Slovene expression for
the form corona di sonetti) lay at the centre of the nation's
cultural memory. (i) Prešeren as part of the canon functions in a
number of ways to uphold the national and aesthetic ideology of
Slovene literary and cultural identity, e.g. in school curricula
and in public life in general. (ii) The transposition of the
Italian sonnet form into Slovene literature, whereby the
versification principles of Slovene language were defined,
resonates in connotations that Slovene literary achievements are
»competitive« in European comparative frameworks. (iii) The
»psychological traits and categories of Slovene collective
mentality« receive a compelling and influential voice and symbolic
expression in Prešeren's sonnets. (iv) Prešeren's works – from the
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literary-technical point of view the sonnets in particular – assume
in the second half of the 19th century the role of a key cultural
text by providing an intertextual reference for the literary
production of the following generations: it provides possible
»pacts« for the new works with the prototypical works in order to
achieve more of the cultural power or it can represent the looming
spectre against which the new works define themselves (Juvan 2216)⁠ .
Because the sonnet as »the paradigm of the highest lyrical
expression« assumes a general cohesive function in Slovene literary
and cultural systems through Prešeren's works, the expectations of
the form in the Slovenian context follow his particular example of
the sonnet. Prešeren considered the sonnet a medium of »high«
artistic expression and strived towards a strict form (all looser
versions of the sonnet correspond to »lighter«, comic content, the
formal deviations appearing only in tercets). All his sonnets are
Italian sonnets.3 As opposed to Dante or Petrarch who used also the
alternate ABAB ABAB rhyme scheme in quatrains Prešeren always used
the embracing ABBA ABBA scheme. Even in tercets that are in
principle more open in content and in form Prešeren used with
notable preference the CDC DCD scheme (rime incatenate). All the
verses are endecasillabo giambico with feminine rhyme exclusively
(Novak 90-2)⁠ . The Shakespearean sonnet is virtually absent from
Slovene versification history (although Shakespeare's works were
accessible to Prešeren), the first in depth studies and complete
translations appearing only in the 1960s (Škulj)⁠ .
3 The theory of the Schlegel brothers has mediated in the reception of the form.
4
Spam.sonnets (2004) by Teo Spiller
(Image 1 – Spam.sonnets)
Teo Spiller's web project Spam.sonnets4 marks the time, when
email inboxes were filled daily with spam messages. It consists of
a database of over 1000 email header subject fields that the
computer then randomly selects from. Fifteen lines are placed as
verses in the visual layout of the Italian sonnet in four stanzas
with the title.
(Image 2 - frontpage)
The first webpage of the project site allows the user to submit her
name and email and also to choose from three interfaces that are
available: »HTML (text)«, »Slide Show«, and »VRML (3D)«. The
default choice is »HTML (text)«.5 The information submitted may (or
may not) be included in the subsequently constructed new media
poem.6
(Image 3 – text – the submitted name is integrated into the text)
After the click a sonnet is shown. The only sonnet element that the
Spam.sonnet entails is the visual appearance of the division into
stanzas, which evokes the memory of the form (Novak 87)⁠ .
Spiller explains that he conceptualized the project from the
point of view of a visual artist, which explains the further
disintegration of the sonnet form and spam communication tactics
alongside with it in the »Slide Show« interface,
4 http://www.s-p-i-l-l-e-r.com/spamsonnets/. The description of the project follows a
personal email from the author from 15 October 2009. Contemporary announcements by Jaka
Železnikar http://www.mladina.si/dnevnik/21-02-2004-sistem_umetnost/ and Špela Kučan
http://info.ljudmila.org/article.php?story=20040317164936985. (All URLs quoted were
verified on the 1 November 2009.)
5 The latter two interfaces were added after the first version of the project.
6 The author's name as it appeared in the collection of spam titles – spam emails
sometimes automatically include the addressee's name from the email account setup – is
replaced by the user's submission.
5
(Image 4 – slide show)
which shows words in big letters in a temporal succession. One can
notice some pauses in the rhythm, however it is virtually
impossible to tell from the observed appearance and disappearance
of the large and colourful words, that this is a sonnet. In this
view only the title of the project points to the (negative) sonnet
form, whereby a symbolic parallel is drawn between commercial
intrusion into privacy and the pressure of the canonized national
author on the artistic production. The institutional significance
of the Prešernian sonnet in Slovenia steps to the forefront through
ironic dethronement – the sonnet is a cultural analogy of spam,
tertium comparationis being its imposition through the media.
(Image 5 - VRLM)
The third user interface to the database of spam email titles is
a 3-D arrangement of words in a VRML coded virtual space. Here,
too, no immediately recognizable sonnet features are to be seen
(apart, maybe, from the visual proportion between hight and width
of the textual block). The cylinder of words rotates to the highly
repetitive MIDI-type sound of organ music. In its centre there is a
cross made of the sonnet title (recognizable from the »text«
interface) and its »spam«-author. The scene could represent a
church or a (funerary) chapel, which, for a Slovenian, would evoke
the elegiac atmosphere of Prešeren's poetry and of its authors well
known misfortunes, but at the same time also the Slovenian selfimage as such, which is often construed through the notion of
»hrepenenje« (German: Sehnsucht).
Automatons and poetry
The French literary group Oulipo (1960—) considered the sonnet
an important example of the »plagiarism by anticipation« (Fournel;
Le Lionnais; Roubaud)⁠ .
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(Image 6 - Queneau)
The cases of the Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) by Raymond
Queneau, the book-like mechanism for the recombination of the
verses of a sonnet (sheets are cut between the verses), and 10
millions de sonnets palindromes (2006) by Robert Rapilly (Rapilly,
“10 millions de sonnets palindromes”)⁠
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(Image 7 - Rapilly)
point to the issue of the recombinatorial production of poetry.
Both projects were realized in the book form and as computer
applications as well. Queneau's recombination of the sonnet
elements was implemented by Dmitri Starynkevitch already in the
early sixties (Wolff)⁠ .8 The Oulipo as a context for theorizing the
computer generated sonnets offers insights through different
positions that were discussed within the group. Oulipo
declaratively explores the use of constraints (contrainte) in the
cognitive involvement with reality. Cofounder of the group, who
wrote two manifests, the mathematician François Le Lionnais
considers the project universally (on the syntactic and – decidedly
less tangible – semantic level), whereby the dichotomy of the
potentiality and the constraint assumes an existential dimension
through recursiveness, e.g. through projects of Ou-(ou-(ou-x-po)po-po9 (Le Lionnais)⁠ . There are four possible standpoints within
the frameworks of Oulipo: (i) Le Lionnais argued for invention of
constraints only, without consequently realizing literary works,
(ii) the cofounder writer Queneau was realizing works by means of
formal constraints and procedures. (iii) In the case of Georges
Perec the use of constraints was motivated and exhaustive, building
7 In 2009 Rapilly wrote another version (Rapilly, “Or érotisé (10 millions de sonnets
palindromes)”)⁠ .
8 The first recombinatory text with explicitly literary features were the Loveletters
(1952) programmed by Christopher Strachey on the first computer, the Manchester
University Computer (Link, “There Must Be an Angel. On the Beginnings of the
Arithmetics of Rays”)⁠ .
9 »Ou« stands for the »workshop«, »po« for potential, »x« is a variable that could be
filled with any aspect of reality (Roubaud #50)⁠ .
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inventories or archives, whereas in Queneau's case the machines
that produce texts are emphasized (Magné)⁠ , (iv) on the other hand,
Jean Queval's works represent the argument for the »intuitive use
of constraints« through the notion of clinamen (Roubaud #51)⁠ ,10
which in turn introduces an aporia into the olipian project as
such.
The main dilemma linked with recombinatorial production of texts
is the lack of control, what the output of the automaton will
actually be. Oulipo, in general, strives to eliminate chance,
however this issue gets more complex through employment of
computers (Poucel; Wolff)⁠ .11 Only Queneau's point of view
theoretically allows to build an automaton for production of poems,
while all the other possible oulipian standpoints demand an
existential human gesture that is beyond computational data
processing's reach (Link, “while(true): On the Fluidity of Signs in
Hegel, Gödel, and Turing”)⁠ . Hans Magnus Enzensberger tackled this
issue head on in his essay Einladung zu einem Poesie-Automaten
(1974, 2000) and concluded in a beniaminian pro-techno attitude
that the poetry automaton could be used as a critical standard: if
one can't write poems better than the automaton then he or she
shouldn't write at all (Enzensberger #2.3.6)⁠ .12
The automatic production of text is by now recognized as an
experiment that has failed. The Poesie Automat leaves the user to
repeatedly click on the »Los!« (Go!) button to get a meaningful
result (“Poesie Automat”)⁠ . This leaves the user unsatisfied, since
she requires a continuous production of poems worth reading. The
aspect of human-computer interaction design appears to be absent
from the main Oulipo's lines of exploration, however a glance at
10 It refers to the »intentional violation of constraints for aesthetic purposes«, while
using a term from Lucretius' poem De rerum natura.
11 The difference between automatism of the Surrealists and automatism in the era of the
machines was discussed.
12 Within the frameworks of Oulipo Jacques Roubaud distinguishes between »elementary
pieces written according to constraints and creation that is truly literary« (Roubaud
#42)⁠ .
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Queneau's and Rapilly's sonnets printed on paper additionally
reveals a clear hierarchy between the sonnets. In Queneau's book
the first sonnet of course isn't a just any one out of 1014 sonnets.
The online version of Rapilly's palindromic sonnets consists of two
views – the random sonnet and a page with 10 palindromic sonnets
that stand apart from their 107 recombined versions.13
»Sonnet interface« and spam communication
The focus on the human-computer interaction offers an insight
into the principles that govern computational sonnets. Teo
Spiller's Spam.sonnets are explicitly offered as »interfaces«,
which points to Manovich's definition of the new media object as
multiple interfaces to a database (Manovich, The Language of New
Media 227)⁠ . The elements of the database in Spiller's case are not
fragments of verses (such as in Enzensberger's proposed model) but
complete ready-made statements, the consciously designed
promotional slogans. Consequently, Spiller's »verse« carries
meaning embodied in a rhythmic linguistic form, while the model of
permutations within a line of text necessarily compromises its
integrity.
In addition, the author has noted that the spam messages are
encountered within an email client in a visual layout similar to a
strophe.
(Image 8 – spam strophe)
»Spam language«
Another issue to consider in the case of the Spam.sonnets is the
language employed. It is not determined by the sonnet or the
13 See the sonnet-origins (les sonnets-souches)
http://blackbanzai.free.fr/sonnets_palindromes.html. The multiple view interface was
presented already by Douglas Engelbart in his oNLine System 1968
http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html.
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Prešernian context but by the specificities of the spamming
communication medium.
(Image 9 – spam language)
The word »1nches« is e.g. sometimes written with a number, or, as
above, words are divided randomly, in order to let the spam
filtering algorithms the unwanted emails reach their addressees.
The »spam language« used here is different from the »code poetry«,
where the language is a mix of computer code and natural languages
(e.g. mezangelle by Mary-Anne Breeze alias mez).14 Another
recognized new media inspired language idiom is the language of
abbreviations, such as LOL etc.15
In the sonnets – which were sampled in Slovenia – the English
language prevails. Some French text elements appear, too. Spiller's
examples lack Slovene language textual fragments. The Spam.sonnets
language is goal oriented, addressed to spam filters and the users,
who can grasp the general meaning in the »internet English« well
enough. On the other hand, Teo Spiller's project reflects on the
specific Slovenian sonnet prototype and therefore as a whole can be
considered a Slovenian new media art project pointing to multilayered hybridization of the topographies of the cultural domains
in – and through – the new media.
Nacija—Kultura (Nation—Culture, 2000) by Vuk Ćosić
(Image 10 - Ćosić)
Slovene versologist and poet Boris A. Novak notes that Slovene
poets use the sonnet to emphasize the importance of the message
(Novak 94)⁠ . In 2000 Vuk Ćosić was commissioned to make a new media
art project for an exhibition commemorating 200th anniversary of
14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mezangelle
15 Should be read »loughing out loud«, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_slang.
The dot in the Spam.sonnets title should be read in the context of the net.art movement
that was widespread in Slovenia in the late nineties and on the turn of the millennium.
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Prešeren's birth.16 At that time Vuk Ćosić was in position to obtain
the raw »search-stream«, the real-time input to the then major
Slovene internet portal Mat'Kurja.17 He projected the search-stream,
formed as a sonnet, next to the first edition of Prešeren's book of
poems Poezije (1847), which is one of the key artifacts of Slovene
culture. The visual part of the project consisted of a Flash
application, which had shown in real-time the queries of the web
surfers in the typography of the first edition of the Poezije.
Ćosić used Prešern's sonnet reference as the text that is
supposed to explain the Slovene national character. Instead of
turning to the sonnet through interpretation of its contents Ćosić
suggests a conceptual »subtraction« instead: what his sonnet
reveals is the (Slovenian) nation »minus« culture. The nation is
therefore without any culture and therefore vulgar and profane,
which shows in the queries related to pornography that were
constantly there (during the night time even more so). For a
Yugoslavian the project also brings to mind a joke about »bratstvo
i jedinstvo«18 which means brotherhood and unity, in the joke,
however, the unity is ironically changed to »the only child«
(»jedinac«) and cancels the initial notion of brotherhood.
Google's Zeitgeist project, which runs from 2001, could
represent a comparable new media object.19 It is possible to read
Ćosić's work as a techno-image as theorized by Vilém Flusser – not
a traditional visual image nor a narrative text but an image of a
theoretical concept. The institutional framework and the existence
of a web directory type portal Mat'kurja is indispensable for the
understanding of the project. The split within the authorial
instance – (i) the programmer, (ii) the author of the artistic
16 Pevec, ne bôgat a slovèč (razstava ob 200. obletnici Prešernovega rojstva), Narodni
muzej Slovenije, Ljubljana, 3. 12. 2000—8. 2. 2001
17 www.matkurja.si, http://web.archive.org/web/20030401083528/www.matkurja.com/slo/
18 In the Serbo-Croat language.
19 The first URL was http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html,
http://web.archive.org/web/20010706024815/http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html.
The project is now called GoogleTrends.
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concept, and (iii) the limited freedom of expression of the users –
is required to understand the work. Another dimension of the work
is the existence of an online community that corresponds to the
work, however in this case it is clear that Nation—Culture doesn't
actively construct its social network through specific rules – as
for instance does the project Assoziations-Blaster (1999—) by Alvar
Freude and Dragan Espenschied20 - and therefore in fact primarilly
»steals« the data secretly emanated by an existing society: the
Slovene web users of the time of the exhibition.
The reading of Nation—Culture
If Spiller's poems retain the integrity of a verse-like rhythmic
line of text, Ćosić's sonnet becomes a stream of words. The
dynamization and complete loss of control over the appearance of
words cancels two sonnet requirements: the verse and the two part
structure of the Italian sonnet (stricter quatrains and looser
tercets). Nevertheless, the fact that there are no verses and
sonnet features apart from the visual layout doesn't mean that it
is not necessary to read the text that is projected. The only way
to grasp the project is to read the lines, which results in the
segmentation of the lines into meaningful units. The reader first
recognizes the existence of the textual machine, then text is
segmented into quarries: a single word or multiple word quarry. The
quasi-verse »Ministrstvo za finance najstni MONDO MOTO,« shows two
caesuras: after the quarry for the »Ministry of Finance« and after
»najstni«, which is a misspelling for »teenage«. The word »tyco«
appears twice in the »nonsonnet« and points to the reemergence of
the same user's voice at two points in time in the stream of the
chorus of multiple voices. What is finally read and interpreted is
20 http://www.assoziations-blaster.de
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the chorus of voices that corresponds to the content of Vuk Ćosić's
work.21
(Image 11 - Ćosić-Warhol)
The reception of the Nation—Culture project follows the model
from the conceptual arts. In another project, History of Art for
the Intelligence Community (2002), Ćosić e.g. uses masterpieces
from the art history to provocatively display data (in a fictive
spying situation): Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup Can is used as a
template to display the quantity of data leaving the target
computer by the levels of red and white on the can.
A tag cloud sonnet of my day (21 Jan 09) by Jaka Železnikar
A tag cloud sonnet of my day (21 Jan 09)
awake, kiss, piss, bake,
mistake cake, remiss amiss, demiss kumiss, shake brake,
news, horror, weep, blues,
explorer restorer, sleep.22
Jaka Železnikar is a Slovenian new media artist that focuses his
work primarily on the literary aspect of new media. The sonnet
visually follows the Shakespearean scheme, while the rhymes follow
the Italian model, which could suggest that Železnikar explored the
sonnet as a literary form and not merely as a Slovenian cultural
artefact. Another aspect of this new media sonnet is its double
contextualization. On the one hand, this is a purely literary work,
sent in an email and published in a blog post, but lacking any
21 Another point of view to consider is Espen j. Aarseth's emphasis on the hybrid mix of
literary reading and game playing in the reception of hypertexts and textual adventure
games. A cybertext as a »textual machine« necessarily involves the reader-user's
actions in its functioning, from which many consequences follow (Aarseth; Vaupotič,
“Who Chooses, What the Reader Reads? (The Cybertextual Perspective)”)⁠ .
22 Personal email from the author on 9 February 2009. http://www.jaka.org/blog.php?post=15
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interactivity or obvious new media features. (Note that it is
written in English.)
On the other hand, the »tag cloud« is mentioned in the title,
which invites a nonliterary reading of the text.
(Image 13 – Google Books automatic tag cloud of Shakespeare's Sonnets) 23
The tag cloud is a generic interface that is used in many variants
to present frequencies of tags (or words in a text)24 in a planar
arrangement. E.g. the size of typography may represent the
frequency of a word, whereas the succession of words is usually
alphabetical to facilitate easy access to particular words or tags.
From this point of view the sonnet's random grouping of the lines
can allude to the possible dynamic width of a tag cloud, because
information is in fact an alphabetical chain of words with varying
typeface size.
Jaka Železnikar's computational poetry and net.art projects are
founded on a fragile balance between the new media artistic
techniques and the literary ones. The author's collection of poems
Interaktivalija (Interactivalia, 1997) is an example of artistic
probing of the synergies between literary qualities and the new
media. The seven interactive poems foreground different aspects of
the hybrid medium: the first reflects on the reading of the moving
text, the second to fourth poem allow the reader to add select
content to the poem structure whereby the authorial position begins
to disintegrate, the fifth offers the recombination of two poems by
means of an interface of geometric shapes, the sixth foregrounds
the visual aspect and the seventh explores the ready-made and
collaborative aspects of the web communication and its geographical
embeddedness (Bovcon 185-90)⁠ .
23
http://books.google.com/books?id=xSgGMZuLG4EC&dq=shakespeare+sonnets&source=gbs_nav
links_s
24 A »tag« refers to metadata level of the database.
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Slovene new media sonnets
The three works presented cannot be considered sonnets in the
strict meaning of the term of art. Teo Spiller's Spam.sonnets and
Vuk Ćosić's Nation—Culture are linked to the sonnet primarily
through the canonic works of Prešeren and function as artworks –
this is true particularly for Ćosić – on the conceptual level and
less on the literary or the verbal one. Železnikar's work is the
only one focused on the Ingarden's model of the literary-aesthetic
experience aspect of the reception of text (Vaupotič, “Literarnoestetski doživljaj in novi mediji – prihodnost literature?”)⁠ .
Another issue that stands out is the problem of mechanical
production of verses and of strophes. Two problematic solutions
stem from the examples considered: the presentation of specific
data streams and the recombination of fragments. (i) Ćosić has used
the search-stream to endow lines of text with meaning – the human
speaks to the machine while the artist, together with his audience,
eavesdrops. Spiller's webpage presents spam ready-mades – the human
speaks past the machine to another human by employing a specific
language that is incomprehensible to the machine. (ii) Železnikar's
model is a simultaneous double artistic creation, marked by a
fragile equilibrium between the literary and the technological
aspect.
The »negative« of the literary text in Metamorfoza lingvistika (Metamorphosis of Language, 2007) by Srečo
Dragan
A way to approach the new media literature is by understanding
its conceptual constructedness through Flusser's techno
imagination. »The Field or Letters« was the title of an exhibition
curated by Peter Weibel and it points to the »ground zero« of the
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literary involvement with new media. The letters are left scattered
on a field.
(Image 14 – input fields)
The project Metamorphosis of Language by Srečo Dragan25 first
asks the user to submit two opposing concepts (preselected values
are »love« and »hate«) and click on »Retrieve«. The system then
uses the two strings to retrieve phrases from the Slovene language
text corpus Nova beseda26 or the Lextutor online corpus, for the
English version.
(Image 15 – the animated text field)
An animated text field is generated that confronts the user. The
text moves in a way that prohibits the full reading. Only cursory
reading is possible that scans the textual surface. The reading
event happens in order for the user to click on words whereby
inscribing her reading onto the textual surface. (The phrase as the
linguistic context of the chosen word appears at the bottom and is
replaced with any subsequent click on a new word.)
(Image 16 – End Sentence)
Upon the click on the button »Končaj stavek« (»End Sentence«) the
chosen words are shown building a string of words that Dragan calls
»Tvoj stavek« (»Your sentence«). The textual field above remains
frozen and the user's »sentence« is added to the project's
database.
The field of words that looks like a strophe is the source,
which interacts with the user's horizon of understanding to
materialize a phrase that corresponds to the initial conceptual
opposition. The core event is the mutual influence between the
context of words in the database of the corpus and the individual
reading act of the interactor. The result marks this event,
25 http://black.fri.uni-lj.si/2007/mol/, http://black.fri.uni-lj.si/mol/. The project was
realized in Slovenian and in English.
26 http://bos.zrc-sazu.si/s_beseda.html
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however, the new sentence isn't a fragmentary literary work, e.g. a
text to be read by subsequent readers, but a sort of »fossil« of
the entering a dialogue in the past experience of the work. The
sentence therefore isn't an analogue of a verse, as also the field
of words – which at first might appear like a strophe – is a
textual object that on the one hand stimulates reading, while at
the same time deliberately destabilizes itself. The unstable field
of letters is supplemented with the reading act – of course, of a
particular kind – that builds the literary text in the moment of
contact between the reader and the interface of the Metamorphosis
of Language project. The »genuine«, though highly original,
literariness is restored. The language is used in a new media
object to establish an existential link between a human (author or
reader) and the world.
Srečo Dragan's project radically deconstructs the literary
strophe and any literary fragments in the computational media.
However, if the sonnet is to prevail as a hegemonic literary form,
it needs to be reconstructed in a way that acknowledges the change
in the world that underwent a fundamental transcoding.
Abstract
The sonnet phenomenon in the new media domain raises questions of
intermedial transitions. However the hypothesized universality
(e.g. by Lev Manovich) of the new media, the status of being able
to integrate different modes of expression from literature to video
and music in a homogeneous medium or "post-medium" (derived from
Peter Weibel's concept postmedia condition), necessitates a
particular approach. The text will consider Slovene new media
sonnets – Vuk Ćosić's Nacija—Kultura/Nation-Culture (2000), Teo
Spiller's Spam.sonnets (2004) and Jaka Železnikar's A tag cloud
sonnet of my day (21 Jan 09) – from two points of view: the
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literary nature of the original sonnet genre, how it integrates
into the new media communication, and by considering the particular
cultural status of the sonnet in Slovene (literary) history – e.g.
in respect to the sonnets of romantic poet France Prešeren –, which
is indispensable to understand the context of use of the sonnet by
Slovene artists.
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