Technology and Literary Theory in Svetlana Boym”s ”Alternative New Media” Art
I discuss Svetlana Boym, a contemporary digital media artist who is the Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University.My paper focuses on her new media art oeuvre, entirely accessible online at her website, Nostalgic Technology(http://www.svetlanaboym.com/main.htm).Her new media art makes use of multiple technological devices, especially laptop computers, digital cameras, and smartphones—many times, all at once—often while she is traveling in a scholarly capacity to speak at academic conferences.When Boym photographs her computer screen with a digital camera while within a moving train in order to create her pieces such as ”Multitasking with Clouds” and ”The Black Mirror, or technoerrotics”, she states that, ”My black(berry) mirror is open to chance encounters of the virtual and material worlds. It reflects different kinds of flows and connectivities, of afterlives and afterimages, of the non-technologica virtual realities of imagination that produce an alternative new media”. Boym often intentionally employs ”digital devices in an improper way... transforming their cheerful pixelated interfaces into reflective surfaces and melancholic ”black mirrors””. I consider how Boym”s new media art intersects with her literary theory and criticism, in particular her writings about globalization, homesickness, migration, mourning, melancholia, nostalgia, and transience, much of which is expressed in her ”Off-Modern Manifesto” and other writings on her website. Interspersed throughout her new media art projects are extensive readings of/references to Jacques Derrida (to whom Boym paid artistic homage in her ”Touching Writing”, which was published on the cover of PMLA 2005),Roland Barthes, and Walter Benjamin, among others. Boym”s art creates a new media/literary criticism hybrid, blending genre, discipline, and technology, therefore making a significant contribution to New Media Literary Theory.
Marcelline Block
国内会议
“新媒介与当代文论转向”研讨会暨中国中外文艺理论学会新媒介文论分会成立大会
河南开封
英文
334-350
2012-10-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）