Even the flat (third-dimensionless) screen of the programmaton, because of its increasingly implicated relations with film and television, invites our engagement with the illusionistic, naturalistic representation of space, and this continues to have implications for any aestheticized presentation of text on the screen, on the making, that is, of screen-based literal art. To be more specific, it has implied another and, for some readers, a promisingly ‘new’ relationship with the phenomenology of text in space, all without directly addressing the issues and problems as such.
I would argue that the effect on literal art and poetics in new media — the effect of this failure to address directly the phenomenology of text and the ambiguities of the display media — has been to push literal art in the direction of a Concrete poetics. By Concrete, I mean a poetics in which written language — letters and words — take on characteristics of other kinds of objects in order to generate rhetorical and aesthetic affect and significance.
I would argue that the effect on literal art and poetics in new media — the effect of this failure to address directly the phenomenology of text and the ambiguities of the display media — has been to push literal art in the direction of a Concrete poetics. By Concrete, I mean a poetics in which written language — letters and words — take on characteristics of other kinds of objects in order to generate rhetorical and aesthetic affect and significance.
