What are the consequences of admitting an idea of textuality that is dispersed rather than unitary, processual rather than object-like, flickering rather than durably inscribed, always differing from itself rather than repro-ducing itself as a stable entity?
An obvious result is the highlighting of the temporal dimension, inviting experiments that play with the flickering indeterminacies of digital texts. Moreover, with texts that allow some degree of interactivity, reading also becomes a performance in a more kinesthetically complex and vivid sense than is the case with reading print texts. The machine produces the text as an event; the reader interacts with that event in ways that significantly modify and even determine its progress; these readerly interventions feed back into the machine to change its behavior, which further inflects the course of the performance. Less an object than an event, the digital text emerges as a dance between artificial and human intelligences, machine and natural languages, as these evolve together through time.
An obvious result is the highlighting of the temporal dimension, inviting experiments that play with the flickering indeterminacies of digital texts. Moreover, with texts that allow some degree of interactivity, reading also becomes a performance in a more kinesthetically complex and vivid sense than is the case with reading print texts. The machine produces the text as an event; the reader interacts with that event in ways that significantly modify and even determine its progress; these readerly interventions feed back into the machine to change its behavior, which further inflects the course of the performance. Less an object than an event, the digital text emerges as a dance between artificial and human intelligences, machine and natural languages, as these evolve together through time.
