Recent trends in digital media theory signal the absorption of initial, utopian claims made for electronic hypertextuality and for the transformation of both quotidian and literary discourse via the radical enfranchisement of active readers. Born in 1993, the democratizing, decentralizing World Wide Web - at first, the “almost embarrassingly literal embodiment” (Landow 1992, 34) of post-structuralist literary theory, a global Storyspace, has been appropriated, consolidated, and “videated” as a forum for commerce and advertising. Thinkers such as Landow, Bolter and Grusin have seen from the start that electronic hypertextuality, or the computerized proliferation of symbolic writing, was only a step on the way to general electronic hypermediation dominated by iconic visual, rather than symbolic textual, forms.
As if in response to this, web-based or distributed electronic writing has evolved from its first alphabetic-(hyper)textual forms toward diverse incorporations of, and hybridizations with, the static or kinetic image. Poets and visual artists working from a tradition of typographic experimentation that reaches back to futurism and Dada, and includes twentieth-century visual and Concrete poetry, are using networked, heterogenetic writing spaces to create and distribute a new electronic visual poetry. This growth of visual writing may be seen as a response to the technological acceleration that permits more and more complex forms of information - from simple text, to static images, to animated and then to user-interactive text-image clusters or constellations, what might be called “lex/icons” - to coexist in one “medium” or information-delivery system. As Bolter suggests, “True electronic writing is not limited to verbal text: the writeable elements may be words, images, sounds, or even actions that the computer is directed to perform.” (Bolter 1991, 26)
As if in response to this, web-based or distributed electronic writing has evolved from its first alphabetic-(hyper)textual forms toward diverse incorporations of, and hybridizations with, the static or kinetic image. Poets and visual artists working from a tradition of typographic experimentation that reaches back to futurism and Dada, and includes twentieth-century visual and Concrete poetry, are using networked, heterogenetic writing spaces to create and distribute a new electronic visual poetry. This growth of visual writing may be seen as a response to the technological acceleration that permits more and more complex forms of information - from simple text, to static images, to animated and then to user-interactive text-image clusters or constellations, what might be called “lex/icons” - to coexist in one “medium” or information-delivery system. As Bolter suggests, “True electronic writing is not limited to verbal text: the writeable elements may be words, images, sounds, or even actions that the computer is directed to perform.” (Bolter 1991, 26)
