Creativity and digital text

In his 1928 Anthropophagic Manifesto Brazilian writer Oswald de Andrade claimed that in its search for its own identity Brazilian culture must ‘devour’ – critically assimilate rather than imitate or ignore – European codes by means of irreverence, inversion, parody and insult as subversive anti-colonialist strategies. With respect to the notion of cultural cannibalism, the essay discusses the relationship in digital culture between the new, popular (i.e. interactive installations) and the old, elitist (i.e. text) media as medial anthropophagy. Such inter-medial encounter leads to many forms of trans-medial transformations (or: creative consumption) in which text is deprived of its linguistic message and turned into an audio-visual event. Against the history of trans-medial relationships which address the fusion of text and image (the figurative poems in Antiquity, the concrete poetry movement in the 20th century, the text-installations of Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer and Lawrence Weiner), the essay discusses the medial expression of cultural anthropophagy in digital media as a-semanticization and musicalicization of text and offers close readings of three exemplifying interactive installations: Text Rain (1999) by Camille Utterback and Romy Achituv (letters of a poem fall down on a screen and can be stopped and collected by the silhouette of the viewers),Listening Post (2000-2001) by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin (text fragments culled from thousands of Internet chat rooms on 231 miniature text display screens), Complete Works of W. S. (2008) by Caleb Larsen (the complete work of Shakespeare as a gigantic abstract picture with colored pixels representing alphabetic characters). In all three works text is presented in a way that rather than to read invites the audience to engage with the text in a new, creative, post-alphabetic way.