Tributaries & Text-Fed Streams

In February 2007 The Capilano Review, a literary journal based in North Vancouver, B.C., published an issue dedicated to new writing and new technologies. TCR 2-50 “Artifice & Intelligence” was guest-edited by Andrew Klobucar and included essays by: Andrew Klobucar, Global Telelanguage Resources, Sandra Seekins, Kate Armstrong, David Jhave Johnston, Laura U. Marks, Sharla […]

In her discussion of the relationship between Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his friend and assistant, the writer Johann Peter Eckermann (the German Boswell), Avital Ronell develops a theory of dictation which can be expanded to describe several important aspects of the machinic assemblage I’m calling “typewriting.” While the overall tone and focus of Ronell’s […]

“There was a flipping sound every thirty seconds from the vcr as it was continually trying to eject a videocassette which was not, in fact, in the machine. Through some glitch of artificial unintelligence the malfunctioning vcr kept trying to eject nothing for days. The tuner part of the unit was working fine so it […]

“‘the artist’s culture … cross circuited’”
“spill of speech (which chaotically can influence the real, material, environment) with its appearance of free labor,”
“a double-writing in which the boundary creates an imaginary and inchoate presence that will turn out to be the self, parceled out within the wall, dismembered, with the memory of a totality that comes […]

THAT “there’s no other to cyberspace, no air anywhere”
THAT “the body appears to breath, its organs duplicated everywhere, laminated across the constructed world”
THAT “the invisible as the defined excluded, ‘excluded’ from the field of visibility and ‘defined’ as excluded”
THAT “there’s a mass psychosis underway, as if being offline meant you’re somehow deficient, in education, worldliness, […]

“Language [as] an effect of neural
processing / learning, rather than a
ground or ur-grund” “fading-objects”
“translucencies that shatter” (at the touch)
(glance of the eye) your reading eye
‘my’ so-called reading eye
how it seizes on the ‘part-object’
geared toward foreclosure
the eye (my eye) its hatchet job
the violence of the seizures
among this book or that
“Writing may be made between the ear […]

“‘Instantaneous information, what can be seen at one time (without turning one’s head), and understood apart from a study of its parts. Additive information, whatever takes time to be understood, what takes time to be understood. Sequential development, adding on, accumulations of information, the uses of time, precedents, juxtaposition.’
Her work ‘accumulated,’ often no beginning, ending, […]

Laura U. Marks’s essay Taking a line for a walk, from the Abbasid Caliphate to computer graphics, or, The Performativity of the Vector follows important continuities in what at first may appear as disparate traditions in art history: classical Islamic art, European modernism and contemporary new media. Comparing several tendencies shared by both classical Islamic […]

This portion of Sandra Seekins’s essay on the The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art also bring us many promises and perils of translation, a thorny topic that recurs again and again in this issue of The Capilano Review. As Seekins tells us, Eduardo Kac’s controversial and ongoing work Genesis begins with the imperialist […]

In her essay, Of Molecules and Matter: The Promises and Perils of Biotech Art, Sandra Seekins writes: “Biotechnologies reveal that bodies are composites of replaceable parts, open to reorganization, surveillance, and psychological and physical modification or augmentation. This can be an unsettling proposition, but one that is faced by artists concerned with the metaphors and […]