On Mon, 12 May 1997, John Cayley wrote:
> I had that Jean Baudrillard in the back of my cab the other day. (Spoke at
> the ICA on May 8. Where *were* you?)
At the Rempress series in Cambridge, John. Caroline Bergvall and Cris
Cheek and Sianed Jones gave a resounding show into the near
pitch-darkness of the new venue - see review on this list by Keston, I
think.
> Ask yourself: Is *this* text or image? How do you read it? Do you read it
> differently because of the screen? What happens to our 'texts' when we
> transpose them to the screen, especially if they become illegible to, or at
> least unread by, someone like Baudrillard?
I came back to this reply after reading the posting of Jackson MacLow's
"content" poem, and thinking as I scrolled down through it that I
couldn't tell how long it was/was going to go on for. In that sense
like speech. But could stop it, scroll back, though even after I got
to the end there was still no sense of the proportion of the chunk I was
looking at to the whole thing.
So somehow here the significant difference seems to be one of relation to
the body. One can MANIPULATE text in the literal sense, i.e. handle.
Interestingly, Baudrillard earlier (in the simulacrum book) characterised
the word as more abscene than the image, for similar reasons. Whoops, I
wrote abscene; meant obscene. Abscene would of course be the opposite of
obscene, in fact would apply to the image's ungraspability.
I wrote here before about the physical inimicality of the screen -
Repetitive stress injury from deleting unwelcome postings, tearless dry
eyes.
Performance poetics actually go in the opposite direction to the
image's, from this standpoint. We're there.
Ironic that the cosier page should represent some kind of real.
Fiona
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