Visual Text and Media Divergence

Abstract

This article explores current reinventions of the paper page and the book-object as bearers of visual text in the digital age. How has the literary evolved as a verbal-visual art in the digital age, pronouncedly ‘bookish’ in spite or because of its overall digital mode of production? The authors focus on works illustrative of three genres – Mark Z. Danielewski's novel Only Revolutions (2006a), Louise Paillé's artbook Livres-livres (1993–2004), and ET Russian's personal zine Ring of Fire #3 (1999) – showing how the digital does not erase but produces ‘analogue’ or paper-based writing anew. How does the digital provide new meanings, and modes for such writing to pronounce itself? With respect to the works discussed, the authors argue that such ‘analogue’ writing is presented as an embodied writing: a writing addressed towards the body, but also presenting itself as a visceral, bodily act. They approach this embodied writing as an instance of media divergence: a dynamic of contrastive, material differences between ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ media in the present.

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