Do the Domains of Literature and New Media Art Intersect? The Cases of Sonnetoid Web Projects by Vuk Ćosić and Teo Spiller

Abstract

Franco Moretti’s notion of “distant reading” as a complementary concept to “close reading”, which has emerged alongside computer-based analysis and manipulation of texts, finds its mirror image in a sort of “distant” production of literary works – of a specific kind, of course. The paper considers the field in which literature and new media creativity intersect. Is there such a thing as literariness in “new media objects” (Manovich)? Next, by focusing on the websites that generate texts resembling and referring to sonnet form, the article asks a question about the new media sonnet and a more general question about new media poetry. A mere negative answer to the two questions seemingly implied by Vuk Ćosić’s projects does not suffice because it only postpones the unavoidable answer to the questions posed by existing new media artworks and other communication systems. Teo Spiller’s Spam.sonnets can be viewed as an innovative solution to finding a viable balance between the author’s control over the text and the text’s openness to the reader-user’s intervention. In conclusion, two concrete reconfigurations of the experience of (new media) literature – and through it the surrounding world – are considered: the experience of time in Spiller’s News Sonnets and the spatial dimension as implied in his project SMS Sonnets. News Sonnets uses current news obtained via RSS feeds from various sources, which makes the “messages” contained in the lines of the sonnet a potential stimulus for readers’ immediate action. SMS Sonnets expands the territory where the communication takes place beyond the text-reader confrontation and into the community of participants in an interactive (non-artistic) communication system.