Francisco J. Ricardo - Böcker

"Literary Art in Digital Performance" examines a dozen works of digital literature, a category comprising creative works that are principally (but not exclusively) textual in character, and which includes interactive poetry, narrative computer games, projective digital art, among other creative classifications specific to digital media. Electronic art in all its forms has presented a need for approaching its mechanism as new aesthetic. The historical change in digital literature centers on the fact that part of the creative content and the conditions for its reception are now produced by machine structures rather than exclusively through manual means and materials. With this new factor, in which the creative impetus is embedded in algorithmic decisions, the aesthetic practices and strategies of digital literature are not approachable in the same way that literature is understood. However, the rise of highly commercialized and popular fascination with media has not incorporated significant discussion about the degree to which art and literature remain as before, or are altered by this kind of widespread mediation.

Long after painting, sculpture, photography, and film developed along with their materials - canvas and panel, marble and bronze, and celluloid film - a new generation of art has emerged in which digital, electronic, architectural, and performative materials have offered new forms for creative expression and experience. In much of this new art, the medium - no longer composed of passive materials - now embraces and challenges viewers to work as co-creators of aesthetic experience. Starting from the impossibility of understanding this new and complex art solely within the framework of contemporary art history and criticism, The Engagement Aesthetic offers new modes of critique for new media works of art, literature, and performance that operate in complex ways. Blending a range of methodologies from phenomenology, art history, linguistics, and statistical analysis, Ricardo explores how a new kinship between individual participation, electronic media, virtual and actual space, and mediated language results in a new aesthetic of mutual engagement.