CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Article Title

Plotting the Pixel in Remediated Word and Image

Authors

Sarah Wyman, The State University of New York New Paltz

Abstract

In her article "Plotting the Pixel in Remediated Word and Image" Sarah Wyman argues that art's historic negotiation of culture continues into the new digital media age as it both asserts the materiality of the medium and acknowledges the impact of embodied perception. She demonstrates that however revolutionary, the new digital media still relate to many traditional paradigms of aesthetic expression. Problems of representation and simulation continue to catch on questions of time, space and human perception. The contingent relationships between categories and entities once kept separate — word/image, observer/observed — determine and define the process of globalization. The new digital media's ostensible goals of immediacy and transparency clash with its irresistible fascination with the electronic medium itself. A look at the pixeled image in various pre-electronic incarnations – geometric painting, concrete poetry, mosaic art — demonstrates a counterpart to our own experiential existence, now transformed by the impact of contemporary technologies. By examining such cultural artifacts, Wyman elaborates on the way aspects of remediation, intermediality, and hypermediality have always factored in the way people read, create, and use images in the West.

Recommended Citation

Wyman, Sarah. "Plotting the Pixel in Remediated Word and Image." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): <http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1792>

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