Related Papers
Posthumously Speaking: Thanatography in a Posthuman Age
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth, inge van de ven
In: Frame, Journal of Literary Studies 25.1, 2012. 47-68.
NEW MEDIATION, NEW POP-CULTURE?
Digital Signatures: From Traces to Codes
2015 •
Michaela Fiserova
In the first chapter "Digital Signatures: From Traces to Codes", Michaela Fišerová launches the discussion with an analysis of the contemporary transformation of the semantics of the signature in the electronic era. Her contribution focuses on the electronic signature as a semantically new medium that we use in our everyday lives. Fišerová claims that this technological change initiates a complex semantic transformation: in contrast with the handwritten signature, the digital signature is no longer a pictureof the citizen’s name that is supposed to be drawn repeatedly by the citizen himself in a “similar” way to his drawing of his specimen signature. Because the metaphysical concept of “similarity” (and the constant aporia that it produces) can’t be defined in a logical way and understood by a computer, it is no longer a handwritten trace but an arbitrarily assigned code that is supposed to guarantee the “authenticity” of digital signatures. Therefore, the double bind that obliges us to repeat the unrepeatable – which Derrida described in the case of handwritten signatures – disappears: there is no longer an aporia to be deconstructed. Finally, this chapter examines Manovich’s definitions of new media as possible inspiration for grasping the current discourse change and its influence on the metaphysical setting of the new media semiotics.
Victoriographies
Faded Ink: The Material Trace of Handwriting in Neo-Victorian Fiction
2019 •
Kym Brindle
Neo-Victorian novelists reimagine handwritten documents to feed contemporary nostalgia for the materiality of handwriting. Handwriting signifies the personal and the private in ways that seem threatened in a digital age. Writers like Andrea Barrett, A. S. Byatt, and Peter Carey map material pathways to the nineteenth century with fictional characters who strive to possess the written past. Archival fantasies are simulated by novelists depicting writing processes and subsequent discovery and rereading of the handwritten trace by later generations. Imagined scenes of reading and writing describe tactile traces of handwriting that stage possession of the Victorian body in fragmented and partially recoverable states. Resurrection of the desired Victorian body through a metonymical relationship of hand/handwriting evokes a sense of a partial past recovered and experienced. Part of the aestheticism of the past relies on the aura of documents worn to a trace to evidence time and decay. Dis...
SIGNATA
Pragmatical Paradox of Signature
2018 •
Michaela Fiserova
What is a handwritten signature? Is it a reliable and recognizable trace of civil identity? Is it an authentic and singular work of art? As I’ll try to demonstrate, surprisingly, answers to both of these questions should be “yes.” In this paper, I will understand the handwritten signature as a metaphysical double bind: it is a juridically important civil sign, which is simultaneously considered to be a repeatable personal trace and an unrepeatable authorial work. More precisely, the handwritten signature is a conventional—but individually styled—picture of the writer’s civil name, which is created manually by the writer himself on a document it is meant for. However—and that’s what interests me the most—the handwritten signature isn’t just any name written by the name holder’s hand. As a reliably recognizable picture of the name, it should be created each time again with an efort to remain as visually close as possible to its “original” authorial version called specimen signature. Moreover, the handwritten signature is oten requested to be handwritten not only “similarly” but rather “equally” to the registered specimen signature. Especially in the juridical practice, it is believed that the citizen’s “identity” can be recognized thanks to the “equality” of his personal traces. In order to better understand this particular aspect of the handwritten signature, I propose to distinguish it from other handmade works which combine writing and drawing.
Diffraction, Handwriting and Intra- Mediality in Louise Paillé's Livres-livres
Kiene Brillenburg Wurth
I here use Karen Barad’s methodology of diffraction to think through the remove of literature, and how this removal affects, touches, reading. Diffraction is a particularly helpful tool to analyse hybrid works such as L’Œuvre au noir I where entangling and reading through has, so to speak, already been done for us. We can move ahead. Of course, entanglement is everywhere, but with Paille ́ we can see it happen before our eyes in the archaic writing in the second-hand books. Why this slow and archaic writing in the age of code, turbo-writing and speed-writing? It is a question that we may not be able to answer. Is Paille ́ ’s self- absorbed writing, closed in on itself and with only the impression of a trace of signifying left, part of a writing on the wall that we are in an age of transit that will take us into a universe of images? This is the transit that Vilem Flusser imagined in the 1980s and 1990s; the future of writing was in question. Yet even he recognized that we cannot write or move past writing. Indeed, the Italian philosopher Maurizio Ferraris has claimed not so long ago, the future is to the scribe. It is not that the future of writing is in question; in the age of the computer, writing has, precisely, exploded. It is everywhere.
Sonja Neef, José van Dijck, and Eric Ketelaar (eds.), Sign here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2006), pp. 183-195.
Writing on Archiving Machines
2006 •
Eric Ketelaar
Do the new archiving machines, Jacques Derrida asks, affect the essentials of what Freud demonstrated with the Mystic Pad? The Mystic Pad represented memory as the internal archivization of external perceptions. Archivization, however, produces as much as it records the event. This paper focuses on the ways in which handwriting on, in or with new archiving machines impresses archivization.
Writing on Archiving Machines in: Sonja Neef, José van Dijck, and Eric Ketelaar (eds.), Sign here! Handwriting in the Age of New Media (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2006) 183-195.
Eric Ketelaar
Do the new archiving machines, Jacques Derrida asks, affect the essentials of what Freud demonstrated with the Mystic Pad? The Mystic Pad represented memory as the internal archivization of external perceptions. Archivization, however, produces as much as it records the event. This paper focuses on the ways in which handwriting on, in or with new archiving machines impresses archivization.
''665 Making Prints with Light' Stephen Inggs’s exhibition catalogue, Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, Cape Town (p76-‐86) (ISBN 978-‐0-‐620-‐51872-‐7)
Traces of Presence
Virginia MacKenny
'Traces of Presence' examines the use of the trace/residue in the work of printmaker/photographer Stephen Inggs with a special emphasis on two works: '100 Years of Solitude I' and '100 Years of Solitude II' based on a diary found in the Karoo.
Hand-written journaling in the digital age
Dolly Garland
As digital technology has become a norm, and as social media has become a primary form of acquiring information (A study by the American Press Institute in 2015 found that 88% of Millennials get news from Facebook), people are increasingly shifting from the tactile experience of reading a physical book or writing by hand. In this paper, I investigate how the amalgamation of digital tools and technology can indeed aid, enhance, and even encourage the tactile experience of writing by hand, and impact the art and practice of journaling for personal development.
A JOURNAL OF WRITING, MEDIA, AND ECOLOGY A JOURNAL OF WRITING, MEDIA, AND ECOLOGY New Materialism and the Intimacy of Post-digital Handwriting
New Materialism and the Intimacy of Post-digital Handwriting
2020 •
Adam Wickberg
This essay analyzes three cases of the changing ontology and epistemic conditions of the practice of handwriting after digitization. It does so by developing a theory of post-digital handwriting, that is, writing on paper by hand which is then digitized as image and disseminated online. The theory draws on scholarship in media theory on the post-digital as well as insights from new materialism. The cases discussed are penmanship p*rn, bullet journaling, and the political signature, all phenomena which highlight the intimacy and singularity of handwriting as a physical and sensory practice reminiscent of the modern understanding of love letters.
