Lecture Five (Un) Weaving

These notes appear on one slide of this weeks lectures. Here with them them I present my qualms with Twelve Blue" by Michael Joyce.

"The artists of the avant-garde believe that their practices are revolutionary. They have the potential to generate real world freedoms for the viewer/reader (active and produces meanings)"

And,

"They also believe their practises have the prospect of revitalizing art itself, and changing it from something that is ornamental and decorative and not essential in our lives to something woven tightly into the fabric of our everyday lives."

I don't think that "Twelve Blue" has any sway in generating real world freedoms for the reader, nor do I believe it would ever come to mean something that is essential in our lives. I am trying to wrap my head around why it has come to be something so prolific- why people write about it or discuss it. I can understand that maybe it is a little out of my grasp because I am 21 years old and have really been worked over by technology, hyperlinks are nothing new to me now. But even keeping that in mind, the story still seems vacant.

What I question is whether hyperlinks express anything in the story effectively or if they are just distracting and thrown in because Joyce realized it was possible to do so. Maybe it reflects how we construct narratives for ourselves, much of the story seems like a reflective inner dialogue of the narrator to me, but I don't think it does much aside from sensationalize literature on the internet.

In fact, I think if Anne Everret were to look at this (and y'know, Anne and I aren't really close so I don't assume to KNOW but I GUESS) she would say that part of the satisfaction or curiosity of this story has to do with simply the 'clicking' aspect of it. We would get off on clicking on the hyperlinks, and would enjoy the story for that reason. It gives off a false sense of agency over where the story is going. Novelty is found in the click, and merit is void from the telling? Am I just being too hard on digitality again?

I think it's less effective than avante-garde forms that came before it. "Twelve Blue" also has a ton to contend with, though. There is an overload of different art forms trying to be avante-garde these days on and off of the internet. There's conceptual art, anti-conceptual art, digital art, traditional art, new literature, and so on. I think hypertexts have potential but are only just starting.

Viva la Revolution!