E-Art: Fragmentation and Assembling

What constitutes the distinctive aspects of digital art? In what manner is art (created by the possibilities offered by electronic writing) either breaking away from or innovating upon the previous artistic tradition? The search for an answer to these questions leads us to circumscribe five traits, many of which are common to more recent artistic traditions. These are, in order: reflections on language, the thematisation of the act of production, the conceptual value of the work, art in a place beyond its reproducibility and the consequent value of its uniqueness, but above all, the work as a fragmented assemblage.

“Self Portrait (s) [as Other (s)]” by Talan Memmott, published in the first volume of the Electronic Literature Collection, summarizes and provides a case study, and in many ways it is exemplary of these traits.