Splatter Semiotics / Semiotics of Splatter
The paper would be a presentation, with video, on the subject of Splatter Semiotics, and The Semiotics of Splatter, which is concerned with 'messy' digital lit / digital literacy. It will discuss Trump's tweets, Russian hacking, blockchain, and disruptive technologies which possess 'spread' as, not only a form of digital literature, but also a new and dangerous cultural horizon, one that threatens the very foundations of democratic institutions. This work stems out of my thinking about 'gamespace / edgespace / blankspace' that I've presented at other conferences (including ELO); the three terms reference gaming and habitus as forms of political, social, and artistic thinking; I would include a summary of this work and indicate its relationship and dissolution in splatter.
('Gamespace' is defined as a rule-governed domain; the term applies to anything from a chessboard to a school community. 'Edgespace' is the borderlands of the gamespace; it's always problematic, and might exist within competing regimes. In the motion capture work I've done, edgespace references the boundaries of the architecture for capture, and what happens at the boundaries appears to 'break' the capture representation. 'Blankspace' then indicates how edgespace is 'filled in,' how the imaginary operates there. I use the terms in considerations of Arctic and Antarctic mappings, virtual worlds, and so forth. Finally, the semiotics of splatter considers splatter as world-breaking and fast-forward tendencies towards mobile boundary closures; this leads to splatter semiotics, where the terms form a field that remains always already ruptured. This is the semiosis of the overloaded or hacked network, the network of fake news and fake apps, the explosive and turbulent behavior of the mediasphere itself.
I see this field as a form of politicized digital literature, where words lose meaning, become puncta (Barthes) or tokens, where language splays. The talk will be laptop-dependent; the concepts are easiest to grasp through text-imagery, which will include maps, tweets, word grids, virtual-world video, and so forth.
