The media materiality as a “dance of agency” – Performing Literary Text with Substances

Shelley Jackson’s Snow does not easily conform to established literary categories or interpretative strategies – words written on snow are evanescent and fragile, vanishing as soon as the surface on which they had been inscribed melts away. The text in progress is offered to the audience only as the documentation of the artist’s own acts of inscription, made available through the accounts on Flickr and Instagram dedicated to the project. Additionally, reading the story in a traditional way on Instagram is possible only in reverse order of the photostream. In my presentation I would like to broaden the notion of a literary text taking into consideration the very materiality of this project’s affordances – especially the specificity of the inscription surface, evoked to the audience with photos regularly uploaded to Instagram (which itself can be seen as a domain of fluidity with its constantly changing visual stream). What I am particularly interested in is the specific mode of meaning distribution – in this case performed between the evaporating substance, photographic documentation and networked media.

(Source: Author's Abstract, ICDMT 2016)