<\/p>\n
In the early twentieth century, a group of artists in Zurich, Switzerland created an art movement by the name of \u201cDada\u201d that utilized non-sensical imagery to communicate deeply textural and evocative concepts to a devastated and war-torn society. An admirer of this particular movement, I was initially intrigued by the \u201cHegirascope\u201d. The mere chaos of it resembled the Dada ideology: because nothing in the world makes sense, neither will the art that attempts to reflect it. However if one pursues a further study of Dadaist pieces, they will find that many of the artistic works have a politically charged undertone to their near unrecognizable form. Therefore, members of the Dada sect did rely on some sort of representational meaning in order to portray an intensely evocative theory on the state of the world after World War I. When I think of \u201cHegirascope\u201d in these terms, it suddenly doesn\u2019t fit in at all. Although it can be argued that each segment is somewhat representational, the entire piece functions as a disjointed, abstract draft containing a vast variety of miniature plots that dream of assembling into an extended narrative.<\/p>\n
Upon closer examination, the \u201cHegirascope\u201d functioned as a sort of stream of consciousness. At each screen we abandon the center text when we wander to a particular link that had succeeded in distracting us from the central text. In an interesting comparison, Ryan says the text gave her the \u201cimpression of a loose collection of drafts and writing samples\u201d. Like Ryan, I imagined that if we were able to break open the mind of a creative writer, the many textual fragments of \u201cHegirascope\u201d would be what we would find. Each screen contained a cohesive idea, however before one could completely articulate that idea-the screen changed and a new thought was presented. To me, the web engine was a writer\u2019s worst nightmare: capturing a moment to later build on only to lose it to another incoming idea. The \u201cHegirascope\u201d acted as a controller, choosing when its thoughts were finished and moving onto the next (even if its reader was not ready for the shift).<\/p>\n
In class we discussed Marie-Laure Ryan\u2019s interpretative strategies for reading new media texts. Within her framework, I would probably describe \u201cHegirascope\u201d dually as a \u201ckaleidoscopic performance\u201d piece. The \u201cstories\u201d the \u201cHegirascope\u201d constructs are all made from the same fragments; however, with each new refraction the evocative meaning of the piece changes and a new narrative mosaic is created.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the early twentieth century, a group of artists in Zurich, Switzerland created an art movement by the name of \u201cDada\u201d that utilized non-sensical imagery to communicate deeply textural and evocative concepts to a devastated and war-torn society. An admirer of this particular movement, I was initially intrigued by the \u201cHegirascope\u201d. The mere chaos of … Continue reading “Hegirascope”: Blog #2<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":19,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[27,10,28,12,5,11],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-engine","tag-evocative","tag-hegirascope","tag-meaning","tag-narrative","tag-representational"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/19"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}