Our recent explorations in class of the “Oulipoems” and the list of the some-thousand most frequently used words reminded me of the Dadaist movement of the early twentieth century and their emphasis on “non-sensical” art. The art of the Dadaists meant nothing, and everything at the same time. It was a response to the senselessness of World War I, and their seemingly “meaningless” art was designed to capture the irrational chaos that war projected on society.\u00a0<\/p>\n
One of the techniques of the Dadaists was to use found objects in their work. Artists removed ubiquitous objects from their utilitarian context and transformed them so as to place them in an aesthetic light, in effect, modifying the public’s perception of these everyday “cultural artifacts”. The effect of “context” and “subjective perspective” on art is mirrored in the aforementioned media texts. If one reads the series of most frequently used words in the context of its statistics, the list simply appears to be just that – a long list of numerical statistics accompanied by words. However, if one views the list in the context of a piece of electronic literature, some of the various word associations that one discovers at random begin to make sense. This, of course, relies on how one interprets the information provided to them.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This is a perfect example of Hayles’ theory on the relationship between the machine and the body that we just discussed in our second media inquiry (or at least how I interpreted this interface between mind and machine). The collective network of the machine provides the user with this list, but it is ultimately up to the mind of the viewer to make sense and find meaning in the information provided to them on the screen. Without this interaction, the list is (once again) just a list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our recent explorations in class of the “Oulipoems” and the list of the some-thousand most frequently used words reminded me of the Dadaist movement of the early twentieth century and their emphasis on “non-sensical” art. The art of the Dadaists meant nothing, and everything at the same time. It was a response to the senselessness … Continue reading “Found Art” in Literature: A Brief Thought<\/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":[],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","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=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":684,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions\/684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.samplereality.com\/gmu\/fall2008\/343\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}