Discovering Digital Dimensions at C&W 2003*
David Blakesley
Purdue University
I
closed my opening remarks at Computers
and Writing 2003, hosted at Purdue from May 22-25, 2003, by expressing
a sentiment I'm sure many of us felt, though few might have put it
in exactly these terms (probably because the effects of Snow
Crash or Baudrillard had worn off):
And now, to rabble and rouse with you in the parlor, why, it’s enough to cause a meatware crash in the hardscape of the real. o-:
There were no meatware crashes to speak of in West Lafayette that long weekend, but the hardscape of the real was enlivened by some dazzling work in multimedia by teachers and writers, showing us both the challenges and the great opportunities that digitality presents to us. Only some of that work is represented in this Kairos CoverWeb, but it is significant work, not simply because of what it says, but because of how it says it. If we've discovered one thing lately, it may be that, as information architects are quick to point out, organization and design in digital dimensions is at least as important as content. Rather than prophesy the doom of Western civilization, I think that attention to mediation itself--mediation as interface--is long overdue, and the work we're now witnessing--work like that of Madeleine Sorapure and Victor Vitanza in this Coverweb--bears out that in focusing attention on the interface (interFACE, or inter<wink>FACE</wink>, as vv might have me say) we do not sacrifice depth for gloss. In the multiple media of digital dimensions, there is often quite a lot more there than meets the eye. I want to discuss this possibility a bit as I focus on the work of these two featured authors who presented their work at C&W 2003: Madeleine Sorapure ("Five Principles of New Media: Or, Playing Lev Manovich") and Victor Vitanza ("Year Zero: Faciality": Redux ...!). Along the way, I will mention some of the other innovations in multimedia in digital dimensions that sprang forth, including Computers in the Movies, the film created by Christopher Berry, available here for the first time (more on that in Node 3), Bob Stein's rousing demonstration of TK3 Author, and the short marathon that became Digital Publishing F5 | Refreshed.
* I want to thank the editors of Kairos for continuing to do so much to advance the scholarship in our field and to support the Computers and Writing conference. I also want to thank my co-editor of this Coverweb, Michael Kapper, for his help in reading and responding to submissions, for always urging reflective and integrative use of multimedia, and for the fine example of his work, most recently seen "Mixing Media: Textual, Oral, and Visual Literacies (and then some) in Teaching PowerPoint" in Computers and Composition (Fall 2003).