NYMA:
Mother Always Said
I visited the World Trade Center complex in New York City in August 2001. It is strange now—searching in my iPhoto library for images to accompany this work—to find the pictures of the Twin Towers, standing tall, as if the destruction never took place. In some ways, digital texts alleviate the deconstruction that Johnson-Eilola (1997) points to in the above quote; we can create a both/and space in hypertext in which the Twin Towers are both there and gone. The twinning of the space, the ambivalence, is disconcerting. Because it is difficult to follow multiple branching choices out to their natural ends—choices influence choices, change options—the both/and word is terrifying. It is easier to deal with a difficult known, often by merely putting it out of our minds, than it is to accept the duality.
“The visible deconstruction of writing in hypertext spaces might be even more terrifying that the psychic deconstruction of print texts.” (Johndan Johnson-Eilola, 1997, p. 148)
Monday, February 22, 2010
Deconstruction
