Seventeenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

Media designers, artists, and writers closely working with media technologies have been utilizing meta-creation when planning and devising their mostly interactive events. Metatextuality, the focus of the workshop, is based on a specific form of creative expression exercised through a multi-phasic authorial process. The first text which explicitly used combinatory principles was the I-Ching, with its binary-based language. The Cabbalists would follow, proposing letter-based reinterpretations of sacred texts. The Christian philosopher Ramon Lull, in the 13th century, construct a series of concentric movable wheels, the first sentence machines. Lull was read by Giordano Bruno and both were read by Leibniz, inspiring his dissertation on “Ars Combinatoria”. The procedures of Mallarmé, Lewis Carrol, James Joyce, the French OULIPO, or William Burroughs can trace a literary history of ‘Ars Combinatoria’. Kandinsky and Klee have developed generative processes for their creative and teaching strategies. The pedagogical notebooks of Paul Klee were based upon combinatory principles. Recently, those historical procedures have been reconceived and have led to the emergence of the computer as a semiotic machine able to recombine signs through mathematics and language algorithms. The main historical, theoretical, methodological concepts regarding a Metatextuality theory will be transmitted through a series of illustrated lectures. Participants are then be instructed to create their version of a generative process making them visible and readable through a series of successive diagrams. They also collaborate and simulate responses to their peers’ projects, thus performing both as inter-designers and co-authors in media design, as well, as in actualizations.

Presenters

Artur Matuck
Associate Tenured Professor, Graduate Program in Humanities and Law, at School of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences of the University of São Paulo, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil

Jeane Cooper
Faculty, Visual Arts, University of North Georgia, United States