> media history
> media materiality
> contemporary literature, art, and media
> interfaces and interaction
This project proposes intermediality (the study of relations among media forms and genres) as an analytical framework for understanding how media content, form, and materiality shifted from the late 18th Century to the early 21st Century. Spanning print, photography, cinema, and digital media, I focus on the collaboration of older and newer media in today’s cultural imagination and practice.
Particular emphasis is placed on the illusion of media immateriality as a fundamental and contiguous condition of contemporary representation. I examine cultural texts—novels, art works, film—that reflect a condition of the body done away, especially material media such as books. To be clear: the body done away does not mean that we no longer need nor want books. It means that in the privileging of information over bodies, information is no longer exclusively or even primarily found in books.
OUTPUT
Journal article: Fan, Lai-Tze. “Material Matters in Digital Representation: Tree of Codes as a Literature of Disembodiment.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal vol. 51, no. 1, 2018, pp. 37-53.
Journal article: Fan, Lai-Tze. “Writing while Wandering: Material and Spatial Contingency in Locative Media Narratives.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies vol. 23, no. 1, 2017, pp. 5-19. Special Issue: “Writing Digital: Practice, Performance, Theory.”
