[ISEA2011] Panel: Elif Ayiter (moderator) – La Plissure du Texte

Panel Statement

Chair Per­son: Elif Ayiter
Pre­sen­ters: Roy As­cott, Jan Baetens, Elif Ayiter, Max Moswitzer & Selavy Oh

Roy As­cott’s ground­break­ing new media art work La Plis­sure du Texte (“The Pleat­ing of the Text”) was cre­ated in 1983 and shown in Paris at the Musée de l’Art mod­erne de la Ville de Paris dur­ing that same year. The title of the pro­ject, “La Plis­sure du Texte: A Plan­e­tary Fairy Tale,” al­ludes to Roland Barthes’s book “Le Plaisir du Texte”, a fa­mous dis­course on au­thor­ship, se­man­tic lay­er­ing, and the cre­ative role of the reader as the writer of the text. In 2010, La Plis­sure du Texte re-in­car­nated as a three di­men­sional, in­ter­ac­tive ar­chi­tec­ture cre­ated in the meta­verse and was pro­jected into Real Life in Seoul, Korea dur­ing the INDAF new media art fes­ti­val held at To­mor­row City, Songdo, In­cheon, through­out Sep­tem­ber 2010. Fol­low­ing As­cott’s orig­i­nal premise of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, the fairy tale is now being told by a text dri­ven ar­chi­tec­ture within which a pop­u­la­tion of ro­botic avatars tells the tale through end­lessly gen­er­ated con­ver­sa­tions which are har­vested from the On­line Guten­berg Pro­ject. Ad­di­tion­ally, vis­i­tors to the ex­hibit in the phys­i­cal realm may also con­tribute to the gen­er­ated text flow through SMS mes­sages or via Twit­ter. Thus all pleated text – the gen­er­ated, the con­tributed, and the stored – is si­mul­ta­ne­ously vis­i­ble as a mas­sive, ever evolv­ing lit­er­ary con­glom­er­a­tion. This panel will un­der­take a close scrutiny of La Plis­sure du Texte, tak­ing into ac­count both its cre­ation in 1983 and its re-cre­ation in 2010, dis­cussing the work in its role as a land­mark of New Media Art His­tory as well as an art work which has shown the ca­pa­bil­ity of re­gen­er­at­ing it­self as an en­tirely novel man­i­fes­ta­tion based upon the con­cepts of dis­trib­uted au­thor­ship, tex­tual mo­bil­ity, emer­gent semi­o­sis, mul­ti­ple iden­tity, and par­tic­i­pa­tory poe­sis.

  • Elif Ayiter is a de­signer and a re­searcher, teach­ing at Sa­banci Uni­ver­sity, Is­tan­bul, Turkey. Her texts have been pub­lished at aca­d­e­mic jour­nals such as the Jour­nal of Con­scious­ness Stud­ies and Tech­noetic Arts. She has pre­sented cre­ative as well as re­search out­put at con­fer­ences in­clud­ing Sig­graph, Cre­ativ­ity and Cog­ni­tion, Com­pu­ta­tional Aes­thet­ics and Cy­ber­worlds. She is also the chief ed­i­tor of the jour­nal Meta­verse Cre­ativ­ity with In­tel­lect Jour­nals, UK and is cur­rently study­ing for a doc­toral de­gree at the Plan­e­tary Col­legium, CAiiA hub, at the Uni­ver­sity of Ply­mouth with Roy As­cott.