&Now 2019 Conference

How can visual texts offer alternate forms of meaning-making and collective living? Three panelists discuss the effects of image consumption on our digital and material realities.

Austin Brady and Daniel Uncapher’s “IMAGE/TEXT//INTER/NET: The Content-Soaked Memes of Production” explores some of the creative possibilities of Instagram-oriented imagetext poetry and the procedural elements of content aggregation, condensation, and co-creation. They combine centuries of experimental techniques—like erasure, cut-up, assemblage, meme play, and more—to their imagetexts, along with the visual and textual content of private and digital lives, to rapidly reorient traditional ideas of engagement, accessibility, connectivity, interactivity, and community in the ever-mutating space of the internet.

Nico Vassilakis’ “Reading Seeing and the Letter” asks: What are we looking at when we’re looking at what we’re looking at? The only material is Seen. Only the material is Seen. Seen, unseen, what an eye might see. Two e's, two e's, s_ _n to be. The eye will track. The orb will float till it finds its oar and focused boat. Seeing the former left behind, a past tense of alphabets touching aqueous humor. A sequence comprised entirely of having seen and seeing it too. Letters seek liberty from word supremacy. Will detach from word and roam the page. Will find new designs to thwart their word captor. Will unhinge entirely and emerge alongside natural formations. Only then. Will the letters offer to return, to reconvene. Will reassemble. Will re enter the word template. Will be poured into WORD meaning, the slots of which letters attend.