Unconventional Writing

Every once in a while I become overbearingly overwhelmed about the idea of writing as anything: architecture, multimedia, photography, etc – and this clip from Portlandia about Unconventional Art projects kind of sums up my feelings of anxiety when it comes to reading these articles about how computers have changed our assertions of what a “text” is.

I love this clip, not only because it’s hilarious but because it illustrates how text (and also, rhetoric) is everywhere and persuades our thinking and our actions in various ways. It gets me thinking about Wysocki’s remark, “The visual elements and arrangements of a text perform persuasive work” (124). (What he might lack in his point thus far is that not only do visual arrangements perform persuasive work, but so do elements of audio, perception, and time do work as well, which he gets to later in the article) The Portlandia clip also reveals that all of these different elements depend on each other, which not only shows their intertextuality and their multimodality, but that meaning is lost or changed when any of these elements live or are emphasized in different ways. It is also up to the audience to make meaning out of the elements, and they have various pressures associated with perception on their own end. 

The clip also does a good job at broadly defining what art is – which we can expand to say what writing is – and that ultimately it’s not really constrained by anything, other than the experience of the relationship between author, audience, and subject, and what the audience says is okay to be writing and/or art. The humor of the clip works to show us this relationship when the normative concepts of "art" become pushed too far, such as when Carrie's mom says that Carrie herself is an art project - which could be totally legitimate for some radical artists, but ultimately the census quo doesn't let that one count.

The most interesting idea to me now, after reading through the articles for class, is how one experiences reading – judged by different formats and media types. Johnson-Eilola’s article really kind of opened up that concept for me. Especially with the notion of intertextuality helping to form new meanings, but the hybridity and hypertextualization of texts working to break it apart, that “the very interconnected nature of texts holds them apart” (200). They are both dependent but interdependent. That’s some sort of crazy paradoxical spacey-wacey, timey-wimey sort of stuff going on there, in a postmodern kind of way, too.

The computer and its ways become both empowering and illusive; we can more easily create meaning and link thousands of supporting ideas or counter-arguments to our webpages, but as we allow our readers to experience those different webpages and arguments it changes the way they view our own argument, maybe in ways we didn’t intend. That’s why crafting on the computer and on the Internet becomes so much more difficult, because we can no longer control the reader’s perception based solely on the fact that we know our article will appear in this setting with these certain constraints – OR it becomes more controlled in exactly the right ways, if we constrain it (but now there is so much more to constrain and so much more that we can’t control off the bat).