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ABSTRACT Media art theorizes itself in terms of the production of boundary objects and the intermedial zones that they create. In a similar vein, but from a critical perspective, communication studies concerns itself with intermedial border zones as sites of transition and reversal To what extent, if any, do the intermedial encounters of avowedly interdisciplinary, but relatively stable /ields ike media art and communication studies, staged through the boundary objects of media art, actually change the way that the fields themselves go about their daily business? What would it mean for communication studies to take contemporary experimental media poetics seriously? This article focuses on Christian Bòk's Xenotext Experiment as a site for working through these questions.
KEYWORDS Biomedia; Poetics; Xenotext Experiment; Christian Bofe; Marshall McLuhan
RÉSUMÉ Les arts médiatiques se conçoivent en fonction de la production d'objets limites ainsi que des zones intermédiatiques découlant de cette production. D'une manière semblable bien que critique, les études en communication portent sur les zones intermédiatiques en tant que sites de transition et de renversement Dans quelle mesure les rencontres intermédiatiques de domaines interdisciplinaires mais relativement stables comme les arts médiatiques et les études en communication, vues sous l'angle des objets limites des arts médiatiques, changent-elles réellement la manière dont les domaines évoluent au quotithen? Que signifierait-il pour les études en communication de prendre au sérieux la poétique médiatique expérimentale contemporaine? Cet article évalue le Xenotext Experiment de Christian Bòk en tant que site pour résoudre ces questions.
MOTS CLÉS Biomédias; Poétique; Xenotext Experiment; Christian Bòk; Marshall McLuhan
Since Sputnik there is no nature. Nature is an item contained in a manmade environment of satellites and information. Goals have now to be replaced by the sensory reprogramming of total environments and DNA particles, alike.
- Marshall McLuhan (1970, p. 330)
Media art theorizes itself in terms of the production of boundary objects and the intermedial zones that they create. This has been true at least since Dick Higgins' classic "Intermedia" manifesto of 1965 (revised in 1981 and reprinted in 2001) - but arguably much earUer - where he argued that Samuel Taylor Coleridge uses the term "Ui exactly its contemporary sense" (p. 52) in 1812. Higgins describes media art not Ui terms of the objects that faU "between...