THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 

(presented in part on South-East TV)

“In the windswept stairways of the Eiffel Tower, or, better still, in the steel supports of a Pont Transbordeur, one meets with the fundamental aesthetic experience of present-day architecture: through the thin net of iron that hangs suspended in the air, things stream—ships, ocean, houses, masts, landscape, harbor. They lose their distinctive shape, swirl into one another as we climb downward, merge simultaneously.” Sigfried Giedion, Bauen in Frankriech. . . In the same way, the historian today has only to erect a slender but sturdy scaffolding—a philosophic structure—in order to draw the most vital aspects of the past into his net.” 
-Walter Benjamin

This project draws heavily on the work of writer Walter Benjamin, a German-Jewish theorist and philosopher of the early 20th century, who spent his life investigating and experimenting with the way writers use technology to restructure their work and thereby make new ways of reading possible. Now, more than seventy years after his failed attempt to escape Nazi persecution, the scope of his vision is beginning to take form, as the tools and canvases writers use evolve and change. In what follows, some of his primary themes and practices are briefly summarized.

Walter Benjamin. (Photo found on 

http://thefrailestthing.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/walter-benjamin.jpg)

Walter Benjamin

Drawing on literature, Jewish mysticism, historical materialism and the evolving art of photography, Benjamin wrote innumerable volumes exploring the manner in which artists and writers have recorded the poetry of daily life. His greatest work, The Arcades Project, is a multimedia collection that examines the architectural phenomenon of the Parisian arcades and its relevance to philosophy, literature, and economics as an emblem of modern consciousness. Within these passages, Benjamin located the character of the flâneur, a reader of the increasingly complex texts created by consumerism.

"Industry and utility are the angels of death who, with fiery swords, prevent man's return to Paradise. . . . And in all parts of the world, it is the right to idleness that distinguishes the superior from the inferior classes. It is the intrinsic principle of aristocracy."

Henri Fantin-Latour's "Portrait of Edouard Manet," completed in 1867. Manet's work is often associated with the flaneur.

The Flâneur

Flâneur is the name given to the wealthy educated men who wandered the arcades during the nineteenth century, reading the surrounding scenes like texts designed for their own amusement. He was the shopper with no intention to buy, though with plenty of money to spare; thus overcoming his kind of aloofness forced the world of advertisement to cross-over into the world of literature and art. Wealthy, educated, and without need of a job, the flâneur was removed from the economic hardships of life. His greatest enemy was boredom. He strolled the arcades in search of novelty—the kind of art that occurs by chance—scrutinizing the fashions of the day, the menus, shop windows, and wares for sale as texts to be read in moments of idleness.

Though long a creature of the past, there is something of his attitude that remains when we read online: transient, aloof, and comfortably seated in the first world, we observe the lives of others at an optic distance.

Photo found at 

http://www.blogonlyapartments.com/wp_images/galerie-vivienne-paris.jpg

The Arcades

Made possible by 19th-century advances in iron and glass construction, one that parallels in its effects the invisible enclosures through which we wander in hyperspace today, the arcades were not the result of city planning but instead emerged as improvised structures as capitalism began to take root. Merchants banded together and commissioned their construction in hopes of using the shelter they offered to lure customers off the boulevards in times of bad weather. As constructed worlds, these passages offered their dwellers an experience that was both aesthetic and commercial. Storefront windows became artistic installations and advertisements became works of art.

Cover of the 1999 English edition of The Arcades Project

The Arcades Project

While a few of his writings emerged on the intellectual scene in 1968, The Arcades Project was not to assume bound book-form until its publication in 1982 (English version, 1999). It is a work of scholarship that more resembles a stack of file folders a collector of textual artifacts might pull from a filing cabinet than a book.

Here, Benjamin approaches the task of reading not as a critic who reduces and interprets the texts he reads so that he might fit them into a well-wrought argument for whatever purpose, but as an exploration—an investigation—that serves as an end in itself. It is a way of looking at research and scholarship that is on the rise as our technologies of writing evolve to accommodate such a process.

"The Tyger" by WIlliam Blake. (Image found at http://www.nimbi.com/copyright/william_blake_the_tyger.jpg)

The Author as Aesthetic Engineer

Much like poet and artist William Blake used etching as part of his writing process to create poems that present language and image as a single unit, Benjamin reconfigured scholarship to better represent the experience of the modern reader. Such an innovation in the writing process speaks to the concurrent roles writers play today as researchers, storytellers, and textual engineers, not simply supplying publishers with content, but instead, self-consciously modifying the way their readers inhabit and engage that content, whether through the text itself or the way it is delivered to the reader. This artistic installation is intended to explore the idea of reading as an immersive experience, one that is likely to become increasingly transparent as technologies of writing evolve.

THEORY SLIDESHOW