Daten, Atmosphären, Texte – Künstlerische Erfahrungsräume und Virtualisierungen des Literarischen
Authors: Urban Annette 
Published: July 2023

This article deals with contemporary interweavings of literature and visual art. It asks to what extent they include their own form of mediation of the literary and can be relevant in terms of literary theory. This is prompted by the currently diagnosed migration towards ›Literature’s Elsewheres‹ (Annette Gilbert), which, within the omnipresent digital culture, leads away from its traditional media and places. As one of these refuges, the art museum has already come into focus. In addition to being a shelter, it also promises to be a site of reinvention for literature because it offers different modes of presentation, display structures, and modes of experience. Nevertheless, while the literariness of media art has already been explored (Claudia Benthien et al.), less consideration has been given to the spatializing means of exhibition display and, in particular, art installation. Particularly revealing are those examples that attempt to connect the museum and the digital elsewhere of literary writing. For this second site of transformation is usually considered as part of the mass-practiced digital reading-writing culture, so that bridges to the visual arts emerge primarily through related conceptual approaches of appropriation rather than through the specific experiential framework of the art context.

As a starting point, therefore, serve theses on the writing of contemporary artists understood as a practice of appropriation that increasingly involves publication gestures and mediation performances (Stefan Römer). Thus, artistic appropriations of literature and poeticized theory can be brought into view, which are performed in physical as well as virtual spaces and, for this purpose, are subjected to a process of datafication as two selected works of contemporary art show. In addition, the concept of atmospheres anchored in recent aesthetics, literary and media theory proves helpful in approaching such examples. For as »spheres of sensed bodily presence« (Gernot Böhme), they imply a mediation-relevant concept of aesthetic experience that privileges body-bound presence over hermeneutics and also open up a different reality of literature (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht). At the same time, as a concept linked back to space it enables an expanded understanding of space/body/object ensembles and can be intertwined with theories of atmospheric media including their immersive environments (Tim Othold).

On this basis, the first main part of the article explores the tendencies towards conceptualization, spatialization, and the performative, which are particularly at work in the intermediation of literature and the visual arts. A common point of reference here is the conceptual as uncreative writing of Kenneth Goldsmith, which shows distinctive publication performances and uses of the physical space of art exhibitions. In order to further ground forms of the spatial-installative exhibition of literature in literary theory, recourse is made to Roman Jakobson’s reflections on meaning in poetic language, which is evoked by the very positionality of words and the equivalences they evoke (Heike Gfrereis). Furthermore, it is necessary to briefly define the relationship between literature and visual art in the sign of the digital, which still favors their entanglement due to the detachment from the printed text. The paragons proclaimed by Goldsmith, which aim at a competition in terms of avant-gardism as well as digital-cultural contemporaneity, only seem informative because they promote an equation of writing, reading, and theorizing and thus imply a circular but also quite closed model of mediation among writers as readers and critics of themselves. Beyond this, the premises of fluid boundaries between the arts and of an»interdisciplinary and audio-visual method of language work« (Catherine Bergvall) are more profitable for analyzing reciprocal mediations, going back to Katherine N. Hayles and her early genre-spanning definition of digital art with the core characteristic of the literary instead of textuality. Regardless of the now multimodal research agenda (Thorsten Ries) and the conceptualization of digital literature/art as ›speech before our eyes‹ that focuses on an embodied literary experience (Brooke Belisle), however, screen-based images often remain in the foreground.

Concerning the spatialized-environmental entanglements of art and literature, the theorization of the ›text as event‹ provides some more clues. Following reflections on the digital poem (Katherine N. Hayles), it has been further developed for the sublinguistic calm technologies of ubiquitous computing (Roberto Simanowski). While the resulting ›culture of presence‹ is seen as a-semantization, the two artworks by Pierre Huyghe and Jazmina Figueroa in the second main part give rise to discuss whether these antagonisms must be maintained. Selected for this purpose are Huyghe’s exhibition, which transfers Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket into a so-called musical staged on the three floors of the Bregenz Kunsthaus, and, a lecture performance that Figueroa conceived for the virtual replica of an exhibition space at the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) Karlsruhe. The two artworks can be examined as paradigmatic surrounding textual atmospheres, each of which performs its own specific virtualization of the literary. In Huyghe’s case, his exhibition presents an already datafied but largely pre-digital artistic staging of a classic of world literature literally condensed into artificial weather events. Figueora, in turn, transfers such a score into a VR environment, where it allows for an individually navigable listening experience of her spatialized spoken words, which present a motivically condensed, poeticized appropriation of theoretical fragments and mythological themes. In conclusion, these exemplary artistic fusions of the museum and digital elsewhere of literature are considered regarding their forms of storage and temporality, which enable a re-experiencing of texts as atmospheric presence-events.