4

Simon Mills: How do you feel about the suspicion that hypertext and New Media art are superficial? Robert Coover once wrote, "The constant threat of hypermedia: to suck the substance out of a work of lettered art, reduce it to surface spectacle."

Christy Sheffield Sanford: Nervous. Stomach tightening. For me, the quote has a fear-inspiring patriarchal flavor. Literature in danger. People are suckered into creating an out-group. Phrase from childhood: Don't make a spectacle of yourself!

Artists should lead to their strengths. "Lettered Arts" can't be pasted onto a movie, TV or computer screen. No amount of choices/paths will solve the problem of presenting text on a monitor. The computer is a medium for image, text, motion—features of its uniqueness.

4c

"Spectacle" often identifies whatever the critic feels uncomfortable with at the moment: something too big, too bright, too hyper—too much. The out-group can stretch from author Virginia Woolf (Orlando) to painter Cecily Brown or, could it be, noooo, yikes, me.

I'm uneasy when I sense the unspoken dress code is black. I mean, without fishnet, sequins or leather. In the U.S., we have a puritanical strain that seeps out in various ways. Goody Proctor.

4b

The "spectacle" complaint has been lodged in all the arts. Years ago in theatre, anyone who wanted to use costumes, lights, sets: impure. Barebones was de rigueur. Think Beckett. Imagine cinema, how bleak without Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books, Jane Campion's Piano, Julie Taymor's Frida. It's one thing to say, I have this aesthetic; it's another to say walk-like-me.

English professors protect the canon and canonical values. True, cogent characteristics of a discipline are important. What is poetry? What is fiction? In Lectures in America, Gertrude Stein clearly expressed some of these distinctions. For a new medium, we need the creation of new forms with new aesthetics. Not just one, however.

4d

Some of the most glamorous ocean spots stretch fathoms under the surface. Put on your diving suit and jump in. Austerity doesn't guarantee depth. Nor does purity. People are afraid of seduction by beauty. I'm fearful of spinelessness, sterility, fascism. Lack of tension, death. One of my fathers is Baudelaire.

There is a certain excitement in cutting a path through the jungle. The occasional loss of control as the machete strikes an orchid is inevitable. Oh, Pioneer. But literature will stand its own, recover and push forward. Real letters have duende.

Some academic disciplines encourage taste-makers and followers. This is not to be confused with art. Look at those coteries so engrossed in tree diagrams they almost missed the elegant show hide scripts with those silky mouse overs that allow text to unfold in gorgeous patterns.

Rather than an illustrative role for art and graphics, I think power resides in expressions of substance that act as counterpoint or add tangential, oblique, complementary vectors. And the reverse is true: literature should not merely gloss the image. Each art should maintain its own integrity.