Editorial [PDF]
Christine Caruana, Elsa Fiott: University of Malta
“On not writing ourselves out of the picture…”: An Interview with Stefan Herbrechter [PDF]
The antae Editorial Board: University of Malta
Trespassing the Boundaries of Flesh: Exploring wounded embodiment through artistic practice [PDF]
Pamela Baldacchino: University of Malta
The aim of this article is the contemplation of the mineness-otherness relation of being triggered by the onset of serious and chronic illness. The phenomenological theories of Frederick Svenaeus and Martin Heidegger bring to light a form of otherness (alienation) experienced with illness and allow one to question the boundaries of flesh in relation to homelessness and exile. My study is directed towards analysing this experience and finding ways of overcoming such boundaries in an effort to reach out for the suffering other through the process of empathy. The conceptual framework lies embedded in the process of reflection, relation and revelation by which the ill person encounters the self and seeks to reveal new meaning in life. Considering the body in illness as being in a state of internal war, an audio-visual tool called ‘Sanctuary’ was designed to serve the ill person’s narrative. As a mobile space that can be consumed in wards or clinics, it presents a bunker experience which magnifies one’s presence and places one’s whole body in the context of a solitary shelter whilst being assailed. The tool allows the viewer to look out onto digital artwork created as a metaphor of the self.
Enc0d1ng Poetry [PDF]
Clara Chetcuti: University of Malta
So-called “poetry in code” mounts a doubled claim to electronic-ness and literariness, and can be dubbed “literary” precisely due to its coded nature. It would seem, then, that code requires at least as much critical consideration as the linguistic and rhetorical devices normally employed in print literature. Insofar as a legitimate codework employs code at the scripting level as a language-generator and -animator, and at the surface level as either executable or non-executable programming, to what extent can E. E. Cummings’s I Will Be (1925) be considered a poem in code? What can be inferred from a comparison between this would-be proto-codework and a canonical digital poem such as Brian Kim Stefans’s The Dreamlife of Letters (2000)? What is it that makes Cummings’ poem a potentially more remarkable codework than Stefans’s? Is it the precociousness of his coded address, or is it the fact that he anticipates the links which N. Katherine Hayles makes between code and liminal somatic states in her essay ‘Traumas of Code’ (2006)?
Relative Authenticity: Abstraction and the Digital Domain [PDF]
Nigel Baldacchino: Independent Researcher
This article intends to offer a preliminary investigation of what will be referred to as the notion of ‘abstraction’ in relation to Sigmund Freud’s ideas of ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’, together with Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of signification. Abstraction, then, shall be defined as one process through which a ‘signifier’ is created. The argument shall aim to trace and retrace the cognitive process of abstraction by discussing its role across different facets and layers of contemporary society, with particular attention being paid to the effects of the digital on this role. Abstractions shall be discussed regarding how they occur both in principle and in practice, and in how they might be perceived. This shall lead to a series of hypotheses concerning reflections and reactions which the omnipresence of the digital domain in every-day life might be prompting in contemporary society. The essay shall also focus on the parallel phenomena of ‘relative reality’ and ‘relative authenticity’, which can be understood as the hypothetical middle ground or gradient existing between ‘real’ and ‘fake’, and which shall be argued to be direct implications of abstraction.
From Audiences to Publics: Convergence Culture and the Harry Potter Phenomenon [PDF]
Giuliana Fenech: University of Malta
