William Poundstone

New Digital Emplems

The "New Digital Emblems" site of course attests to my interest in emblems. Like much that I admire, emblems are really on the margins of art and literary history. Pre the dot.com bust, so much that was written about the web struck me as wrong-headed. People imputed what I can only call "magic" to web's feature set. Low-cost-per-million multimedia interactivity was going to change the world. I knew that people had said similar things about the emblem, and had offered, in outline, many of the same reasons for it. So the emblem, often literally magical, became a caricature of the web. "New Digital Emblems" is "quasi-didactic." It has relatively a lot of text (I think I computed 15,000 words total?), and big chunks of text are normally outre for web art or web anything. This emulates/parodies the commentary, often lengthy (and often in verse) that accompanied the old emblem books. The emblem anticipated our culture of criticism, the idea that a poem or novel or film is valued by how much can be written about it.. Emblems helped shape the idea that a work of art can't just be something, it's got to be this mystery that resists any definitive explanation. These values are still defining web art and literature. The ideal is so often a site that is different every time you visit and which can never be fully experienced. All of which is fine, assuming that the site really is an endless cornucopia of good and original context. Which is unlikely. So often, sites are only being coy--withholding content and dispensing it to those who run a maze of links and clicks. This "I know something you don't" smugness is equally behind the emblem books.

http://www.williampoundstone.net
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