In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

TXTual Practice 1 5 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 8 Rita Raley We demand that art turns into a life-changing force. We seek to abolish the separation between poetry and mass communication, to reclaim the power of media from the merchants and return it to the poets and the sages....We will sing to the infinity of the present and abandon the illusion of a future. —Franco Berardi, The Post-futurist Manifesto Does art have a point? Is this art? Does it have a point? —anonymous contribution to Urban_diary are text messages displayed on large video screens or mobile variable message signs, or projected on building facades or on open ground in public squares, meaningful or not meaningful? And what is the structural form or logic of these scenes of reading and writing that would command critical attention? Would a laudatory or skeptical tone predominate in an analysis of interactive text installations, the expressive heights of which at times run the gamut from“u r gorgeous”to“This wall is way more popular than me”? Were one to approach these works by focusing on linguistic content alone, regarding, or attempting to regard, each line or set of lines as literary utterance with the interpretative method that implies, most likely it should be the skeptical, but to consider only the substance of any particular text message would be to occlude all of the moving parts of each installation: hardware, software, screen or projection surface, audience, physical environment, telecommunications infrastructure, and all of the social and technological protocols that govern the production and reception of the projected messages. The urge to read, to do more than acknowledge or see the words, is not so easily disregarded, but the transitory aspect of the messages means that the subjectivity constituted in relation 6 RITA RALEY to the text cannot be understood to be literary as it has historically been understood. The exact temporal structure of each art project, each installation, differs, but what they necessarily share is the evental form. Unlike billboards, posters, signs, and even video art installations, they are live, continually refreshed; they are said to “run” for a set number of days or hours per day, and the messages on display are thus impermanent. 1 What one reads with a momentary peripheral glance is likely not to return and, though the moment of textual consumption might be captured and replayed through recorded documentation, that moment cannot be restaged or reenacted. Any installation might, of course, suffer all manner of glitches and errors that would cause the text to freeze, but in their fully operational state, the displays are dynamic, the trajectory is forward, and the already mined phrases are not available for further mining. The public art installations I address in this chapter are interactive (remote and on-site participants are invited to contribute an SMS message of their own to the data feed); sited (they cannot but engage the specificities of each place and, by extension, prompt a consideration of what is“public”and what is“private”); and social (participants are continually negotiating their relationship to the audience, crowd, and readerly communities that are themselves continually mutating). For example, in Matt Locke and Jaap de Jonge’s Speakers’ Corner (2001–), participants contributed text to the live feed on a fifteen-meter LED display wrapped around the corner of the Media Centre building in Huddersfield, shouting by SMS, through a web interface, or by voice message from a phone booth. Its title invoking the ritual performance of public speech as civic participation, the eventual fate of Speakers’ Corner was entirely fitting: the screen was hacked, the external booth was vandalized, and a library of expletives accrued after the contributions were filtered in response to municipal complaints.2 What was at stake was less the physical parts of the work than a negotiation of control over property, technological systems...

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