Article:

On Analytic Method in the Digital Reading

Presented with the modality of the new work of art, which, being interactive, sculptural, filmic, or ludic, is in nature and structure so different from prior aesthetic production, literary critic and historian of art alike are now confronted with questions as to preferable modes of reading new media art that can do justice to its unique ontologies. In this conversation (from the book Literary Art in Digital Performance: Case Studies and Critical Positions) with Francisco J. Ricardo, Roberto Simanowski lays out a phenomenology that goes beyond the formalism of the work and opens to a critical reading while, in harmony with the thinking of Lyotard, viewing the encounter of the work as possessing greater importance than specific commitments to interpretation, that is, of experiencing “not what happens but that something happens”.