Beautiful Untrue Things
The Digital Dilemma
Art has never been a mere mirror up to nature, yet as in no other medium has it been so easy to create a simulacra of reality as with digital technology: a 'heterocosm', both simulating the familiar while deconstructing it. This talk will explore how mimesis might be used as a paradigm from which to explore the relationship between digital surrogates and their analogue counterparts; how familiar terms like object, imitation, copy, original function in the digital realm; and the notion that a digital representation may be more appropriately termed a simulacral identity, reflecting, not the object itself, but our beliefs and conventions about it. This talk will also briefly touch upon mimesis from the viewpoint of digital representations as conscious fashionings of hyper-reality or in Wildean terms, employing the unreal and non-existent to recreate the material world in unexpected, fresh, or subversive ways.
Speakers
Susan Schreibman is Assistant Dean and Head of Digital Collections and Research at University of Maryland Libraries. She received her PhD in Anglo-Irish Literature and Drama from University College Dublin (1997). She is the founding editor of The Thomas MacGreevy Archive, Irish Resources in the Humanities, and principle developer of The Versioning Machine. She is the author of Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy: An Annotated Edition (1991), co-editor of A Companion to Digital Humanities (Blackwell, 2004); and co-series editor of Topics in the Digital Humanities (University of Illinois Press). She is currently co-editing A Companion to Digital Literary Studies (forthcoming, Blackwell).
