BITE THE HAND THAT FEEDS YOU!

If an Avant-Garde is to do justice to the contradictory nature of History as Trauma (which is to say, if an art movement is to be considered Avant-Garde in the first place), then it has to do far more than simply develop its medium; it must challenge that medium.

This means that the so-called New media, despite Landow's jubilatory and Manovich's sober declarations of the avant-garde nature of digital media as such, must move beyond its normalized conventions, even if these conventions themselves are hardly a decade old. Contemporary capitalist society is now so thoroughly digitized--and liking it that way--that an Avant-Garde needs to be critical of techniques, strategies, and practices which only recently marked revolutionary developments in poetry as a genre. In the age of Microsoft, Tomb Raider, and online shopping, artists working in digital media need to look beyond the ideological notions of interactivity and rhizomatic hypertext.

The online shopping cart, for example, is a wonderful example of interactivity. Here is an example: click me!

The online shopper, with mouse in hand, navigates his or her way through the hyperlinks of this page which is so artfully designed and illustrated. The interacting shopper takes advantage of the element of choice built into the consumer-subjectivity set in motion by this page: choose your style, your color, the number of items you want, and then watch as the website interacts back by taking you to the shopping cart page!