&Now 2015: Blast Radius

This panel is aimed at discussing perceptions and conceptions of text as a fluid medium. We will examine the ways in which the seemingly fixed medium of the written word alters into complex motions that represent the dynamics of speech, thought, meaning and feeling. As is made clear from the beginning of Matthew Nye’s novel Pike and Bloom, any page is a potential field of interactions that comes to life as soon as a reader sets his or her eyes upon it, allowing the essentially fluid nature of meaning making to be enacted. Dan Beachy-Quick turns his highly perceptive experience of the world into a language experience, shared with the reader, calling the senses back into the intellect, and playing with the materiality of words to let them emerge from the page into the reader, impressing his or her senses with lasting and moving traces. 

The plasticity of these texts will also be considered through the translation process. While some aspects of the source text have to be given up, what is it that makes it across the boundary of a language’s frontier? What is the permanence of a translated text (or of any text in time)? Can we still think of texts as having a fixed status in the age of digital arts and media? How does conceiving of a text as a fluid medium allow for meaning to be carried, while resisting its potentially reified fate? 

Our reflexion will involve performances of the authors’ texts, in English and French.