Seriality and the Computational Sublime
Presented at "Infinite Possibilities? Seriality: A Symposium"
Davis Musesum and Cultural Center
Wellesley College
Saturday, March 6, 2004
From a talk I gave in 2004.
The computer is a metamedium. It can represent almost any other medium. In this sense, there are many new media projects that look like some of the works in Infinite Possibilities: Serial Imagery in 20th-Century Drawings or address similar issues of the multiple, the variation, the sequence. What I would like to address today are some of the ways that seriality is fundamental to computational media, even if some of the resulting works might not at first glance - or first experience - seem like serial works. What I would like to suggest is that the underlying seriality of computationally based art and how this so-called "language of new media" may lead to new forms of narrative seriality in art.
