Spacetime (Oh yes, I'm going there)

Okay, so this post is mostly in response to Sarah's post about Hypertext and Temporality. I was stumbling the other day and found this video which I think offers a really interesting take on “metapicture.” I’m not entirely sure what it has to do with Mitchell’s “metapictures,” but it definitely acts in a very metapictorial way. This video draws on this idea from Mitchell: “a world that is not merely represented by pictures, but actually constituted and brought into being by picture-making” (Mitchell, 41).

There exists in this video many aspects. To borrow from Sarah’s post, I think Landow’s description of a "quasi-magical entrances to a networked reality" (Landow, 37) applies quite well here. For a picture to act in a four-dimensional way such as this piece of art does is really magical. And not only this, but it shows off some of reality. It provides commentary on art, the act of making art and many other things. It might even be said that this painting provides a commentary against the post-modern idea that “there is nothing outside the picture” (Mitchell, 41). There is something outside the picture: the real table. The video highlights the limits of representation.

What does this have to do with spacetime and hypertext? It “captures the provisional, temporary, changing quality in which readers make individual lexias the temporary center of their movement through an information space” (Landow, 41). When the initial picture begins, it is simply a “painting” of fruit—a still-life. People addressed the information with presuppositions about what the object was until time was introduced into the equation. The ability to move through time back and forth between what was and what the picture would become created a separation. I might say this would be a liminal space, but I am not sure it must be. In any case, the picture illustrates the temporary nature of the temporary center, even when one is not thought to exist. I think the fact that the center can change so simply suggests that any center is temporary and somewhat arbitrary.

Of course, what this means for textual interpretation is unclear and likely very much more complicated than saying that either "the author is dead," the "reader is at the arbitrary will of the author" or even that there must necessarily exist a non-hierarchical conversation between the two. However, it does seem to claim some kind of liminal space between reader and author, which I think is important enough as it is.