Bookninja » Subvirtualism: The Surrealists’ love child, immaculately conceived
As you may note, these techniques no longer affront common conceptions of reality. In fact, they’ve become reality – the currency of our culture, the shared vocabulary of our consumer society:
* Odd juxtapositions and subconscious drives? Advertisers have long mastered such techniques and moods, employing them to sell a whole array of consumer products – everything from bottled water to toilet water to toilet paper.
* Automatic, unedited writing? The embrace of democratic possibilities in art, regardless of expertise? Try a blog. Try ten-thousand, if you like.
* The spread of associations across a wide field of play? That essentially describes the dynamics of the web.
* Collaborative creations? Well, the Wiki has become the new Exquisite Corpse. Unfortunately, most Wikis feel more like diddling with the dead than daring to risk through language.[…]
Despite the violence done to the form of Surrealism, the deeper thrust remains within a new group of contemporary writers. Like the Surrealists, these writers are driven by the need to crack open the fissures in accepted reality, thereby making us see the dynamics of self and society; the need – not to shout or rail or talk incessantly – but to growl from the landscape of the true, as they perceive it. These contemporary writers are responding to the political, scientific, and cultural tone of their time. Now, however, that tone resounds within and from the virtual nature of our society.
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