Literary Arts

Rather than as a function or inevitable consequence of conventional translation practices (of, for example, some attempt on the 'untranslatable' poem), or as the literary maker's right to refuse the application of such practices, untranslatability is proposed as a special case of unreadability, where the latter is taken to be entailed by all embodiments of language-as-such in particular natural languages or linguistic forms. A thought experiment is described within which mutual unreadability is inscribed in the form of separate monolingual discussions on the same special subject. The discussion is complicated by the proposal that the subject of discussion -in both thought experiment and essay -is that of an actual, Chinese, 'unreadable book,' the artist Xu Bing's (1955-) Book from the Sky.

Rather than as a function or inevitable consequence of conventional translation practices (of, for example, some attempt on the 'untranslatable' poem), or as the literary maker's right to refuse the application of such practices, untranslatability is proposed as a special case of unreadability, where the latter is taken to be entailed by all embodiments of language-as-such in particular natural languages or linguistic forms. A thought experiment is described within which mutual unreadability is inscribed in the form of separate monolingual discussions on the same special subject. The discussion is complicated by the proposal that the subject of discussion - in both thought experiment and essay - is that of an actual, Chinese, 'unreadable book,' the artist Xu Bing's (1955- ) Book from the Sky .

The Readers Project is an aesthetically-oriented system of software entities designed to explore the culture of human reading. These entities, or 'readers', enact specific reading strategies and function as autonomous text generators, networked writing machines visible beyond the texts they 'read'. As the structures on which they operate are culturally implicated, the project's readers shed light on a range of institutional practices surrounding the digital literary and the aggregation of the linguistic commons by corporate interests. In this paper, we present the practical and theoretical considerations guiding the project's development, and consider various strategies to resist the commodification and enclosure of literary culture within the corporate 'cloud'.

Project MUSE promot es t he creat ion and disseminat ion of essent ial humanit ies and social science resources t hrough collaborat ion wit h libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a part nership bet ween a universit y press and a library, Project MUSE is a t rust ed part of t he academic and scholarly communit y it serves.

A code-critical close reading of two related works by Daniel C. Howe. The artist's Automatype is an installation that visualizes and sonifies minimal-distance paths between English words and thus explores a possibility space that is relatively familiar to western readers, not only readers of English but also readers of any language which uses Latin letters to compose the orthographic word-level elements of its writing system. In

Cayley's image is an apt illustration of an essay that's also a work of 'digital language art.' Although Cayley incorporates new material and newly contextualized examples, referring chiefly to his own work, what follows is also the reconfigured rewrite of a recent essay for a series of conferences and a peer-reviewed online journal, Political Concepts, which can be found online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

Between the gangsters, the beautiful girls, the vibrant nightlife and the gigantic scale of the city itself, full of its diverse millions and their struggles, the lurid and colorful world of Bangkok's notorious nightlife is brought to life in Chris Coles' series of Expressionist-style paintings. Broad sweeping lines and strong contrasting colors dominate in these artworks, portraying a chaotic edgy world of colliding intention and misplaced desire - lives out of balance, male-female compulsion, alienation and disassociation. At once beautiful and frightening, this collection of paintings is a vibrant celebration of the pyschedelic Bangkok Night and its many shades of noir...

The blinding neon and shady denizens of the Bangkok night are captured vividly in American painter Chris Coles' watercolor renditions of the lurid and colorful world of the Thai capital's notorious nightlife. Heavily distorted lines and strong, clashing colors dominate in these paintings which portray a chaotic, edgy noir world of colliding intention and misplaced desire, lives out of balance, sexual compulsion, alienation and disassociation, echoing the German Expressionist paintings from Berlin in the early 1900’s as well as the Paris nightlife paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas and the early Picasso. Organized into twinkling street scenes, situational encounters and mesmerizing portraits of the girls, the boys, the kathoeys (ladyboys) and their clients, Chris Coles shows us how the Bangkok night isn’t “only a sordid money-machine servicing the low-end of humanity”, but “an authentic and unique setting in the ongoing cultural history of mankind”.

As the sun sets, the Bangkok Night and its fabulous Neon comes to life. The air cools, the traffic calms, and Bangkok’s faults disappear into a glossy and seductive darkness. Beautiful women and stylish men fill the sidewalks, along with a billion food stalls, a million motorcycle taxis and ten thousands of soi dogs. Music drifts through nighttime breezes scented with jasmine and the smell of spicy smoke. And lighting up every boulevard, street and soi, across the entire metropolis, trillions of little fairy lights and millions of signs. Every kind of sign in every kind of language with every typestyle and color, from gigantic to small, stylish to outlandish, some blinking, some discreet, some ordinary, others wacky. Very few cities anywhere on this planet have the number and variety of signs as are spread across the vastness of the Bangkok Night. With little apparent zoning, control or censorship, the only limit is the imagination and when it comes to applying visual imagination to the business of Night Entertainment, Thais are second to none. What follows is a taste of the Bangkok Night’s neon signs along with some of the mood and feeling they create......enticement, the promise of pleasure, glowing neon colors hissing in thick humid air.

The German Expressionists often used Early 1900 Berlin’s degenerate nightlife and multiplicity of noir characters as the setting for their gritty, colorful vision of a distorted humanity drowning in a universe of alientation, dysfunctionality, bad intention and misplaced desire. When I first came to experience the vast, colorful and almost infinite universe of the Bangkok Night......one of the largest ongoing nightlife spectacles ever staged by humans in the history of the world, with millions of participants from Thailand, Asia and every country on earth.......Sellers, Buyers, Consumers, Enablers, Protectors, Managers, Support Staff, Owners, Grifters, Gangsters, Conmen and Profiteers.....billions of investment and revenue.....I immediately saw a similarity with some of those powerful images of early 1900’s Berlin Nightlife created by the German Expressionists.A visual setting with a similar multiplicity of characters, only updated to early 2000’s with Mass Tourism, ATM machines, Erectile Dysfunction Drugs, hi-rise hotels, spicy food, amplified music, complex lighting and a powerful blend of Southeast Asian style, traditions, people and stuff.If Re-Incarnation is Real, as many Southeast Asians believe, the German Expresisonists would all be here, in the Bangkok Night, taking in this unique human spectacle and using it to make their paintings.

My 1st Exhibition in Bangkok opened in April 2011, at the lovely, stylish Koi Gallery in the trendy Upper Sukhumvit District.The evening also served as the Book Launch Party for my first book of paintings titled, “Navigating the Bangkok Noir” which had just been published by the Marshall Cavandish company in Singapore.Opening Night was packed. An upscale Bangkok crowd of Expats, Hi-So’s and art people as I made my debut on the fantastic stage of the Bangkok Night.

American artist Chris Coles approaches this world in a completely unique way, with watercolor paints and a brush in hand. His expressionist paintings, of which there are more than 2,000, add a brilliant splash of color to this scene and cast its familiar subjects in a fresh light. His eyes flit freely among bar girls and patrons, from Japanese businessmen to Bangkok old hands, capturing them honestly and humanizing them, but never idealizing the flesh trade. In the introduction to his book of paintings, Navigating the Bangkok Noir, author and friend Christopher G. Moore compares Coles to Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, the French painter who captured the bohemian, often decadent nightlife world of Paris in the 19th Century, including numerous sympathetic portraits of prostitutes. Berlin’s nightlife in the 1920s and 1930s inspired a similar artistic movement.