Hyperstitial Poetics in Networked Media

Remediating the Social was a conference and exhibition, with a focus on creative works and activities, developed within the domain of new media arts practice that feature a particular engagement with literary form - an area often known as electronic literature or digital poetics. This text will treat these terms interchangeably and will focus on the exhibition component of the project. Remediating the Social engaged creativity as a property emergent from a multi-modal social apparatus rather than, as is often assumed, an attribute of individual or group human agency. The event sought, as many artists who work with digital media do, to problematise conventional notions of authorship. The key proposition was formulated within the context of an expanded understanding of individual and collective ontology that regards selfhood, in large part, as a socially contingent construct and, in this sense, a creation of the social space from which it emerges and is sustained within. Here, creativity is apprehended as a reflexive property of the inter-agency of social interactions, rather than as an activity concerned with the origination of novel things or a capability invested in an individual or group of individuals.