For a new Mnemosyne: Art, Experience, and Technology

This paper will outline the key elements of an ongoing research project, whose main focus is to explore the application of new technology to the study of key works of modernism, whilst simultaneously arguing that modernism can itself offer fresh perspectives on contemporary digital art. I am interested in the way modernism presents the artwork as both an object to be experienced and as a structured theory of knowledge. This tension can be seen most obviously in such canonical works as Ezra Pound‘s Cantos (1917-1969) where his aesthetic of the 'luminous fragment‘ is set against the poem‘s larger, Dantescan, vision of history. Concomitantly, I wish to argue that the resources of digital technology offer a significant new set of tools for approaching modernism itself, allowing us to explore the boundary between the work of scholarship and work of art.