Techno-Prosthetic Romantic Futurism

Imagination Matters

Imagine what Blake would have made of our media. Jerusalem is a hypertext waiting for the Internet. [1]   Now it's a precious book incarcerated in several museums. Blake conceived it as a field of reading. Today he would have hyperlinked pages. He would have scanned and mapped illustrations. He would have digitized apocalypse. Back then the available technologies were burin and press. Digitizing Blake means recovering that materiality, the labor, stuff, and money he put into producing his books. [2]   The Internet is a material medium. As Blake might say, technology can subdue the Spectre of scholarship.


Notes

1. This may or may not be the way it works in The Blake Archive. Judge for yourself at www.blakearchive.org.

2. See Joseph Viscomi, Blake and the Idea of the Book (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1993).


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