Language as a life form

This chapter addresses the work of non-digital text-based art in the age of digital media through a discussion of an installation by Australian artist Lynne Barwick. It highlights the animation of both viewer and space and considers text as simultaneously writing and image. Key to the discussion is the animating power of the word and the ways in which entangled bodies depend on media as a data-driven life-form with its own kind of (non-human) consciousness. Referencing writers such as Craig Dworkin and Marjorie Perloff, Gibbs explores the language of text as an assemblage that we cannot stand apart from, operating beyond a necessity for strategic communication. Accordingly, the focus is not about the individual ego but about language itself as a conduit or collaborator.