UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Eduardo Navas, Penn State assistant professor of art, works with students in the School of Visual Arts' New Media and Interdisciplinary Digital Studio programs, teaching a range of digital art courses that draw on his expertise in cultural analytics and digital humanities.
Navas is an artist, writer and media theorist who is interested in the potential of creative production and critical thinking in culture and media. He collaborates with artists and institutions in various countries to organize events and develop new forms of publication and creative production. His new text, "Spate: A Navigational Theory of Networks," is a critical and creative reflection on networked media composed with repurposed tweets. "Spate" is the first in the publication series "Deep Pockets," edited by the Institute of Network Cultures (INC).
“'Deep Pockets' are just the right size to stick in your pocket and read on the subway, not much bigger than your smartphone, which carries the epub version of the work,” notes Editor Miriam Rasch. “And yet, 'Deep Pockets' go, well, deep. They offer both the wealth of the rich and the cunning of thieves.”
Navas' playful, yet critical, approach can be seen in the excerpt found on the back cover:
"The relation of your handwriting and typing exposes the contention of efficiency in a world driven by the ever-increasing compression of all things. Fake wood is more natural than an honest answer: lying reaffirms the truth based on negation only to move into a grey area. You are not excited? The potential of rusted ideas polished as a brand is the obsession of future-trending. 24/7 specs. You flip the script: house to the jacked sound of information overflow. Noise is controlled for the sake of our compromise called communication. Flip to the first; jack to the sound of overused eyeglasses lacking prescription, designed to make perfect vision appear unfashionable. The murals stored in the cloud become available on the screens of anyone willing to transgress experience as a virtual factor of lack. This is not your place, but a localized tweet. Refresh gives you, and everyone else, instant hope to experience something new; passive action becomes the foundation of a radical lifestyle."
“We couldn’t have been more happy than to start the series with the highly artistic, creative, and jubilant work of Eduardo Navas,” said Rasch. “'Spate' is an experimental, funny, and deep reflection on networked media. It is composed with tweets written by the author over an extended period of time and repurposed into a text which studies media processes such as flowing, searching, and trending and at the same time is a flow, a search, an illustration of trend.”
Eduardo Navas is also the author of "Remix Theory: The Aesthetics of Sampling," co-editor of "The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies," and is currently editing the forthcoming anthology "Keywords in Remix Studies," also for Routledge.