Writing Touch at the Interface

Luxuria Superbia’s Exploratory Play with Self-Writing

Abstract

Digital literary works, such as Luxuria Superbia (2013) an interactive, verbicovisual experimental tablet game, recombine media, modes, and genres of writing to comparatively reconsider and assess shifting writing practices. These works reveal the complex relations linking prior print to emergent digital forms of self-writing. They are particularly concerned with how shifting writing practices help to co-realize distinct subjectivities, intersubjective relations and lived spaces. Luxuria Superbia experiments with touch-based, multimodal digital writing, asking how it might alter gendered and sexualized assumptions about subjective boundaries and lived spaces. Such exploratory play with performative practices of self-writing and with intersubjective touching at the interface move discussions of digital media beyond the limiting Heideggerian frame of the properly human toward more thoroughgoing understandings of how technics repeatedly reenter the human, her past and present handwriting.