Resumen
?Reconfiguration: Symbolic Image and Language Art? proposes an analytic and theoretical framework for computational aesthetic practices in terms of ?reconfiguration? and its derivatives, ?reconfigurationism? and ?reconfigurationist?. Digitization of the media of aesthetic practices has rendered these practices subject to software architectures derived from computational applications that, for the most part, have had little regard for aesthetics as such. The ?images? of contemporary aesthetic practices are often ?symbolic images? in the terms of the essay. They are co-produced by networked computation and digitized?symbolized?representations of media, all within new formations of (?Big?) software architectures that are, typically, beyond the artists? generative, poetic control. Aesthetic practice is configured by software and digitalization. To bring art and aesthetics back into a generative relation with this potentially constrictive not to say totalizing situation, artists must reconfigure. This is an intervention that computation traditionally and productively allows, even in the era of Big Software. Reconfigurationism is demonstrated, specifically, in the field of language art and is also proposed as a poetics, characteristic of a wide range of contemporary aesthetic practice in all media where computation is at play. ?Reconfiguration? and ?reconfigurationism? distinguishes itself from theories of a ?New Aesthetic? and pretends a more insightful and critically generative analysis. The essay?s ?symbolic image? bears a relation to Vilém Flusser?s ?technical image? but has a clearer relation both to language and to computation, since Flusser?s term is overweening with regard to (the end of the history of) language and overdetermined by its links to apparatus as opposed to the generalized abstractions of computation.