On Being (Social), Selfhood and the Creative Experience in the Digital Age in Clara Janés’ Vilanos (E-mails) (2004)

Clara Janés intertwines contemporary e-communication and Spanish medieval mysticism to envision the texture of social experience, selfhood and creativity in the digital age. Vilanos (E-mails) invokes e-mailing’s mystical dimensions: cyberspace’s effacement of time and space and the cybernetic undoing of the self. Interrogating encounters with electronic ‘otherness’ in the cybernetic void, a digitized form of spiritual pilgrimage emerges, encompassing a search for self-knowledge and aesthetic intuition. Confronting the limitations of social connection through technological mediation, the digital’s invitation to self-encounter, nevertheless, can reveal the aleatory complexities of the self, cosmos and poetry itself, characterized by indeterminacy and constant movement.