3.
Author:        Barclay, R.
Title:         Here/Hear We God Again: On the Holodeck with Rosellini's 1737 Mechanical Pig, Plus CD (book reviews).
Journal:       POMO Media Studies Monthly v147, n24:11 (6 pages).
Pub Type:      Review.
Descr:         Photograph, graphic illustration.
Notes:         Reviewer's Grade: B+.
Subfile:       Magazine Index (MI).
               Academic Index (AI).
Subject:       Vieuchanger, Fatima Michelle -- Biography, Memoir.
                     Authors -- Biography, Autobiography.
                     Books -- Reviews.
                     Interactive Media -- Reviews.

Abstract:
For readers who have followed Fatima Michelle Vieuchanger's adventures (e.g., the serialized version of _Masquerading at Shower-Lourdes_) with that amazing porcine automaton, the mechanical pig created by Guillermo Rosellini in 1737 and recreated by Gilbert van Gelderschott in 1884, this latest installment offers only a little comforting familiarity and more than a few surprises. In her earlier works, Vieuchanger tells how she got and lost and got again the pig(s) and recounts their storied scatological performances at Shower-Lourdes, Florida, and Findhorn, Scotland. The 3-D holovideo (with omnisound) multimedia CD-ROM packaged with this monograph, especially, along with its somewhat-misleading Instructions, raises two major questions for readers equipped with state of the art electronic appliances and postmodern critical vocabularies: (1) Does the excrementalization induced by a subversive anality in the previous metanarrational representations -- somewhat conflating the semiotic sublimation of the author's hermeneutical hand-wringing (e.g., Eubern et al.) with a nonphallomorphic but recentered and essentialist dialectical historiography -- here test the constructed/constructive boundaries of a totalizing hypertextual ideology (in the sense of Jimson) rather than the pseudo-semiotics of, say, Python? Further, the major surprise comes when Vieuchanger engineers the potential meeting of Porker and Creator(s) by programming convincing apparitions of the Pig's original master, Rosellini himself, in multimodal virtual dialogue with the master's imitator, van Gelderschott, which is all the more surprising to the extent that it is ignored in the otherwise fallacious Instructions. (2) Is what is thematized here essentially a tension between the textuality of the image as an (rhetorical) object, emerging peristaltically as it were through market forces, and an articulation of the nostalgic self-reflexivity of a Bynarian late-stage modernist protocapitalism? Or is it rather a metaphorically transgressive commodification -- along with a final, inescapable reification of the postmodern Machine qua machine? Huh?