New Digital Emblems

I probably encountered emblems first through the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay. Like much that I admire, emblems are really on the margins of art and literary history. Before the dot.com bust, so much that was written about the web struck me as wrong-headed. People imputed what I can only call 'magic' to web's feature set. Low-cost-per-million multimedia interactivity was going to change the world. I knew that people had said similar things about the emblem, and had offered, in outline, many of the same reasons for it. So the emblem, often literally magical, became a caricature of the web.

(Source: Author's description from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume Two)