Keeping an eye on the minotaur: the poetics of the labyrinth in electronic textures by Andrei Thomaz

Abstract

In this paper we investigate how the metaphor of the labyrinth, closely related to other images of complexity and interconnection, such as the network and the rhizome, is a constant in different works by the artist Andrei Thomaz, especially those that we herein embrace as analysis objects: Daedalus and Ariadne, The Hunter and the Prey and Library. In those projects, we can see an evident weaving of intertextual and intermedia connections, which draw more attention to the passages between these discourses than to a so-called specificity of each artistic language. Therefore, the metaphor of the labyrinth plays the role of Ariadne’s thread, with which we can wander among Thomaz’s works and the texts they evoke, so as to guide our reflection on the extent to which many hypermedia dynamics are structured as mazes. In them, the user is frequently asked to experience the senses of disorientation and exploration that are so characteristic of labyrinths, under the threat of a minotaur, a doubt, an interpretive disruption that only makes the pathway more interesting.