Presentation Schedule
When Text Fails: The Behavioral Language of Affect in Digital Post-textual Environments (101596)
Session Chair: Simon Cooke
This presentation will be live-streamed via Zoom (Online Access)
Friday, 27 March 2026 14:15
Session: Session 2
Room: Live-Stream Room 1
Presentation Type: Live-Stream Presentation
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This study investigates how communication shifts from linguistic to embodied modes when language loses precision in post-textual digital environments. On social platforms, text often compresses or distorts emotional nuance, creating semiotic breakdowns that demand somatic responses. Five undergraduate design students conducted a six-week practice-based inquiry treating "failure" as generative method. Their process combined typographic analysis, glitch experiments, web-based interaction design, and kinetic installations, culminating in a public exhibition. Documentation included iterative records, visual journals, and audience encounters, examined through phenomenological observation and thematic pattern analysis.
The project reinterprets machine aesthetics as an early precedent for multimodal communication studies—where linguistic form, bodily movement, and perception intersect beyond representation. Building on this lineage, it positions post-textual practice as a perceptual interface that transforms reading from semiotic decoding into somatic negotiation. Integrating multimodal discourse theory (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006) and affect theory (Massumi, 2002), the study distinguishes emotion (cognitive recognition), affect (pre-cognitive intensity), and embodiment (behavioral enactment). The inquiry revealed three phenomena: textual delays and errors prolonged viewer attention; kinetic typography activated proprioceptive awareness; and glitch aesthetics generated interpretive multiplicity, with viewers describing "felt sense" rather than "decoded content."
This challenges psychology's view of emotion as stable symbolic content and positions post-text as a critical site for theorizing how signification transcends linguistic boundaries through somatic and affective behavior—extending aesthetics concerned with transmission and intensity over representation.
Authors:
Juiyi Yen, National Taiwan University of Arts, Taiwan
About the Presenter(s)
Juiyi Yen is currently an Assistant Professor investigating visual communication and post-textual practices, and a doctoral student at the National Taiwan University of Arts.
See this presentation on the full schedule – Friday Schedule
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