Entanglements: an exploration of the digital literary work FISHNETSTOCKINGS Main Menu Start Cover page FishnetStockings Fundamentals A path of background and documentation of FishnetStockings Hybridity Sub/Immersion Processing, Systems, and Code Movement/Dance Silhouettes Underwater Paper Cutting Swim Through the Code A path about the code of FishnetStockings Fellow Fish works of digital art that set precedent Works Cited Sources of our inspiration and edificiation

Mermaids, Little and Otherwise

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This Scalar book is not about Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid or the many adaptations and interpretations of it. Yet, because our tutor text, FISHNETSTOCKINGS, uses this canonical story as one of its source codes, we need to register its influence and also the fact that mermaid narratives and imagery push further back, far beyond 1837. Recent scholarship takes this longer history seriously. For example, for a history of merfolk in Western religion and science, see Vaughn Scriber’s Merpeople: A Human History (2020); for a summary of recent mermaid stories and films from around the world, see Philip Hayward’s Scaled for Success (2018); for a collection of mermaid tales from around the world translated into English, see The Penguin Book of Mermaids (2019).

Mermaids play a significant role in contemporary digital culture—from Young Adult (YA) novels to wiki fan-fiction, Webtoons to China’s highest-grossing film (The Mermaid dir. Stephen Chow, 2016), and even emergent genres like online cosplay and fan fiction. Indeed, we are in the midst of a mermaid craze. Everywhere you look—from literature to film, social media to fashion, digital art to commodity kitsch—mermaids are there. In this Scalar book, we look to a single work of digital literary art as an example of a larger cultural mermaid renaissance.

Contents of this path:

  1. The Little Mermaid context
  2. The Little Mermaid (annotated)
  3. Racism and the live-action Little Mermaid
  4. Banksy's Glitch Mermaid at Dismaland
  5. Sexuality and The Little Mermaid
  6. Ancient and Medieval Mermaids
  7. Contemporary Mermaid Craze