corporeality

This dissertation explores the relationships between literacy, technology, and bodies in the emerging media of Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), and Mixed Reality (MR). In response to the recent, rapid emergence of new media forms, questions arise as to how and why we should prepare to compose in new digital media. To interrogate the newness accorded to new media composing, I historicize the literacy practices demanded by new media by examining digital texts, such as video games and software applications, alongside analogous “antiquated” media, such as dioramas and museum exhibits. Comparative textual analysis of analogous digital and non-digital VR, AR, and MR texts reveals new media and “antiquated” media utilize common characteristics of dimensionality, layering, and absence/presence, respectively. The establishment of shared traits demonstrates how media operate on a continuum of mutually held textual practices; despite their distinctive forms, new media texts do not represent either a hierarchical or linear progression of maturing development. Such an understanding aids composing in new VR, AR, and MR media by enabling composers to make fuller use of prior knowledge in a rapidly evolving new media environment, a finding significant both for educators and communicators. As these technologies mature, we will continue to compose both traditional and new forms of texts. As such, we need literacy theory that attends to both the traditional and the new and also is comprehensive enough to encompass future acts of composing in media yet to emerge.

Taking the work some Australian new media artists as case studies, we explore the contemporary penetration of writing into visual media and visual media into writing. (The work of Chris Caines, Ross Gibson, Norrie Neumark and Maria Miranda, Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, Peter Charuk, Leon Czmielewski, Ben Denham and Sarah Waterson are all possible sites of focus).

(Source: Authors' abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)

This paper examines the way literary practice in digital media illuminates traditional literary processes that otherwise remain unremarked, and conversely, what the literary concept of ‘address’ might contribute to an understanding of the way digital media are reinventing literary agency. It explores handwriting as an embodied praxis linking thought with corporeality through the medium of gesture, and its transformations in text-based new media art. Handwriting (and especially signatures) has long been thought to make personality traits manifest. Its expressive gestural and kinematic aspect can be illuminated by Werner’s theory of physiognomic perception in which two-dimensional diagrams are shown as consistently corresponding to and eliciting a small number of categorical affects (happy, sad, angry) in viewers. Diane Gromala’s ‘Biomorphic Typography’ (2000 onwards) in which the user’s keystrokes generate biofeedback input which combines with the behaviours assigned to typography to animate text in the present time of writing draws on these conventions and complicates them in the process. By contrast, John Geraci’s locative media project ‘Grafedia’ (2004-2005), in which, as he says, ‘walls are made into websites’ handwriting signals the public discourse of graffiti with all its connotations of haste and illegality. In this work, users can write by hand on any of the various physical surfaces of the world and link this graffiti to rich media content that can be accessed by others as they come across the texts, appropriates the live dimension of handwriting as graffiti into the memorialising and communicative functions of a larger textual work that might also be collaboratively elaborated over time. The handwritten graffiti (in blue and underscored) mimics the default HTML hyperlink, which makes it visible as a piece of Grafedia, also signals the complex reciprocity between handwriting and print in new media work.

(Source: authors' abstract)