hypermediation

If the media was the message for McLuhan in the 1960s, then audio-visual publishing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo have become a message today. In his 1998 article entitled “Database as Symbolic Form,” Lev Manovich fails to foresee the socially hypermediated turn of the new century when he argues that “database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world” (p. 7). From a purely mathematical, logical viewpoint, they do at first seem at odds, since the database is the superstructure and the narrative media files are the objects oriented within. For example, a database might house narrative-less stock photos or sound effects as easily as it does an audio-visual story. The (early) media database seems indifferent to its contents and does not seem to be able to tell a story. Likewise, the narrative within a digital movie file is indifferent to its matrix-host, because the “story” operates regardless of whether you play the film on a DVD player, digital projector, or a YouTube download.

Electronic literature challenges Manovich’s perceived divide. Where does the “story” reside in a narrative-driven video game: its interface? Its database of media objects? The image and sound files? The algorithms? The players’ interactions? The gaming system? The best answer we can probably give is that the narrative is realized through an alchemical interaction between every piece and player. If so, then there must be deeply reciprocal relationships between electronic narratives and the platforms through which they are published. And, just as importantly, these symbiotic relationships continue to evolve, constantly redefining narrative as well as publication.

The ELO Conference prompts us to explore the shifting boundaries and relationships between narratives and publishing platforms. As a case study, this presentation examines how the current generation of novice filmmakers are pursuing new ideas about narratives and stories as demonstrated on three media platforms: YouTube, Vimeo, and Vine. This case focuses on three developments in socially hypermediated publishing platforms:

Ethos and the collapsing divisions between media producer, consumer, and critic.
Temporality and the declining patience with long stories.
Literature and the persistence of the power of words.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Critics have understandably fetishized the electronic page or digital screen as a way to understand the relationship between the algorithmic logics that drive computation and the public rhetorics of display. At the same time an evolving set of practices within electronic literature continues to be in dialogue with contemporary digital media arts practice and its move to explore the meaning of incorporating autonomous sensing and new forms of human-computer interaction in dialogic works. Considering the rhetorical position of devices such as the iPad and considering them as more than viewing apparatuses or interfaces for reading it is possible to engage differently with a whole set of binaries around camera vs. scanner, optics vs. sensors, and representation vs. registration.

This presentation focuses on three writers who are utilizing augmented reality technologies to expand the repertoire of digital poetics. Judd Morrissey has collaborated with choreographer Mark Jeffery to stage The Operature (2014), combining live performance and augmented reality multimodal poetry to highlight anatomical science and voyeuristic erotic spectacle in which the temporary tattoos worn by the work’s dancers can be read by a surveillance apparatus. In contrast, a voice of intensely personal lyricism that speaks very intimately to the listener defines Caitlin Fisher’s Circle (2011), which is an “augmented reality tabletop theatre piece” that deploys the iPad or smart phone in a much more private setting. Amaranth Borsuk’s approach to augmented reality multimedia favors an aesthetic of sleek mid-century modernism and machined characters in Between Page and Screen (2012), which investigates “the place of books as objects in an era of increasingly screen-based reading.“ The actual pages of this artist’s book contain no legible text; the reader is presented with only abstract geometric patterns and a URL leading to the Between Page and Screen website, where the book may be read by using any browser and a webcam. With a new generation of reading machines that can perceive contrast relationships in a 2D visual environment, sensors can read the “ink” of tattoos, the grain of family artifacts, and the code of a numbered artist’s book or print-at-home emulation.

These works may also spur a new kind of criticism that may require that we rethink the theoretical framework of immediacy, hypermediation, and remediation proposed by Bolter and Grusin as we reconsider our own interchanges with the sensorium of the mechanical apparatus. In responding to Galloway, Thacker, and Wark’s theses about “excommunication” and the possibility that the relation between “objects and things” problematizes the standard narrative about media, mediation, and communication, Benjamin Bratton has suggested that this could more precisely be characterized as “incommunication” around the activities of “sensing, addressing, and pricing.” Borsuk, Morrissey, and Fisher create works that dramatize device-to-device relations and their associated modes of reading.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This paper explores the effects of sonic implacement in L.A. Flood. Engaging locative literature in situ, a reader can pull audio files that come very close to replicating the experience of hearing such files off-site. But same is not true of the visual interface, which is flat and sensory-impovershed. The deep attention one musters reading locative fiction on desktop is shattered by hypermediation in situ: buildings tower above us, sunlight and air press upon our skin; our devices, other people, weather and other on-site variables distract us from concentrated reading. Distracted reading creates a productive, hyperattentive cognitive dissonance.

In a video by Talan Memmott (Interrogating Electronic Literature), J.R. Carpenter discusses "between" as a third space between lexia and embodiment: "l'entre-espace." In English, "between" is a null value. French language endows "l'entre-space" with dimension, a space of cognition that permits critical thinking. L.A. Flood challenges readers to rethink not just that city's fungible borders, but lived space and racist and classist limitations of access to such space. The cognitive and emotive potential presented by L.A. Flood is conjured with unique richness in audio lexia, which use the human voice to convey extratextual information about the lexia: the actors' voices are vessels of tone, attitude and musicality that imbue the lexia with extrasignificance that can't redound to the text alone.

Hearing lexia endows them with a ghostly being, a borrowed vitality from the actors, that haunts actual physical space.

I likened reading L.A. Flood to reading serial fiction during the nineteenth century, when readers would have to wait months between installments. Close reading, distant reading: locative lit prompts us to think about persistence ("enduring reading") in new ways. Fictive ghosts don't just ramble around our imaginations, as they do in reaction to codex books, but in actual space tied to precise geospatial metadata. We encounter the ghosts when we pass through the actual spaces. The readers' experience of such characters is cumulative, layered atop the physical sites one visits (or doesn't) in L.A. Flood.