mediation

The paper describes and reflects upon a research and development project specifically related to a sound installation – Listener (Hoem 2014) – where the purpose has been to examine artistic possibilities when staging an auditive user experience, via micro positioned mobile devices. Listener is augmenting an existing environment, adding a fictional layer, using sound as the only expression. The auditive text is experienced through headphones, connected to a location aware mobile unit, which is positioned by “beacons” (Bluetooth LE transmitters).

Listener tries to relocate an environment, from Bergen railway station to the Bergen University College’s premises, using sound. To this environment we have added six fictional characters, and the user can listen to these characters’ cell phone calls. The text has to be experienced by moving around, as the sounds corresponds to the user’s position and orientation.

What distinguishes Listener from many other installations that are often based on localisation by GPS is the concept of micro positioning. The paper will discuss and exemplify this concept in general, and look more specifically into how this can be implemented to tell micro positioned stories.

Micro positioned texts are discussed in light of the experience of place (locus) and the perception of space (platea). When following the development of theatrical performances back to when travelling companies were performing in the streets, the theatre companies had to be able to adapt their performances to different places. This was achieved by a close understanding of the two ways of using space as an integrated part of the performance: The platea, an open space used to perform the play, contrasted by the locus, a defined space that can be given representational meaning. Locus always represents a specific location, and the platea is essentially fluid and non-representational (Dillon, 2006:4).

Where a space is given by the physical environment, place can be seen as constructed through a meeting between mediated artifacts, actors and interaction between those. Thus the linking between place and space becomes determined by social relationships, emotions and sensations. There will always be several, often competing notions of place, which leads to a potential for staging different narratives within the same physical environment.

The paper will discuss and try to exemplify and finally conclude upon questions about how the relationships between locus and platea are influenced by mediation artefacts that represents parts of the environment by virtual and/or augmented artifacts, and how this relates to concepts of electronic literature.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

This presentation will link the trope of “digital ekphrasis” (as articulated by Cecilia Lindhé) and the developing of platforms for “augmented reality” to argue that one probable future for electronic literature lies in the interweaving of “born digital” and print texts in ubiquitous layers of mediation. It will examine three instances of “augmented” print – the multimodal performance of ekphrastic poetry, the AR comic book Modern Polaxis, and the AR epistolary romance Between Page and Screen – all of which demonstrate the power of “intermediation” (Hayles) and foster a critical perspective on it. Looking at these amalgamations of print and digital textuality through the lens of digital ekphrasis reveals that electronic literature will most likely always arouse ambivalence, just as the trope of ekphrasis in traditional media has, for better or worse, provoked a sense of the uncanny through its interweaving of visual, auditory, tactile, verbal, or haptic experiences.

I will first establish the aesthetic and rhetorical theories of ekphrasis that will frame my discussion of augmented reality and electronic literature. In writing of the centuries of ambivalence associated with intermedial “picture poems,” W.J.T. Mitchell has outlined the “dangerous promiscuity” of ekphrasis (155), how its “mutual interarticulation” (162) – with words helping to determine the significance of images and vice versa – threatens the stability assigned by audiences to each medium, at the same time that it provokes the “hope” that each medium’s limitations can be overcome. Lindhé has rehearsed and extended that discussion to highlight specifically “the interaction between visual, verbal, auditive and kinetic elements in digital literature and art” (Lindhé Par.13). She makes the case that the more comprehensive theory of ekphrasis in rhetoric allows us to understand and appreciate the intermedial functions of digital textuality in new ways: “digital literature and art align with this concept of ekphrasis, especially in the way that its rhetorical meaning is about effect, immediacy, aurality, and tactility. The multimodal patterns of performativity in the rhetorical situation stage a space-body-word-image-nexus with relevance for how we could interpret and discuss digital aesthetics.” Lindhé’s concept of digital ekphrasis has much to offer as we think about the power of electronic literature, but I will argue that the ambivalence the trope has always elicited is just as important to remember.

In the final section of the presentation, I will demonstrate how various AR texts court a sense of the uncanny and thereby serve as paradigmatic examples of the multi-layered future of electronic literature. After noting the precedent of Caitlin Fisher’s Andromeda (Electronic Literature Collection, V.2), I will examine the remediation of print poetry through multimodal AR performances and locative poetry (Berry and Goodwin). Next, I will offer a close analysis of Sutu’s AR comic book Modern Polaxis, which employs both the palimpsest effects of AR and the tropes of science fiction (time travel, body snatchers, the automaton) to encourage us to “learn to taste the tea on both sides” of an uncanny reality. Finally, I will end with a discussion of Borsuk and Bouse’s Between Page and Screen, to my mind the most ambitious use yet of AR for literary expression. Like Lev Manovich’s thoughts on “the poetics of augmented space,” Borsuk’s work (both the book and her essay on “words in space and on the page”) shows us, it is more fruitful to think of AR as a cultural and aesthetic practice than as a technology. The platforms for AR may change from smartphones to wearables, and beyond, but AR itself will persist in, among other things, an uncanny electronic literature not just “born digital,” to use Strickland’s phrase, but cached in the world around us.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

Interfaces are back, or perhaps they never left. The familiar Socratic conceit from the Phaedrus, of communication as the process of writing directly on the soul of the other, has returned to center stage in today's discussions of culture and media. Indeed Western thought has long construed media as a grand choice between two kinds of interfaces. Following the optimistic path, media seamlessly interface self and other in a transparent and immediate connection. But, following the pessimistic path, media are the obstacles to direct communion, disintegrating self and other into misunderstanding and contradiction. In other words, media interfaces are either clear or complicated, either beautiful or deceptive, either already known or endlessly interpretable. Recognizing the limits of either path, Galloway charts an alternative course by considering the interface as an autonomous zone of aesthetic activity, guided by its own logic and its own ends: the interface effect. Rather than praising user-friendly interfaces that work well, or castigating those that work poorly, this book considers the unworkable nature of all interfaces, from windows and doors to screens and keyboards. Considered allegorically, such thresholds do not so much tell the story of their own operations but beckon outward into the realm of social and political life, and in so doing ask a question to which the political interpretation of interfaces is the only coherent answer. Grounded in philosophy and cultural theory and driven by close readings of video games, software, television, painting, and other images, Galloway seeks to explain the logic of digital culture through an analysis of its most emblematic and ubiquitous manifestation – the interface. (Source: Polity Press)

This thesis takes the position that current analyses of digitally mediated interactive experiences that include narrative elements often lack adequate consideration of the technical and historical contexts of their production.

From this position, this thesis asks the question: how is the reader/player/user's participation in interactive narrative experiences (such as hypertext fiction, interactive fiction, computer games, and electronic art) influenced by the technical and historical limitations of the interface?

In order to investigate this question, this thesis develops a single methodology from relevant media and narrative theory, in order to facilitate a comparative analysis of well known exemplars from distinct categories of digitally mediated experiences. These exemplars are the interactive fiction Adventure, the interactive art work Osmose, the hypertext fiction Afternoon, a story, and the computer/video games Myst, Doom, Half Life and Everquest.

The main argument of this thesis is that the technical limits of new media experiences cause significant ‘gaps’ in the reader’s experience of them, and that the cause of these gaps is the lack of a dedicated technology for new media, which instead ‘borrows’ technology from other fields. These gaps are overcome by a greater dependence upon the reader’s cognitive abilities than other media forms. This greater dependence can be described as a ‘performance’ by the reader/player/user, utilising Eco’s definition of an ‘open’ work (Eco 21).

This thesis further argues that the ‘mimetic’ and ‘immersive’ ambitions of current new media practice can increases these gaps, rather than overcoming them. The thesis also presents the case that these ‘gaps’ are often not caused by technical limits in the present, but are oversights by the author/designers that have arisen as the product of a craft culture that has been subject to significant technical limitations in the past. Compromises that originally existed to overcome technical limits have become conventions of the reader/player/user’s interactive literacy, even though these conventions impinge on the experience, and are no longer necessary because of subsequent technical advances. As a result, current new media users and designers now think of these limitations as natural.

This thesis concludes the argument by redefining ‘immersion’ as the investment the reader makes to overcome the gaps in an experience, and suggests that this investment is an important aspect of their performance of the work.

(Source: Author's abstract)