oral communication

Aurality may be understood either as the entirety of distinguishable, culturally impli- cated sonic phenomena or, more narrowly and with specific regard to aurature, as the entirety of linguistically implicated sonic phenomena.

Aurature must be distinguished from oral literature (in orality or oral culture), for at least two reasons. In the first place, to emphasize that aurature comes to exist more on the basis of its being heard and interpreted rather than on the circumstances of its production (by a mouth or speaking instrument) and secondly, for historical reasons, because contemporary digital audio recording, automatic speech recognition and auto- matic speech synthesis technologies fundamentally reconfigure—in their cumulative amalgamation—the relationship between linguistic objects in aurality and the archive of cultural practice. Whereas, during the literally pre-historic period before writing (before there were linguistic objects as persistent visual traces), essential affordances of the archive were denied to oral culture, in principle, the digitalization of the archive allows aurature to be both created and appreciated with all the historical affordances and the cultural potentialities of literature.

This is the currently proposed definition of aurature that most concerns us, but it would be quite appropriate for the term to be applied to the entirety of recordable linguistic practices in aurality, including documentary as opposed to artistic practices, for example—by analogy with literature as it is applied with respect to visually supported linguistic cultural practices. 

(Source: Author's abstract)

In my paper I would like to propose reconfiguration of “literariness” through the concept of liberature formulated by Zenon Fajfer and Katarzyna Bazarnik (Bazarnik, 2005), updated to some extent with the theory of affordances (Norman, 1990, 2004). The term which according to Bazarnik (2005) denotes a transgenre where content (text) and its medium form a whole, seems to offer rich theoretical possibilities – especially if “literariness” is to be conceived also as a media-specific, embodied yet emergent and contigent phenomenon (Hayles, 2002). However, the concept of liberature - set from the ouset as both a theoretical tool against a form/content dualism and means to study multimodality of a literary text – still offers an interesting proposition when it comes to instances of e-literature developed for touch screen devices. A particularly interesting example to illustrate such interrogations is The Humument App by Tom Phillips. It is a part of the ongoing project coming from the artist known, among others, from his cooperation with Peter Greenaway on TV Dante. In 1966, inspired by Burrough's cut-up technique, Phillips started working on the print of a late Victorian novel, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Graphically enhanced, collaged and reconfigured, the artwork has been published in 1970 by Tetrad Press as The Humument Book: A Treated Victorian Novel with subsequent editions from Thames & Hudson in 1980, 1986, 1998 and 2004, each of which modified the precedent versions. This part of a project has already been interpreted by N. Katherine Hayles (Hayles, 2002). However, in 2010 The Humument has been released as a tablet application, enhanced with a few interactive features: “the oracle” seems to be the most interesting as the case of remediation of oral communication mode. Apart from questions that had already been asked (eg. about word/image interplay, the book as artefact and the narrative as the case of “interiorized subjectivity”) this particular instance of the Phillips' project inspires as well to pose a set of new inquiries. What constitutes “literariness” of touch screen device application? How – if ever - does it differ from its print (or remixed multimodal for that matter) incarnation? Does the notion of “literariness” exist independent from media into which it is inscribed? Could the protagnist of The Humument App – considering the common social media plug-ins included within it - be seen as an instance of networked subjectivity?

K. Bazarnik (2005), What is liberature. [in]: Bartkowiak’s Forum Book Art. Compendium of Contemporary Fine Prints, Artists’ Books, Broadsides, Portfolios and Book Objects. Yearbook no 23. Hamburg: H.S. Bartkowiak, pp. 465-468K.

N. Hayles (2002), Writing Machines, Cambridge and London: MIT Press

D.A. Norman (1990), The Design of Everyday Things, New York: Doubleday(2004), Design as Communication, http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/design_as_comun.htmlaccessed 19.12.2012

(Source: Author's abstract at ELO 2013 site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/humument-app-tom-phi… )

Janet Murray writes, “The kaleidoscopic powers the computer offers us…might also lead to compelling narratives that capture our new situation as citizens of a global community. The media explosion of the past one hundred years has brought us face-to-face with particular individuals around the world without telling us how to connect with them” (282). This assertion points to the transforming effects digital media are now having on the ways that we experience representational arts following the advent of digital technology, and points to some of the potential setbacks that Internet-based narrative might embody. This paper will investigate these implications as they relate to narrative trajectory and possibility through analysis of Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph’s networked novel Flight Paths (2009).

One of the greatest assets of using Internet-based technologies resides in the potential for these technologies to expand the possibilities for action and interaction among people disbursed through time and space. Flight Paths hearkens to the beginnings of a return to the notion of reading and writing as a social activity and the reestablishment of literature to historical “oral” traditions. In this presentation, I will identify the implications of communal narratives developed via digital means, exploring the potentials of networked narrative spaces as they apply to the larger field of narrative. The potentials for this and other socially generated electronic texts collapse time, space, or both through the instantaneously reciprocal possibilities inherent to works that exist within the digital realm. The Internet and its instant communication possibilities allow for a further change in digital narratives that return us to some of our earliest narrative roots.

This return to early narrative traditions is perhaps one of the most important ways in which narrative is becoming increasingly mimetic in the wake of digital technologies, pointing to the ways in which electronic literature may be positioning itself to become a hyperreal cultural stand-in for real-life narrative exchanges. Flight Paths is a text that connects global readers and allows for continual streams of data incorporation into the narrative. Many other authors are pursuing this trend through Web 2.0 technologies like Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr, illustrating a drift towards collaborative, continually updated narrative strategies that are further pushing us towards Baudrillard’s conception of the simulacra as indicative of our 21st-century reality. If fictionalized narratives can convincingly-enough simulate real-life experiences of their content, while simultaneously replicating interpersonal exchanges of said narrative and further overstepping the limiting possibilities of the tangible world through digital means, what is to stop them from assuming the revered place of the hyperreal that our culture already so highly values? This paper will connect these seemingly contradictory threads, asserting that Flight Paths and other similar works are moving us in two directions simultaneously – towards a group-centered oral culture of the past that is likewise a marker of the hyperreal ideals of the future.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI)