spatiality

Early cyberspatial theories reflected on the qualities of computer mediated experience by introducing aspects of immateriality, incorporeality, symbolism, abstraction, as well as exploring the mental, perceptual, and psychological dimensions of digital experience itself. Electronic interactions have been described as platonically erotic, transcendental, allegorical, even ecstatic conditions, that still seem timely and compelling nowadays, even since the pre-pandemic era. Human mind appeared as an inherent ingredient of the digital phenomenon since its birth. On the other side, ideas such as ‘body amnesia’ or ‘fleshworld’, emerged denoting the rigidity of the physical body to reach the other side of the screen.These days, the superfluous, excessive, sometimes obsessive use of digital technology, pervasive software as well as the internet of things have surpassed the Cartesian mind-body dualism and have given rise to novel hybrid approaches of our contemporary relation to technology. Hybridity has created space for intertextual interpretations of experience, that do not divide the notion of mind and body, but comment on the complex interactions of self with digital culture, through numerous differentiated contexts, evolving cyborg ontologies, alternate bodies, human-nonhuman systems, transformative personas, all rendered through a daily mediated reality.The study attempts to look at the mind-body ever-present conundrum, through a quest on digital spatiality. Digital experience has always been inseparable from the metaphoric use of spatial concepts. At the same time, textual space constitutes an allegorical or symbolic construction with its own architecture, ambience, and other characteristics. Space is not only relating to the strict conception of geometry, physics, or mathematics, but also to an anthropological reading of existence, a quality that is often elusive and immeasurable, thus it helps define abstract, psychological, experiential phenomena, or in other words, that which is in fact indefinable.In this context, self takes the role of a mental dynamic, while space is interpreted as a metaphoric, volatile construction whose literary aesthetics emerge from digital culture. The idea of digital experience is approached though a series of textual-spatial concepts and projects that reflect on space that is constructed in the interstitial area between the digitally platformed self and the mediated environment. This exploration takes the form of creative writings, chatbot interviews, exercises of verbal configurations, visual poetics, interactive game-poems and other abstracts of writing in both artistic and educational contexts. The overall idea of the digital mind-body interpretation takes the form of a series of mental spatialities that comment on our contemporary way of being in the digital world. In architecture, to read means to uniquely understand and thoroughly grasp the phenomena of the surrounding environment - in this case, space is translated in an altered vocabulary that helps us understand what it means to ‘read’ the contemporary self in a platformed culture.

“E-poetry relies on code for its creation, preservation, and display: there is no way to experience a work of e-literature unless a computer is running it—reading it and perhaps also generating it.” Stephanie Strickland outlines 11 rules of electronic poetry.

The broad aim of this paper is to contribute to a discussion on some aspects of the relationship between e-literature, spatiality and site-specificity. The context for this particular investigation is a major initiative for the establishment and development of an Academy of New Media and Digital Arts (see below) on the Italian island of Procida, one of the three islands that sit in the Bay of Naples. Within this initiative, e-literature as both practice and community plays a central role.

One question which inevitable arises from the Procida project concerns the discrepancy between the geographical situatedness of the Academy on the one hand, and the dispersed nature of networked e-lit communities and of e-literature as a practice on the other. How will the relationship between site and network play out?

The paper itself is designed to emphasise the spatiality of e-texts, in contrast to the more temporally structured nature of page-based narrative. It comprises a pattern of “insular” sections that are linked to each other, although this pattern is one among many possible patterns. In other words the “textual islands” are both isolated and inter-located at the same time.

(Source: Authors' abstract)

Coover wrote: “The most distinctive literary contribution of the computer has been (...) the intimate layering and fusion of imagined spatiality and temporality.” Of course, by “spatiality” Coover meant the topologies of text non-linear in its presentation, not a more literal representation of space. I discuss my experiments using the Google Maps API as an interface for hypertext fiction. This of course is not in itself new, but there are some possibilities in cartography-oriented fiction I would like to call attention to. In particular:

1. Using a familiar interface, such works may introduce a broader audience to Electronic Fiction, without dumbing it down;

2. The Golden Age’s concerns with spatiality are recast now with a third extra dimension, represented space in a more literal sense. The realm of topological possibilities in this intertwining – temporality, textual structure, represented space – is vast. 3. Such works inevitably touch upon our subjective relationship with space, and the shifting modes of our articulation thereof. Three works are presented:

1. Where in the World is Loira do Banheiro? (2008) is a collaborative map of haunted places in Sao Paulo. Visitors are invited to contribute their own stories of haunted places – personal, a-friend-of-friendish, or belonging to folk/common knowledge. An introductory text and a design in imitation of classical “ghost stories” websites suggest some playfulness to the endeavor. This work has been featured in Folha de São Paulo and O Estado de São Paulo, the two largest newspapers of the city and the first and third, respectively, in the country. Besides points 2 and 3 listed above, this work explores the common grounds between anonymous writing and folkloric storytelling.

2. Quem Matou Clarah Averbuck? (2009) Clarah Averbuck is a writer residing in Sao Paulo, who became notorious for her thinly-veiledly autobiographical fiction and who began her career writing on the Internet. In the real world, she is alive; in the story, she is found dead in mysterious circumstances. Her death itself is completely irrelevant, but the “mystery of her death” connects different storylines. I have tried to point out the specificities of the interface, such as using satellite photographs of real places in a work of fiction and its consequences, for example; and to scrutinize point 2 more closely. It is a humorous work, and its Leitmotiv is the difference between fiction and lies. Clarah Averbuck was not pleased.

3. The Time Again of Bruno Zeitblom (2010 – of yet unfinished) This work portrays a character, a musician fascinated with Sound Landscapes and the role of spatiality in music, by describing his relationship with the space he inhabits. Recordings of found and ambient sounds are presented as the main character’s attempt of an "aural cartography" of the city.

(Source: Author's abstract for ELO_AI).

This case study was originally prepared for, but does not appear in, New Directions in Digital Poetry (New York: Continuum, 2012); see http://newdirectionsindigitalpoetry.net

Source: footnote 2 to the article

This paper "Spatial Remediations: Navigating the social constructs of the interactive documentary image in Inside/Outside, The Unknown Territories Project, and Estuary" introduces three original works that use features of interactive documentary arts to explore social constructions of places and their attending narratives. The three interactive projects that are introduced are Inside/Outside, The Unknown Territories Project, and Estuary. The paper asks how tools of layering, compositing and navigation through documentary imagery in photography and film contribute to an understanding of the connection between social relationships and a sense of space.

How do we think? N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis-the belief that humans and technics are coevolving-and advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa. mines the evolution of the field from the traditional humanities and how the digital humanities are changing academic scholarship, research, teaching, and publication. She goes on to depict the neurological consequences of working in digital media, where skimming and scanning, or "hyper reading," and analysis through machine algorithms are forms of reading as valid as close reading once was. Hayles contends that we must recognize all three types of reading and understand the limitations and possibilities of each. In addition to illustrating what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. She considers the effects of early databases such as telegraph code books and confronts our changing perceptions of time and space in the digital age, illustrating this through three innovative digital productions - Steve Tomasula's electronic novel, "TOC"; Steven Hall's "The Raw Shark Texts"; and Mark Z. Danielewski's "Only Revolutions". Deepening our understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital technologies have placed in the hands of humanists, "How We Think" presents a cogent rationale for tackling the challenges facing the humanities today.

(Source: University of Chicago Press blurb)

A review of Beyond the Screen: Transformations of Literary Structures, Interfaces and Genres, edited by Peter Gendolla and Jörgen Schäfer.