virtual

Context aware technologies (Augmented Reality) allow for novel forms of interaction with physical environments. These technologies feature properties that allow information to be situated in the environment in a context aware manner. There are diverse ways in which information can be integrated into the environment by such means. The Microsoft Hololens, and related technologies, allow the placement of virtual information in locations that are congruent with physically tangible objects and environmental elements. You may place virtual images onto physical walls, punch virtual portals through to other (virtual) spaces in actual floors, or place a virtual ball on a physical table so that when the table is tilted the ball will roll along the surface of the table and drop onto the floor, bouncing on impact. The virtual object and the physically tangible space the virtual object has been placed within are, within the logic of the system, of the same ilk. The imaginary and the tangible are merged in a novel manner. Artists have been undertaking context specific creative interventions for some time, where the imaginary is sited in specific places. Janet Cardiff's work employing recorded spoken narrative for pre-determined walks (psycho-geographies) are an exemplar. Cardiff carefully crafts the recording of her voice to create a sense of co-location not only with the physical and visual environment the walker encounters, as they listen to the narrative, but also the aural characteristics of the location; Cardiff states, "On the CD you hear my voice giving directions, like 'turn left here' or 'go through this gateway,' layered on a background of sounds: the sound of my footsteps, traffic, birds and miscellaneous sound effects that have been pre-recorded on the same site as where they are being heard' (Gibbons 2007). This merging of now and then, the constructed and the experiential, allows the creation of a hybrid place that exists in the physical now and the artistic imaginary - a space between the real and the unreal. Whilst characterised as a psycho-geography this could also be considered a form of memory theatre (Yates 1992). Recent work by Judd Morrisey, The Operature (Engberg 2017), continues these developments, exploring the dramaturgies of augmented reality as an example of the memory theatre (or memory palace). This paper outlines a program of artistic augmented reality research that allows users to encode information into the environment around them, allowing them, or others, to recover that data at a later time from the environment it was inscribed upon. A focus of this work is on how the information, once inscribed, can evolve (self-modify) in a context aware manner, creating a new imaginary between author, environment and reader. The project seeks insights into how place might be explored as an active mnemonic, a literary and artistic (geo-poetic) site as subjective perception between the real and the unreal.

Paul Harris hybridizes the terms of hypertextual discourse and takes it to a higher power.

The spirit or at least pervasive desire of our age revolves around a sort of transparency: a desire to project ourselves as a surface of permeable traces, to exfoliate, let the inside become the outside, to become fully visible like the meat and bones of a Cronenberg character, while remaining invisible like the little hacker ghost (Turing’s Demon?) that tracks text in the Random Access Memory banks of the machine onto whose screen we splash words. In large part, the attractive force that transparency exerts is an effect of media culture; simultaneously, however, transparency marks a limit of im-mediacy - an unmediated, collapsed sensation where we can see the neurophysiology of our brains or the shapes of and linkages among our words. This is an immediacy of the sensory that never shades into the tactile - it is rather the immediacy of sensing the medium itself, of clicking tracks around the computer screen or dredging up hidden treasures on the Netscape of our lives.

This presentation provides an overview of Hatsune Miku, a virtual pop idol, and showcases a work by the speaker that uses her image and voice as platforms for the creation of electronic literature. Hatsune Miku is a multitude of things at once: a pop star, a software product that uses Yamaha’s Vocaloid text-to-song technology, a fictional character, and ultimately a global collaborative media platform. The electronic literature project presented, “Miku Forever,” uses Miku’s global fanbase as a kind of raw material. An endlessly recombinatory pop song, the lyrics sung by Miku for “Miku Forever” are algorithmically generated from a corpus of songs she has previously sung, and her digital body and dance moves are sourced from open-licensed, fan-created assets available on the web.

In this essay John Cayley reviews Nick Montfort’s #!, a book of computer generated poetry and the code that generated it. Exploring the triangle of Montfort’s programs, the machines that read them, and the output presented for human readers, Cayley situates the experience of reading and writing as intrinsically virtual, powered by its sustained potentiality, rather than its definitive comprehension. (Source: ebr)

Failure, A Writer’s Life is a catalogue of literary monstrosities. Its loosely organized vignettes and convolutes provide the intrepid reader with a philosophy for the unreadable, a consolation for the ignored, and a map for new literary worlds. "The unfinished, unreadable, unpublishable — the scribbled and illegible, the too slowly published, the countless unpublished, all that does not seem to count at all. . . . here lie all manner of ruins. From Marguerite Duras to Google Maps, Henri Bergson to H.P. Lovecraft, Orson Welles to Walter Benjamin to a host of literary ambulance drivers (not to mention the FBI, UFOs, and UbuWeb), _Failure, A Writer's Life_ charts empty spaces and occupied libraries, searches databases bereft of filters, files spam and porn and weather reports into their respective _konvoluts_, and realizes the full potential of cultural inscription. In a series of snapshots concatenated in the best surrealist mode, Milutis has curated a catalogue of curiosities as essential to understanding our current cultural condition as they are eccentric. With Nietzschean _witz_ and self-reflexive bravura, he teases out the occult links between heterogeneities in the tradition of Allen S. Weiss and Greil Marcus. In the process, Milutis redefines the 'virtual' as something much broader and more interesting than digital simulacra: as the unmanageable storehouse of memory and the inevitable expanse of forgetfulness. Here, in all its glamorous success, is the horizon of failure." ~ Craig Dworkin

Although the body has been the focus of much contemporary cultural theory, the models that are typically applied neglect the most salient characteristics of embodied existence -- movement, affect, and sensation -- in favor of concepts derived from linguistic theory. In Parables for the Virtual Brian Massumi views the body and media such as television, film, and the Internet, as cultural formations that operate onmultiple registers of sensation beyond the reach of the reading techniques founded on the standard rhetorical and semiotic models. Renewing and assessing William Jamesʹs radical empiricism and Henri Bergsonʹs philosophy of perception through the filter of the post-war French philosophy of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault, Massumi links a cultural logic of variation to questions of movement, affect, and sensation. 

Source: Publisher description

"Bodies in Code explores how our bodies experience and adapt to digital environments. Cyberculture theorists have tended to overlook biological reality when talking about virtual reality, and Mark B. N. Hansen's book shows what they've been missing. Cyberspace is anchored in the body, he argues, and it's the body--not high-tech computer graphics--that allows a person to feel like they are really "moving" through virtual reality. Of course these virtual experiences are also profoundly affecting our very understanding of what it means to live as embodied beings. Hansen draws upon recent work in visual culture, cognitive science, and new media studies, as well as examples of computer graphics, websites, and new media art, to show how our bodies are in some ways already becoming virtual."

(Source: Publisher website)