ambient literature

We live in a world where everyone with access to technology can publish. From YouTubers to Instagram-influencers, from gamers watching each other play online to writers self-publishing, content is everywhere. And yet, the biggest company with its most promising title and the podcaster putting their first episode online share the same problem: how to find an audience. Over recent years, digital technologies have fostered the proliferation of new platforms for publishing and broadcasting, and the rise of video streaming has further dissolved the boundaries between these two modes. Publishing no longer refers only to words but also images, video and sound and its reach is pervasive and global. Amplified Publishing, part of the Bristol+Bath Creative R+D project, a collaboration between four universities in the UK is examining what publishing has come to mean across sectors, platforms and media and explores its future direction. As a wide-scale research project, it looks at questions such as; What does ‘publishing’ mean in the 21st Century? How will the increased availability of seamless and synchronous visual and audio media enhance and expand traditional media, like books and magazines? What does personalisation offer to both content creators, their publishers, and their audiences? With the rise of visual storytelling, what is the future of reading? And, most importantly of all, who are our audiences, where are our audiences, and what does our audience want? This paper addresses this question of audience and seeks to understand specifically how narrative-based digital publishing, a theme within the Amplified Publishing project, can reach an active audience across platforms. In particular, it questions how audiences experience innovative forms and how their experiences can be mediated and guided by writers, producers and technologists. It uses findings drawn from an understanding of audience from electronic literature and ambient literature to draw conclusions about the future of audiences as they experience digital published content across platforms. It reaches beyond the Covid-19 digital landscape and seeks to understand how audiences have changed and what they might be looking for next. 

This paper will focus on “ambient literature” (Abba, Dovey, Pullinger 2020) as a kind of tradition-inspired literature of the future. Thus I will propose to look critically at traditional theoretical concepts and devices and analyse how apply them to characterise and realise such reading experiences. My starting point will be enhancing the concept of interactional metalepsis (Bell 2016 or Bell, Ensslin and Rustad 2014), then I will go for proposing the concept of “embedded dramatic monologue”, a form of narration built upon tradition and useful in creating immersive ambient reading experiences.I will focus on texts that declare: ‘Dear Reader, borrow me your body, and then I will show You my story’, thus, I will analyse works for which the corporeal “readiness” (Gadd 2020) is conditio sine qua non of reading, due to the fact that the reader’s body is conceptualised as an essential element of the author-reader contract. Such reading experiences frequently lead to mashing of ontological boundaries, to entering extradiegetic elements into diegetic world or the other way round, the phenomenon known as a metalepsis. Although theoretical approach to metalepsis had just been amplified in the digital fiction context (because the interactivity has opened new fields for artistic exploration of this device), ambient literature encourages deepening that critical reflection. The concept of interactional metalepsis yet proposed still underlies the metaphorical and symbolic dimension of the reader entering into the storyworld, while examples of ambient literature permit talk about literal overlapping of fictional and real world.However, such crossing of ontological borders results in a clear need of creating a space for a reader in the narration, narrative and storyworld.I will focus on the ways and devices used to achieve that, being extremely interested in the form of narration that creates such space for a reader, inviting him to cross the ontological borders. I will propose to look back at the traditional form of “dramatic monologue” (used for the first time by A. Camus in The Fall). In context of ambient literature we frequently can and should enhance the dramatic monologue’s theory (successfully built by i.e. M. Głowiński (Głowiński 1963)) and talk about “embedded dramatic monologue”; The latter - build upon the interactional metalepsis and a bleed of the storyworld into the real world of the reader (and vice versa) - does not simply simulate that in a storyworld there is a space for the reader, who is listening to the protagonist’s monologue. It really invites the reader to be and act in the storyworld, the storyworld that overlaps the reader’s reality. Ambient literature often takes the form of narration that does not pretend to permit the reader to listen to the story protagonists “as if” he was standing close to them, but “demands” that the reader really stand there.Classical locative narratives, even GPS-less ones (as Janet Cardiff’s Her Long Black Hair) and examples from works created on creative writing courses held at the University of Lodz will be case studies used to illustrate characterised form.

(Source: Author's own abstract)

The Ambient Literature project explores situated digital storytelling as it responds to the presence of a reader. Within an Ambient Literary work, urban space is reconfigured as a paratextual site to be ‘read’ just as we read the form of a book; becoming the site for story.

The foundation of the study are three commissioned works, each exploring an approach to the design and delivery of a digitally-mediated experience of urban space. These works, successively released in 2017 and 2018, comprise a research- by-practice approach to developing forms for digital writing – ‘It Must Have Been Dark by Then’, ‘The Cartographer’s Confession’ and ‘Breathe’ - each employ different approaches to the positioning role of the reader; the manner in which their presence is implicated in the construction of story; and the specific qualities of that presence within (and around) the works.

Drawing on an emerging form and grammar for digital writing in uncontrolled urban space, this paper argues that an Ambient Literature work - and potentially all situated storytelling by extension - induces a change in the nature of place for each reader; invoking an imperceptible hypertrophy of story within an apparently unchanged physical environment. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s conjecture that maps represent a temporal dimension in addition to their spatial representation alongside an examination of the legibility of urban space, the paper will explore how readers are implicated within an Ambient Literature canon, their role shifting toward a performative register, and accordingly shaping conventions for writing and reading in this form of practice.