space

This paper argues that digital literature can be understood as a social hermeneutic dispositif. To demonstrate this thesis, an experimental book is presented. It is written/read using a geo-tagging software, that restitutes, to the reader acting as a co-author in a Web 2.0/3.0 context, the combination of significant (semantic) keywords (or tags) with a given city place and with a certain social temporality. The novel’s title is based in the philosophical idea of deixis, i.e., the articulation of space (geo), time (neo) and logos (discourse, reason). In the interface, the fictional text presents, at each scene, 3 writing/reading itineraries, each one using a specific literary medium/language, referring, in a greater or lesser extent, to dimensions ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘logos’. A first text has linguistic nature and was deconstructed into several sub-texts types: narrative (mention of major events), dialogic (characters dialogues) and meta-informative (keywords, tags). A second ‘text’ uses visual language inherent to characters and scenery photos (space or synchronic level) subjacent to the novel’s scenes (time or diachronic level). A 3rd ‘text’ refers to the language of maps, which represent the course (time) of the paths (space) used by novel’s characters in their daily lives both in the real and fictional world. The first (seminal) author associated photos both to the moment they were taken and to the urban space where these photos were captured or to a point in cyberspace.

(Source: ELD 2015)

When we strip the lexical band-aid ‘embodiment’ off the more than 350 year-old wound inflicted by the Cartesian split of mind and body, we find animation, the foundational dimension of the living. Everything living is animated. Flowers turn toward the sun; pill bugs curl into spheres; lambs rise on untried legs, finding their way into patterned coordinations. The phenomenon of movement testifies to animation as the foundational dimension of the living.

We propose that the importance of movement in the distribution of space and time is one of the things digital media works make palpable. While western aesthetics – consonant with its spatialised images of subjects and objects – has traditionally paid more attention to spatial form, this is being challenged by new forms of mobility made possible by digital media. These provide both the opportunity for immersion in mediated and programmed/programmable environments, but also the opportunity to move through existing and technologically augmented environments in different ways, using different surfaces and forms of literary inscription.

In these contexts, for example, the silent and stable forms of letters and words on a page that we associate with books take on an animatory force. Letters move and make sounds, as in the programmable works of writers such as John Cayley, Stephanie Strickland , Maria Mencia,, or else they are reclocated off the page so that one can touch and play with them (exemplary here is Camille Utterback’s ‘Text Rain’, or more recently, work being done in the CAVE environment at Brown University) , or else they are transported and translocated in processes that bear witness to movement and mobility through landscapes.

The programmable and interactive works that we analyse in this paper re-designate and redeploy of sensory ecologies in terms of movement through space. By introducing movement as an aesthetic dimension these new forms of writing and aesthetic practice implicitly acknowledge the importance of time or duration in the constitution of being, that is, in the constitution of objects, subjects and things which echo and mimic processes of ‘Life’.

(Source: Authors' abstract, ELO 2013 conference site: http://conference.eliterature.org/critical-writing/ethos-life-digital-w… )

In The Poetics of Space Bachelard applies the method of phenomenology to architecture basing his analysis not on purported origins but on lived experience of architecture. Wikipedia

This paper 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.

Hypertext (the non-sequential linking of text(s) and images) was first envisioned by Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson in its prehistory as an associational, archival storage system suitable for classifying and sorting vast quantities of information. But where library databases, technical manuals and other knowledge-based hypertexts still fulfill this function, literary hypertext overturns this proposed usage, celebrating both information overload and forgetfulness as the desired end of a reading. Promoting disassociation and an awareness of the spatio-temporal dimensions of its environment, hypertext fiction uses the aesthetics of its three-dimensional interface and structure to frustrate memory and to engender a sensory and emotional response in the reader. Focusing on M.D. Coverley's multimedia hypertext Califia, I will investigate how the aesthetics of the hypertext form become an engine of forgetfulness that drives her text through its explorations of lost memories, including the ravages of Alzheimer's, unofficial histories, secrets, missing pieces and the quest for hidden treasure.

An archive is born of forgetfulness (Derrida 11) and Coverley's feminist hypertext is an archival system that embraces contradictions, defining emotional and sensory information as the most important 'knowledge' to be stored. Since hypertext works with association, it is a mnemonic form, but, as an inclusive archival space, it also allows just such a proliferation of contradictions. And being rooted in short term memory as it is, hypertext is therefore by extension also rooted in memory loss. Without a hierarchy, a reader must decide what is important in a text and, working with an associational structure, she is bound to forget details. However, in literary hypertext the real information is encoded, not in the text as such, but in its structure. Dispersing information into the three-dimensional plot architecture, hypertext plays with memory loss as an asset (not a bug) by using a reader's memory against herself, by making the recall of specifics in a text difficult. Through a refusal of traditional plot devices, Coverley's fiction privileges the immersive, sensual experience of reading. Plot still exists, but because it is abstract and spatial--being the very structure and interface of the work--it is difficult to recreate in the mind except as an emotional and sensory response.

Coverley takes literary hypertext's innate associational abilities and incorporates the side effects of information overload into the aesthetics of her fiction, functioning both as plot elements and as the structure of her text. Other authors have used forgetfulness and memory as an aspect of their hypertext works (and I will use Michael Joyce's _Twilight, A Symphony_ as a counterpoint in passing), but never before has the cognitive process of memory loss been transformed into such a joyous sense of exploration as in Califia. This hypertext privileges forgetting and the rediscovery of what has been forgotten, but does not make disconnection or avoidance possible, returning readers to sites of lost memories and old traumas until the text's parameters have been mapped and its treasures recovered.

(Source: DAC 1999 Author's abstract)

As an educator as well as Director of Digital Media Studies at the University of Detroit Mercy, my pedagogical and personal interests lie in how to use media to incorporate inter-disciplinary studies; to use sound, images as well as visual and narrative compositions to communicate multi-dimensional ideas, passions and concepts. In relation to this inter-disciplinary approach, I incorporate the concept of "mixing" to weave together space, design, technology, story-telling and critical discourse. One of the concepts I try to reinforce is that 'space' includes the psychological as well as the physical. In addition, I teach digital media students that "design" is the intentional approach to choreograph the experiential and that digital technology is a tool for exploring these ideas. Accepting this, I challenge the students to consider: how does the user/viewer experience and process the interaction between digital media and the "narrative" of the everyday? Two of the texts I am currently interested in utilizing in the process of creating digital media artifacts are: Paul Miller, AKA DJ Spooky's manifesto "Rhythm Science" and Henry Jenkins' "Convergence Culture." One of the concepts Paul Miller addresses is that technology has become a paradigm for individual identity as well as an interface of the everyday events that tell our stories. Henry Jenkins offers critical insight into the multi-levels and interdisciplinary force behind current digital culture as well as the woven process by which technology converges with a sense of self and culture in the digital world. Using these texts as the framework for teaching some of the UDM Digital Media Studies courses, students are assigned to create short videos that address ideas from the books. For example, one video project was to weave the concept of "mixing" the students' everyday experiences and perceptions with audio tracks from DJ Spooky's work—using the concept of "synaesthesia" to ultimately weave DJ Spooky's audio pieces, which are themselves, in a sense woven artifacts of historical and auto-biographical reference—with the students' own interpretation of urban life, space and cultural critique. Many of these videos are time-based collages—abstract in nature. Another assignment was for the students to use the tool of technology to assemble Shoebox Stories, short videos taking critical stances on urban issues as well as personal stories and histories of the local culture of Detroit.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)