text fragment

Private reading practices and public spaces collide at the mobile browser, and this interactive installation imagines a browser that amplifies the intimate co-presence of its readers. In an ambient immersive environment, it asks if an interface could become more expressive of our influence on each other, and it embodies how language slips from one screen to another in an always shifting hybrid of reading-writing. Users join a public reading area equipped with a row of iPads, each opened to an experimental web browser. The darkened gallery combines the interstitial nature of the public waiting room with the intimacy of a bedroom, and the illumination from each screen invites digital eavesdropping and attention to fellow users. Upon browsing, each reader witnesses other readers' touch behaviors layered in colorful, ephemeral trails on their own screen as they browse. Fragments of text tapped by their neighbors float over their own reading choices, interceding in their chosen narratives, both as alteration of the reading experience and also as reminder that their reading behaviors are written elsewhere. In addition to the in-app display, the program collects these text fragments from all readers into an accumulating archive and conceptual poem, written collaboratively and programmatically. This shared composition is made publicly available on site, as the performance of digital reading becomes an act of writing in an era when every action becomes data. Language has always been about that spark gap of transmission from one mind to another. This work explores how digital reading negotiates the gap between readers as we share anonymous physical proximity but diffuse digital intimacy, plumbing the tensions alive in the intersections of reading–writing, physical–digital, self–other. The work directly engages ELO conference themes including "mobile technologies' effect on writing and reading habits" as well as considerations of screens and presence. The paper draws on interdisciplinary scholarship from media studies and classics, cognitive science and design research, to explore cultural and historical contexts for digital reading practices that ground the considerations of the installation. It argues that digital reading environments contribute to a more fragmented experience of subjectivity, one that reflects an existing social ecology which technology should be used to emphasize.

This paper explores the concept of narrativity in the city by analyzing the project Queering the City of Literature (#QtCoL), a distributed narrative inspired by Implementation (Rettberg and Montfort). Distributed narratives are literary texts that are distributed across different spaces and times to create divergence rather than unity (Walker 1). Implementation and #QtCoL build on several modern-day practices: both of the works consist of text fragments that participants were invited to put up in places of their choice on public surfaces. The texts were photographed and posted online.  



This paper analyses the work by means of a "diffractive reading" (Barad and Haraway) between the narrative and its urban context. Central to my analysis is my observation during the of #QtCoL event, which I co-organized, to understand the choices and experiences of people while choosing locations for text fragments.

The practice of putting up the texts highly influences the way in which the actor views the city, looking for an appropriate place for the narrative. The actor is invited to connect elements in the text fragment to elements in their surroundings. The actor who places the text might not have noticed certain elements if it hadn't been for the text fragment. Once the text fragment is placed in its context, the opposite occurs: the context influences how the narrative is read. Once the text fragment is placed, the surroundings influences the reading of the narrative.

This diffraction between narrative and context is highlighted by the act of photography, which shows the immediate context of the text but makes the city as a whole invisible. For the 'analog' reader, however, the context of the whole city is highly visible as the text has to be found inside the city. The combination of analog and digital practices thus highlights the representation of the city as a visual practice. In addition, the invitation to post images of the project on social media furthers the experience of ‘taking up space’ and having a presence, not only in the city but online as well. 

(source: ELO 2018 website)