Editor's Introduction: Reconfiguring Place and Space in New Media Writing

This installment of the Iowa Review Web explores the function of place and space in recent new media writing. Each of the four interviews concern works that in some way attempt to reconfigure our understanding of the relationship between space and storytelling. Each of the primary works discussed in these interviews also pushes space in another sense, in that each attempts to explore a new "possibility space" on the boundary between different forms and fields of multimedia experience: between story and game, between game and drama, between literature and conceptual art, between game and performance. The introduction contextualizes the narrative function of space in a number of recent works of electronic literature.

Pull Quotes

In most hypertext fiction, the role of chronology in structuring the narrative is greatly diminished in comparison to print fiction conventions. In the absence of chronology, the authors of fragmented multilinear narratives need to offer their readers other tools for navigating the text.

While installations and VR environments have increasingly liberated the user's body from the seated-in-front-of-screen-at-keyboard position and brought the body inside the ontological space of the work itself, mobile computing and communication technologies are increasingly powerful and pervasive. Writers, artists, performers, and "puppet-masters" are employing network writing strategies to deploy a variety of projects that extend from the network into the real world.

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reconfiguring_place_and_space.pdf (126.13 KB)