Ambient literature : towards a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices

This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016–2018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices. Acknowledgments Contents Notes on Contributors List of Figures Introduction Everyday Mixed Realities The Ambient Literature Project Situated Readings Are We not Locative? Ambience and Immersion The Book References Ready Reader One: Recovering Reading as an Ambient Practice References What We Talk About When We Talk About (Ambient Literature) Context The Cartographer’s Context Context Stinks(!) Computers and Context Living in the Background The Problem of Context Context Is Everything Ambient Contexts References Objects, Places, and Entanglements Entanglements Reading Objects Reading Breathe Reading Palimpsests Reading Place Conclusion Bibliography It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman Developing Ambient Attention Reading the Subject of Attention The Experience of Attention The Moralizing of Attention Both Present and Not Literature, Distraction, and Immersion Attending to Ambience Hermeneutics of Ambient Attention Kate Pullinger’s Breathe Messiness and Ubiquity References Critical Ambience Introduction The Desire to Be Enveloped Critical Practices Ambience Praxis Conclusion References The Politics of Ambient Literature Foundations of Digital Power: Being Literary and Being Smart Voices of Wildness Reading Bodies Conclusion Bibliography The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee Where I’m Coming from: Studying the Novelty of Immersive Algorithms The Problem of the Unreadable Text There Is a Way Out! The Specificity of Our Method What They Saw The Occurrence of the Thing Immersive Algorithms Readers Leaning In Subjectivity and Anticipation Conclusion References An Aesthetics of Ambient Literature; Experience, Narrative, Design Dewey’s Aesthetic Experience The Event of Aesthetic Experience; Environment, Energy, Emotions Ambient Literature, a Case Study: The Cartographer’s Confession (2017) Conclusion References Breathe: An Artist Interview with Kate Pullinger Writing Ambient Literature Ambient Poetics Embodied Reading Movement Performance Textual Space Unpredictability Temporality Reflexive Technology References Index This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (20162018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scene. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices