In the fall term of 2012-13 a group of museum studies students at Umeå
University in Sweden were challenged as part of their course to make a
museum installation in a public space using Quick Response (QR) Codes.
"It is my assessment that this new model of cultural production results
in approaching exhibitions as a process—that is an ongoing
conversation with the public. Nevertheless, while the action may be
with art spaces and non-profit galleries, these places have to make
sure that they also stay relevant because the action does not
necessarily stay with them: it moves anywhere due to the possibilities
offered by the new state of globalization supported by networked
culture". - When the Action Leaves the Museum: New Approaches to the Exhibition as a Tool of Communication by Eduardo Navas
“The
labours of men of genius, however erroneously directed, scarcely ever
fail in ultimately turning to the solid advantage of mankind. ”
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus.
“One
text that shows the disaster of the divorce between science and poetry
would be the one by Mary Shelley whose name is Frankenstein.”
Avital Ronell, Body/No Body (in conversation with Werner Herzog)
Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley (published 1818) represents a historical and literary
divergence between the poetic and the technical, and is a significant
reaction against this split as part of English Romanticism. It is the
contention of my presentation that in contemporary digital works of art
and narrative we are witnessing a re-marriage of science and poetry.
However, this union should be no automatic cause for romantic joy, as
the present situation in the education sector of most Western
democracies indicates. Today, the natural sciences are separated from
and weighted favorably in relation to the production and analysis of
culture. There is little to indicate that this is an effective strategy
in light of present global ‘network culture’ initiatives. Today, the
union of science and poetry in digital media is felt most acutely in
reading, or the performative interpretation of imaginative works.
Computer games, websites, digital works of literature, apps, virtual
worlds, interactive art, and spatial media (GIS, Kinnect, GPS, Wii) are
interpreted as they are performed and often require some knowledge of
the medium by the user in order for the work to function. This situation
represents a form of reading that has not been practiced widely in
Western academic and literate circles for several centuries. We are not
witnessing a return to what Walter J. Ong famously terms a “secondary
orality” (10-11), but rather we are seeing a form of inscription rapidly
emerge that is spatial, multi-temporal, performed, place-bound, visual,
sonic, and navigated. Two central concepts are important for
understanding how digital works are generally interpreted, and these are
simulation and remix. Representation has become the domain of mediating
objects, both virtual and physical, while reading is as much about
arranging and appropriating as it is about reference, symbolism,
iconography and interpretation. Based on a relatively small selection of
digital works this presentation examines reception practices involving
digital media, which suggest an expanded concept of reading where the
material technology of a work determines meaning as much as its
representative elements do. In this examination I demonstrate how
performance, participation, co-authoring, and remix make the reading of
the digital works. These works are
The remix is now an established form of cultural production. While legal action and artistic endeavour push remix to new heights of sublimity and farce, the massive growth of what Lawrence Lessig calls the "read/write" culture continues unabated as a source of music, visual and literary arts. Recent examples include Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009) as a work of remix literature, and MIA's Paper Planes (2007), which uses the riff from The Clash's song 'Straight To Hell'. The works of the 2010 Art Remix exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts also contain many examples of remix in the visual arts.
Remix is an important part of digital culture. As a result of the extent remix has developed in relation to digital technologies, it has become a popular topic in theoretical and academic contexts as well. This interest has resulted in debates concerning how we should understand remix in a wide variety of practices and genres. For example, Michele Knobel and Colin Lankshear describe,
"Remix means to take cultural artifacts and combine and manipulate them into new kinds of creative blends. In this sense, remix is as old as human cultures, and human cultures are themselves products of remixing. Since the late 1980s, however—originating with highly contrived forms of music remix by dancehall DJs—remix practices have been greatly amplified in scope and sophistication by recent developments in digital technologies. These make it possible for home-based digital practitioners to produce polished remixes across a range of media and cultural forms. This has in turn strengthened remix culture, encouraging seemingly endless hybridizations in language, genre, content, technique, and the like, and raised questions of legal, educational, and cultural import."
Remix as both a theoretical field and practical concept is discussed on the excellent blog Remix Theory by Eduado Navas, as well as in the work of Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid), and in documentary films such as Good Copy Bad Copy (2007). As I have already mentioned, the work of Harvard University Law Professor Lawrence Lessig is well-known in relation to remix culture, and to Lessig's name we should add Henry Jenkins as a source of valuable writing on the topic.
The advent of new ways to legally frame and claim copyright, such as the Creative Commons (CC) Licence options, has given new scope to the practice of remix. Combining CC licensing with online archives, such as the Internet Archive or the Freesound Project, provide remix artists with the raw materials for their work. To say anything about the digital tools that are available for remixing here would not do justice to the topic. The number of digital tools available for remixing audio, image and text today is huge.
Which leads me to the motivation for this short post on a huge topic. Next Thursday 7 April between 13:00-16:00, HUMlab will be hosting a short course entitled Artistic Expressions and Copyright: The theory and practice of remix culture, which will first look at the origins of remix in the arts, then some contemporary examples, and finally some of the tools available to remix in various media on your own. If you are interested or experienced in remix I would like to invite you to spend a few hours with Carl-Erik and myself making and breaking culture as it is meant to be......(follow the course title link for registration).
In the mid 1990s I was out and about in the bush and inner city with the ferals of Australia. Now I am teaching Swedish people about the culture:
In The Hunter a group of colourful people visit the home, camping in the yard in buses and a tipi. These characters are ferals.
The feral subculture is a counter-cultural social movement originating in the latter part of the twentieth century, mainly centered in Australia. The movement reached its media heyday in the mid 1990s, in parallel with other similar movements in Europe and elsewhere. In common with those movements, the feral phenomenon can be seen as part of the wider counterculture. In Australasia, the ferals are often seen as an amalgam of the punk and hippie subcultures, with a radical environmental philosophy. The movement, during the 1990s, was the subject of national attention, and as a phenomenon has been the subject of anthropological attention as a characteristically Australian "alternative lifestyle".
"So what constitutes the feral spectacle? They are often talented musicians, didj players, artists, dressed in recycled garb, dreadlocked, adorned with multiple piercings and folk-jewellery: feathers, birds feet, skulls and umbilical-cord necklaces (feralia). A wild rustic appearance is desirable. For many, this transpires as fabrics fade and hair tangles in unkempt locks. Others will go to great lengths to achieve a turbulent look - a 'cultivated crustiness' (Hetherington 1996a:43). The feral rig is an ensemble of materials discovered dada-esque in garage sales, op' shops, or fashioned from the hide of road-kill or dead animals found in the bush. Outfits range from the sartorial splendour of brightly imbued and offbeat garments, to dirty green and brown hued favourites. Army great coats with personalised patches sewn on the rear are not uncommon, nor are silken night dresses and fairy wings. They revel in an iconography of otherness and authenticity. The identification with various indigenous peoples and historical cultures - their cosmologies, rituals and artefacts - is apparent in multiple appropriations. " - The Feral Spectacle
"Going Tribal", a documentary by Light Source Films, examined the subculture in 1995. The feral movement is strongly associated with radical environmentalism and a communal lifestyle, with many members residing on multiple occupancy properties. In common with the hippies before them, many members of the feral movement rely on a system of crash pads, squats, and extended networks of "friends of friends" throughout Australia to travel with a minimum of financial outlay.Although the itinerant lifestyle and environmental beliefs most associated with the feral movement are akin to those of the earlier hippie movement, the ferals adopted a confrontational, politically charged style of dress, music, and philosophy more often associated with the punk movement.
As part of the Environments for Teaching and Learning course I observed the work of three educational practitioners in learning and teaching situations. In choosing the settings for the sessions I attempted to diversify the spaces. The first of the three I chose was a traditional classroom with a centre ‘stage’ at the ‘front’ with equipment and a desk. In the classroom the learners were well defined as an audience and sat in rows separate from the leader of the session. The second space I observed for teaching was a large lecture theatre with seating for around one hundred people. Once again the audience sat in rows and the educator took up a position behind lectern at the front of the amphitheatre style space. The third location I observed for teaching was a computer lab where a workshop was conducted in physical computing. I commenced this study with the idea that a space defines the interactions that occur in it. This idea seemed to be fulfilled by my observations, but the focus for this report is the style and strategies of those leading the learning and teaching sessions I observed.
Technology
A common thread through each of the sessions I observed was the use and misuse of technology. In the traditional classroom setting an overhead projector was used, as well as a white board and reading aloud from primary texts. References were made to websites during the session by the educator but these sites where not shown to the class, despite their being a computer and projector in the room. These were never turned on during the session, although they working perfectly. The educator read from several texts during the session, while standing behind the desk at the front of the room. At one point a question was put to the class in general for anyone to answer but there was no response. The line between the educator’s space and the learners was crossed when hand outs were distributed but no discussion was made about the handouts only a single reference to what they described. Similarly in the lecture hall session I observed the line between the leader of the session and the audience was never crossed. In regards to the technology used in the lecture hall the educator set up a video camera to film the lecture to be put out on the web later. The projector the educator was planning to show slides on did not work. As a result the lecture is only verbal with no visual materials. The educator stated the slides will be put on the course website later. In contrast to the classroom and the lecture hall, the computer lab workshop had a technician in attendance during the entire session. As a result there were no technical problems that lasted more than a few minutes and the use of technology was extensive. I conclude from these observations regarding the use of technology in the learning situation, that technical support is an essential element in learning.
Participation and Engagement
In my limited experience of teaching I have found the active participation of learners in learning to be an effective measure of understanding and contextualisation. In the three learning sessions I observed I noticed several techniques used by the education practitioners for drawing out the learners into speaking, making a decision or seeking an opinion or confirmation regarding what was being dealt with. In the classroom questions were put to the group but of the three questions put to the class none were answered. Towards the end of the session a learner asked an impromptu question. After a short break in the middle of the classroom lecture, the educator entered the room to begin the second half of the session eating an apple. The eating of the apple seemed to disengage the leader of the session from making contact with the learners. In the lecture hall the educational practitioner leading the session opened the session with a question, “How is it going with the reading?” which led to a short discussion on the readings for the course. Later in the session the educator said “You can speak up and break in at anytime. It is so boring when I just talk”. This statement was met almost immediately with a question. Finally the educator wrote on the whiteboard several keywords and then asked for definitions from the group. It was not until definitions had been given that the next topic in the session was taken up. This forced several of the learners to speak up during the class which in turn led to short discussions. These strategies can be contrasted to the use of the whiteboard in the traditional classroom session where the educator read out from the text. There was no discussion around anything that was projected or written by the educator in the classroom setting.
The use of objects for teaching was a part of the computer lab workshop and facilitated participation and engagement from the group. While the genre of the subject area (computer science) made the use of objects in learning more self-evident, I can see that it could be possible to use objects in learning for any discipline. There was no central space defined in the computer lab workshop and the leader of the session was forced to move around the learners and speak from different parts of the space. The learner’s attention was drawn around the space rather than just fixed on a single point. While the educational practitioner moved between the four computers shared by ten learners it was the objects that brought the groups into discussion. The objects provided the educator with a focus for questions and statements to each of the learners individually. All statements that the educator made during the workshop session were inquiring or questioning and were directed towards the learners. These included “It works well, but tell me what it does.” Or “is it what I wanted?” and “It turns the motor on but is that all it should do?” The use of rhetorical questions becomes much easier and feels more natural when there is a subject for the question that is not a learner (i.e. “What do you think about it?”). The focus for questions from the workshop was not the learners, but on the objects they were dealing with. In a more humanistic subject setting, as was the case with both the classroom and lecture hall contexts, the objects of discussion could be supplied by technology. Working with objects to explain concepts I think has great possibilities in learning. Visual images, primary texts and even artefacts could be used to provoke discussion and the involvement and engagement of learners.
Performance
The performance of the educational practitioner created the situations for learning in each of the sessions observed. In the classroom session the educator seemed to have planned very well, but the contact made with the learners suffered from a number of performance issues. By standing in one position in the room or sitting on the ‘educator’s desk’ at the front of the room the educator did not move into the learner’s space at any point in the classroom session. The physical position adopted by the educator was reinforced by the use of language and the failure to take advantage of the technology. By reading out from printed material contact was lost with the learners. Eye contact and speech directed towards a present addressee is more likely to be excluded from educator’s performance if it includes reading from a printed primary text. Finally, by eating during part of the session, the educator distorted the focus, removing it from the subject of the session and from the learners. These examples are each elements within the performance of the educator. In the lecture hall session, the educator also remained in a single area of the space, but the design of the amphitheater prevents any real movement between the two defined spaces. Instead, the educator attempted at several times to project out into the learners portion of the space. By addressing questions to the group and asking for questions (“It is so boring when I just talk”), the performance of the educator attempts to break down the barriers created by the physical space and cross over into the learner’s area. The crossing over into the space and attention of the learners was not really achieved in either the classroom or the lecture hall sessions. At the centre of this failure was the performance of the educator in each.
I contrast the classroom and lecture hall sessions with the workshop in the computer lab in the performance of the educator. A sense of enthusiasm, which is not excessive but is evident, was a strong element in the performance of the educator in the computer lab session. The session was divided into five stages:
1. Learners sit in rows and listen to a short presentation by educator
2. Learners move to the computer stations in small groups. Begin planning
3. Learners move to work table were materials are needed to complete tasks set in stage
4. Learners return to stations complete programming of artefacts assembled in stage
5. Learners demonstrate projects
The variation of formats represented by each of these five stages provided a shift in focus for the learners that had continuity but sufficient variation to be interesting. Between stages 2 and 3 coffee and cookies were made available to the learners and the educator joined them in chatting. The social pause for the group provides a contrast to the educator eating the apple alone in front of the group while continuing with the learning session from the classroom situation. The experience is shared in the workshop situation, while in the classroom it becomes a barrier to communication.
Conclusions
I draw a number of conclusions from my observations of three learning sessions. The use of technology has great potential in learning, but it is necessary for it to be well integrated into the experience to be useful. Technical support should accessible at all times when technology is used in the learning space. The technology should also be integrated into the learning experience rather than simply added on. If a piece of machinery or a printed hand out is to be used in the session it should serve a purpose other than being an object. It should be referred to in the broader contexts of the session. Any item of technology that is mechanical should be tested before it is used in the session. Related to technology are the levels of participation and engagement generated in the learning experience. The learners are not the only ones who should be sharing in a participative and engaged environment. It is necessary for the educator to show signs of engagement and enthusiasm in the experience. If the spaces for each of the learning sessions I observed are to be thought of as broken up into particular zones, where a single definition of use dominates a single area, then the position of the educator and the learners become influential. I think the educator should use the ways portions of the space are defined by the design and layout of the site of learning. Each educator I observed made attempts to breach the space between themselves and the learners, but not all attempts were successful. In the workshop example which I observed, the division of the session into five separate zones, where activities were combined with themes in their own areas, with their own objects, forced a total integration of the educator and the learners in the space. Once the space has been defined by the educator it should be the source of strategies for integration of learners and educators into a single space.Accompanying such strategies is the use of verbal techniques for addressing learners in direct ways, encouraging conversation and questions. A break and the sharing of food with the learners in the workshop situation created a shared space with the educator. By doing so hierarchies can be resisted and more effective channels opened in learning.
I have been asked to give a presentation for the staff at the Department of Language Studies (my home department) on using wikis in teaching.
My introduction to wikis was from the incomparable Bryan Alexander, who visited Umeå University and HUMlab in 2003. Back then it was Wikipedia that was grabbing the attention of many.
A wiki is a Hawaiian word for "fast". A wiki is a page or collection of Web pages designed to enable anyone who accesses it to contribute or modify content, using a simplified markup language. Wikis are often used to create collaborative websites and to power community websites. The collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia is one of the best-known wikis. Wikis are used in business to provide intranet and Knowledge Management systems. Ward Cunningham, the developer of the first wiki software, WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work" wikipedia
The strength of the wiki is it is very simple. A wiki is primarily a text based web page where editing can be done in a simplified markup language, sometimes known as "wikitext":
There is no commonly accepted standard wikitext language. The grammar, structure, features, keywords and so on are dependent on the particular wiki software used on the particular website. For example, all wikitext markup languages have a simple way of hyperlinking to other pages within the site, but there are several different syntax conventions for these links. Many wikis, especially the earlier ones, use CamelCase to mark words that should be automatically linked. In some wikis (such as Wikipedia and other MediaWiki-based wikis) this convention was abandoned in favor of explicit link markup, which Wikipedia calls "free links", for example with [[…]].
Changes can be made to the wiki either using an editing tool, with pictures and buttons to make changes or it can be written in code, which does not take long to learn:
Editing window of the teaching wiki I use for English A Realia
A wiki has the potential to be a highly collaborative tool where communal authorship (that can be based on group or individual work on campus or over distance)can be explored in learning. Any one who is registered with the wiki can author content on it. Content is saved, so any mistakes that may be made can be changed back immediately.
Webpage from a teaching wiki. The backup files are shown.
The use of a wiki in a course should be connected for a desire to encourage learner participation and presentation based learning. With a wiki students can organize themselves into groups, comment and discuss in forums, take up elements from the course and develop them further, comment and critique them. This is where the revolutionary aspects of wikis in the classroom come forward.
If a wiki is to be used to the full of its potential in learning and teaching the role of the teacher is changed. The teacher must be prepared to have their own work placed in a position where students have the opportunity to use it in a number of ways . By using a wiki as a platform in learning material can be added to the course by students, work that is discussed in the classroom can be altered or remixed by students. The course can be arranged to include this student input in the assessment or teaching plan.
Post Seminar In the seminar I was joined by Satish Patel from Kalmar College, who has a lot of experience with using learning platforms in teaching. Satish told me about this video, Wikis in Plain English:
We discussed a number of potential applications for wikis, both as teaching tools and for coordinating research and teaching in the department. An interesting suggestion was made concerning using wikis as an archive for the writing process. Based on the way a wiki saves older versions of a text, one could use it to keep a record of a writing or research project. This could be done by a single author or a group. Patish recommended PBwikis and Wetpaint Wikis to get started. I have been using ProjectForum wiki and recommend it highly.
I hope to have further collaboration with Satish. As I was leaving university today I met a colleague who said he had just set up a PBwiki for his first foray into the world of wikis. I was very happy to hear it.
Virtual worlds such as Second Life have become an ever expanding area of interest for pedagogical and artistic experiments. Now, students in the museology program at Umeå University have entered the digital scene. A vernissage exhibition will take place on Tuesday 20 January at 7:00 PM at HUMlab at Umeå University, located one level below the University Library. Second Life is a 3-D virtual world community accessible via the internet with users around the entire globe. Countless galleries, museums and artists are already engaged in worlds like Second Life. The museology program students at the department of culture and media studies are the latest entrants in the digital scene. For several intensive weeks within the framework of their study program, the students have explored the possible opportunities that virtual worlds have as platforms for museology. The result is four exhibitions that illustrate and adapt to themes such as gender/sexuality/disability, social stratification, place/region/nation, and ethnicity/religion. Existing Second Life users can experience the exhibition from the 20th of January via: http://world.secondlife.com/region/d3b84553-8e9a-4345-a84a-2aaa011ee1a8 The 3-D world of Second Life is a social arena that makes it possible to communicate and learn in new and different ways than previous digital platforms. A far as we know, the museology program at Umeå University is the first in Sweden to use Second Life in this educational format.
I gave a lecture yesterday on Space and Place in Architexture for the Museum Studies course I have been working with. I made a long blog entry for the session on my teaching blog Augmented Reality. Accessible from the link are such gems as
"The power a place such as a mere room possesses determines not only where I am in the limited sense of cartographic location but how I am together with others (i.e. how I commingle and communicate with them) and even who we shall become together. the "how" and the "who" are intimately tied to the "where", which gives to them a special content and a coloration not available form any other source. Place bestows upon them "a local habitation and a name" by establishing a concrete situatedness in the common world. This emplacement is as social as it is personal. The ideolocal is not merely idiosyncratic or individual; it is also collective in character." Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Towards a New Understanding of the Place-World. (23)
Over on Augmented Reality there are images, a couple of videos, lots of quotes and a great map:
Yesterday I finished marking the exam papers for a first year course I wrote and have been teaching this term. As part of the course video podcasts were made of each of the six lectures (two hours each). As well there is a website (actually a wiki, which I think I would like to hand over to the students in future courses) which takes up well over 100 pages of text with images and dozens of videos. I suppose in one way it is now a free online course.
Cultures of Commonwealth English A first year university English studies realia course titled Cultures of Commonwealth English. It attempts to provide a short but rather intense introduction into the the history, cultures and institutions of four nations that were once united as part of the British Empire. These nations are England, India, South Africa and Australia. In each of these nations the English language plays an important role in society. The Cultures of Commonwealth English course is an examination of why English is spoken in these nations and what events and practices led to the situation we have today where the four nations are members of the Commonwealth of Nations. We will discuss some of the cultural and social areas where English is spoken and consider some examples of where it is resisted, perhaps as a sign of a colonial past that still has repercussions today. One of the aims of this course is to teach you to process information and not just absorb it. You need to look critically at what I have included in this website as course materials. DO NOT USE EVERYTHING!!! Choose parts from each section. Try to make connections between the parts. An example could be that the use of Australia as a prison in the early years of it as a colony gave the churches a special role in education which persists today with the power of so-called private schools in Australian education. There are many similar examples.
I am very glad it is online and freely available to all. I wonder if I can register it with a Creative Commons licence if it is on a University server...I shall have to ask about that. I will be teaching it again next term
I have just finished a presentation at Luleå Culture Center on Computer Games and Art.The presentation went fairly well, considering I spoke for almost two hours in Swedish. I like Luleå, although I have seen very little of it. For a town this size the culture center is huge and every second person I speak to seems to be an artist.
Some interested/ing people in the audience and got some good questions. I ended by showing Malcolm McLaren on This Spartan Life, a clip I had not actually seen before but it suited the moment perfectly today.
This Spartan Life - Episode 3 Module 5- Malcolm McLaren Interview
Stone Mushroom Theater, HUMlab Island, Second Life.
Today I will be giving a lecture on an introduction to virtual worlds as part of the Digital Culture and Technique course being taught in HUMlab. I have done a blog entry on the course blog outlining the keywords for my presentation. It may be of interest.
This week I have been helping out with a museum studies course that HUMlab is involved with. The students are using Second Life as their assessment material. They have to build displays, installations, architectures of knowledge...who knows what they will come up with. As part of this I have been blogging periodic instructions tips and ideas for them since last Saturday. Here is the blog, if you are interested in reading more.
In three weeks I have presented seven lectures on The Cultures of Commonwealth English. It has been a demanding time, but I have learnt a lot. I have been using a wiki to teach and administer the course. The wiki is the textbook, the lectures notes, the plan and the study materials for the exam. I am not sure how the students feel about the use of the wiki, but I suspect it may be positive. I will distribute a short series of questions to guage opionion during the last lecture tomorrow. I have been even teaching from the wiki in the classroom, using the embedded videos and images as learning objects in lessons. I have been spacing out the videos from between 10 an 20 minutes apart, as the students start to get bored listening to my voice after about that amount of time. I hope to be teaching the same course again next term and I will continue to develop the wiki as part of future teaching of the course. You can check the wiki out HERE.
Engelska D, litt.vet. inr. 30 hp 12a Digital literature 12b Bakhtin and the Dialogic Principle
15th April 10:15-12:00 C203.
'Life knows two value-centers that are fundamentally and essentially different, yet are correlated with each other: myself and the other; and it is around these centers that all of the concrete moments of Being are distributed and arranged.' — Mikhail Bakhtin, Towards a Philosophy of the Act
What is Digital Literature? See http://eliterature.org/pad/elp.html The term refers to simulative and representational works with important literary aspects that take advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer. Within the broad category of digital literature are several forms and threads of practice, some of which are:
•Hypertext fiction and poetry, on and off the Web •Kinetic poetry presented in Flash and using other platforms •Computer art installations which ask viewers to read them or otherwise have literary aspects •Conversational characters, also known as chatterbots •Interactive fiction •Novels that take the form of emails, SMS messages, or blogs •Poems and stories that are generated by computers, either interactively or based on parameters given at the beginning •Collaborative writing projects that allow readers to contribute to the text of a work •Literary performances online that develop new ways of writing (Adapted from the Electronic Literature Organization)
Henry Jenkins, Game Design as Narrative Architecture Jenkins' essay outlines a way of thinking about computer games, as digital communicative artifacts, some of which embody stories or narratives. Central to Jenkins ideas about computer games and narrative are:
1. Spatiality: “Before we can talk about game narratives, then, we need to talk about game spaces. Across a series of essays, I have made the case that game consoles should be regarded as machines for generating compelling spaces, that their virtual playspaces have helped to compensate for the declining place of the traditional backyard in contemporary boy culture, and that the core narratives behind many games center around the struggle to explore, map, and master contested spaces.” (Jenkins 4)
2. Environmental Story Telling: “Environmental storytelling creates the preconditions for an immersive narrative experience in at least one of four ways: spatial stories can evoke pre-existing narrative associations; they can provide a staging ground where narrative events are enacted; they may embed narrative information within their mise-en-scene; or they provide resources for emergent narratives.” (Jenkins 5-6)
3. Enacting Stories: “Spatial stories are held together by broadly defined goals and conflicts and pushed forward by the character's movement across the map. Their resolution often hinges on the player's reaching their final destination, though, as Mary Fuller notes, not all travel narratives end successfully or resolve the narrative enigmas which set them into motion. Once again, we are back to principles of "environmental storytelling." The organization of the plot becomes a matter of designing the geography of imaginary worlds, so that obstacles thwart and affordances facilitate the protagonist's forward movement towards resolution. Over the past several decades, game designers have become more and more adept at setting and varying the rhythm of game play through features of the game space.” (Jenkins 7)
4, Embedded Narratives “According to this model, narrative comprehension is an active process by which viewers assemble and make hypothesis about likely narrative developments on the basis of information drawn from textual cues and clues. As they move through the film, spectators test and reformulate their mental maps of the narrative action and the story space. In games, players are forced to act upon those mental maps, to literally test them against the game world itself. If you are wrong about whether the bad guys lurk behind the next door, you will find out soon enough - perhaps by being blown away and having to start the game over.” (Jenkins 9)
5. Emergent Narratives "The characters [of The Sims] have a will of their own, not always submitting easily to the player's control, as when a depressed protagonist refuses to seek employment, preferring to spend hour upon hour soaking in their bath or moping on the front porch. Characters are given desires, urges, and needs, which can come into conflict with each other, and thus produce dramatically compelling encounters. Characters respond emotionally to events in their environment, as when characters mourn the loss of a loved one. Our choices have consequences, as when we spend all of our money and have nothing left to buy them food. The gibberish language and flashing symbols allow us to map our own meanings onto the conversations, yet the tone of voice and body language can powerfully express specific emotional states, which encourage us to understand those interactions within familiar plot situations." (Jenkins 12)
Who was M.M. Bakhtin? http://www.rpi.edu/~zappenj/Bibliographies/bakhtin.htm Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was born in Orel, south of Moscow, in 1895 and grew up in Vilnius and Odessa. He studied classics and philology at St. Petersburg (later Petrograd) University, then moved to the country, first to Nevel and then to Vitebsk, in the wake of the revolutions of 1917. During the 1930’s and early 1940’s, he completed some of his most important studies of the novel, including "Discourse in the Novel," "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel," and "Epic and Novel." He also completed his major work on Rabelais, submitted as his doctoral dissertation to the Gorky Institute of World Literature in Moscow in 1941 (he was later awarded the lower degree of Candidate). A successful teacher in Saransk during the 1950’s, Bakhtin was discovered in the early 1960’s by a group of Moscow graduate students who had read his Dostoevsky book. He wrote notes titled "Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book" in 1961; published a second edition of the book, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics, in 1963; published the Rabelais book, Rabelais and his World, in 1965; and published a collection of his most important essays on the novel, The Dialogic Imagination, in the year of his death, 1975. During the last twenty-five years of his life, he also wrote several essays later published under the title Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. His work spread throughout the West in the 1980’s and is the subject of vigorous debate and reassessment in Russia in the mid 1990’s (Emerson, First Hundred Years).
Bakhtin can be described as a philosopher, cultural and literary critic and theorist. In his large body of work, much of which has not been translated into English, Bakhtin provides several theoretical devices that can be used to critically analyze cultural and symbolic systems. Chronotope, Carnivalization, Heteroglossia, Polyphonic, Monologic, and Dialogism are all terms which Bakhtin applies complex meanings to, in a sense as analytical tools. The last of these, dialogism is what we will be discussing today, particularly in relation to a work of digital literature.
In the English translation of “The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays” by M. M. Bakhtin (2002 edition), dialogism is described as
“Dialogism is the characteristic epistemological mode of a world dominated by heteroglossia. Everything means, is understood, as part of a greater whole – there is constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others. Which will affect the other, how it will do so and in what degree is what is actually settled at the moment of utterance. This dialogic imperative, mandated by the pre-existence of the language world relative to any of it current inhabitants, insures that there is no actual monologue. One may, like a primitive tribe that knows only its own limits, be deluded into thinking there is one language, or one may, as grammarians, certain political figures and normative framers of “literary languages” do, seek in a sophisticated way to achieve a unitary language. In both cases the unitariness is relative to the overpowering force of heteroglossia, and thus dialogism.” (Glossary to Bakhtin,2002:426 by Holquist)
Key Words and Phrases
“Epistemological mode” "A theory of the grounds of knowledge: how we ‘make meaning'." (Pearce 2)
“Heteroglossia” “Many Tongues”
“Refers to the ‘internal differentiation’ and ‘stratification’ of different registers within a language in particular, the struggle between the official (ideological dominant) and nonofficial registers.” (Pearce 62)
“The base condition governing the operation of meaning in any utterance. It is that which insures the primacy of context over text. At any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions – social, historical, meteorological, physiological - that will insure that a word uttered in that place at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions; all utterances are heteroglot in that they functions of a matrix of forces practically impossible to recoup, and therefore impossible to resolve. Heteroglossia is as close a conceptualization as it possible of that locus where centripetal and centrifugal forces collide; as such it is that which systematic linguistics must always suppress.” (Glossary to Bakhtin,2002:428 by Holquist)
“Monologue” “Speaking alone”
“Monologue refers to those texts in which (to quote Lodge) ‘the authorial narrator does not merely impose his own imperative frame on the table, but makes the characters speak the same language as himself.’ (p19) Bakhtin, as we have already seen, associates this type of authorial hegemony largely with prenovelistic discourse, although it is also a tendency in the classic-realist novel fronted by the so-called ‘omniscient narrator’.” Pearce 51)
"Dialogue" Not simply ‘turn taking’, but is perhaps better expressed in the word closest to that used by Bakhtin; dialogism. Dialogism is a state or condition, not just an activity but a quality of being.
“Dialogic relationships are possible not only among whole (relatively whole) utterances; a dialogic approach is possible toward any signifying part of an utterance, even toward an individual word, if that word is perceived not as the impersonal word of language but as a sign of someone else’s semantic position, as the representative of another person’s utterance, that is if we hear it in someone else’s voice. Thus dialogic relationships can permeate inside the utterance, even inside the individual word as long as two voices collide within it dialogically (microdialogue, of which we spoke earlier).” (Bakhtin, 2002:184)
In relation to a work of digital literature dialogism operates throughout the artifact. It is in the sense that the mechanics and design of the work of digital literature are also sources or sites of meaning. The materiality of literary works as dialogic systems, no matter what media, is well illustrated by a short video, “Learn the Book”:
What makes a book meaningful in the context of the ‘medieval helpdesk’ is learning the registers of its use. These registers are culturally, historically and socially situated. Because we are so familiar with books as a means of storing and transmitting information, culture, knowledge, and so on we do not question the dialogues that exist around such artifacts and how they are employed in the construction of meaning.
A well known and respected theorist of digital literature, Katherine Hayles writes;
“Let us begin rethinking materiality by noting that it is impossible to precisely specify what a book – or any other text – is as a physical object, for there are an infinite number of ways its physical characteristics can be described. Speaking of electronic text, for example, we could focus on the polymers used to make the plastic case or the palladium used in the power cord. The physical instantiation of the text will in this sense always be indeterminate. What matters for understanding literature, however, is how the text creates the possibilities for meaning by mobilizing certain aspects of its physicality.” (Hayles 2005 103)
So, how does the digital text create “the possibilities for meaning by mobilizing certain aspects of its physicality?” By observing the principles of dialogism as proposed by Bakhtin and applying them to a complex, one could say heteroglossic, example of digital textuality; we can gain some idea of how the possibilities are embodied in the assemblage.
Alleph http://www.alleph.net/splash.html Alleph is a complex labyrinth based upon seven depicted visual spaces; an overgrown garden, an abandoned school classroom, a brick wall, an abandoned workshop, empty prison cells, a landscape of menhirs and an abandoned medical theatre. From these dynamic, navigable spaces eleven texts of spoken and written prose, poetic and dramatic narratives and eight puzzles (game or toy like) can be opened from links in the spaces. Move your cursor around inside the images and when you come across a link a green mass will appear around the cursor. Click on the link and it will open a window of text, audio or graphics. As well as the spoken audio texts; in Rasta Creole English, Persian, Urdu and Standard English, there are also several sound and music audio texts. Spoken and written works included within Alleph are by Maqapi Selassie, Farid al Din Attar, and are performed by Amjad Hussain Shah and coded by Irvine Saunders. Alleph was produced using Macromedia Flash by a production team from Emote Media Production Company in Birmingham England, led by digital artist Sakab Bashir. The work is described by Bashir as “A true interactive story” and “a self portrait” in “a patient labyrinth of lines tracing the face”.
The remainder of this seminar shall be devoted to looking at, interpreting and experiencing Alleph by Sakab Bashir.
Texts Referenced Bakhtin M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. 1981. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: U of Texas Press, 2002.
Bakhtin M.M. Towards a Philosophy of the Act. trans. and notes by Vadim Liapunov, ed. by Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov Austin: Texas UP, 1993
Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Pearce. Lynne. Reading Dialogics. London: Edward Arnold, 1994.
Jim M. Craven (Omahkohkiaayo i'poyi), Professor of Economics and Business Division Chair at Clark College/Vancouver, speaks at the Globalization of Homelessness and Poverty Community Lecture Series, Washington State University/Vancouver. January 27th, 2005 Thanks to Nick for the tip.
Cultures of Web 2.0: This is a brief summary of some of the most interesting and perhaps obvious cultural practices associated with the "Web 2.0" concept. I do not really feel completely comfortable with the term Web 2.0 but it is useful to push certain agendas, such as participation and a more horizontal arrangement when it comes to media production. The slides are for a class I am leading tomorrow for Culture Analysis students from Culture and Media Studies. Should be fun.
