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Palgrave Macmillan

Ambient Literature

Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices

  • Book
  • © 2021

Overview

Editors:
  1. Tom Abba

    1. Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

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  2. Jonathan Dovey

    1. Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

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    You can also search for this editor in PubMed   Google Scholar

  3. Kate Pullinger

    1. Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK

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  • Argues for the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location aware cultural objects, writers and readers
  • Lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices
  • Draws on literary studies, creative writing, design, human-computer interaction, performance and new media studies
  • Argues that specific attention to the literary is absent in conventional accounts of digital cultures

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xii
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  2. Introduction

    • Jonathan Dovey, Tom Abba, Kate Pullinger
    Pages 1-26

  3. Ready Reader One: Recovering Reading as an Ambient Practice

    • Ian Gadd
    Pages 27-51

  4. What We Talk About When We Talk About (Ambient Literature) Context

    • Michael Marcinkowski
    Pages 53-76

  5. Objects, Places, and Entanglements

    • Matt Hayler
    Pages 77-102

  6. It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman

    • Kate Pullinger, Duncan Speakman
    Pages 103-113

  7. Developing Ambient Attention

    • Michael Marcinkowski
    Pages 115-140

  8. Critical Ambience

    • Jonathan Dovey, Matt Hayler
    Pages 141-161

  9. The Politics of Ambient Literature

    • Matt Hayler, Jonathan Dovey, Tom Abba
    Pages 163-186

  10. The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee

    • Kate Pullinger, James Attlee
    Pages 187-197

  11. Where I’m Coming from: Studying the Novelty of Immersive Algorithms

    • Michael Marcinkowski
    Pages 199-232

  12. An Aesthetics of Ambient Literature; Experience, Narrative, Design

    • Emma Whittaker
    Pages 233-262

  13. Breathe: An Artist Interview with Kate Pullinger

    • Jonathan Dovey, Kate Pullinger
    Pages 263-274

  14. Writing Ambient Literature

    • Tom Abba, Amy Spencer
    Pages 275-318

  15. Back Matter

    Pages 319-337
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK

    Tom Abba, Jonathan Dovey

  • Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK

    Kate Pullinger

About the editors

Tom Abba is a writer and designer working with the form of digital and physical books. He is Associate Professor of Art & Design at UWE Bristol, UK, and a member of UWE’s Digital Cultures Research Centre.

Jon Dovey is Professor of Screen Media at the Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education at UWE Bristol, UK. Jon works across theory and practice and researches technology and cultural form.

Kate Pullinger is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University, UK, and the Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries. Her novel Forest Green will be published in 2020.

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