The Scottish surgeon, James Braid arguably gave hypnosis scientific credibility with the publication of his psychophysical research in 1855 [1]. His terms “neurypnology” and “neuro-hypnotism,” from Hypnos, the Greek god of sleep, aimed to distance the practice from the ‘animal mesmerism’ of Anton Mesmer and subsequent theatrical spectacles [2]. However, hypnosis, as Braid was aware, rather than a being a type of sleep, involves focused attention and suggestion, that can prime the subject for perceiving and imagining. In The Principles of Psychology, William James [3] concludes that hypnotism involves focused attention coupled with the disassociation of background ideas. David Spiegel’s [4] discussion of recent neuroscience research suggests a similar interpretation, defining hypnosis as “. . . a state of highly focused attention coupled with reduced peripheral awareness.” Evidence for the functional brain basis of a distinctive hypnotic “state” is debated, (as is the idea of brain states itself). Hoeft, et…
A Marathon Controlled by an Algorithmic God: Mr. Robot and Temporal Norms in Ambient Literature
This is a special post from Ben Gwalchmai, a Pervasive Media Studio resident who is currently working toward a PhD at NUI, GALWAY, focusing on using open data to make responsive, augmented reality stories of the city that push the reader-user to protest. In this post, he reflects on a series of questions for digital writing that arose as he spent time with Mr. Robot 1.5, a smartphone-based game/narrative (based on the television show) that weaves common paradigms of contemporary mobile interactions together to produce a narrative. * * * I’ve finished playing/reading Mr. Robot 1.5 . As soon as the game/fiction was over, my “phone” was wiped by my main handler character “Darlene”; true to the show, once my usefulness to the characters had ended, I was booted from their world. Running in real time, the game took three days to complete; some nights I went to sleep hoping…
Do we need containers for stories?
Does the word ‘literature’ presuppose containers? I’ve been thinking about writing for smartphones in the context of Ambient Literature. The idea of the book/ebook/app/website/phones themselves as types of containers for stories interests me. Ten years ago, the idea of a book as an analogue container, and an ebook as a digital container, was useful. But since then that use of the word seemed to fall away. Now, as many (most?) internet users move away from the open web toward closed platforms or ‘walled gardens’ (for example, as designed/driven/dictated by Facebook and the services/platforms Facebook owns), do we need containers more or less than in the past? If a ‘container’ is defined as broadly as stone tablet/human storyteller/book/app, do ‘stories in containers’ conflict with our developing ideas around ‘ambient literature’? Does thinking about thresholds and boundaries in storytelling conflict with our ideas about the borderless, unbounded stories afforded by pervasive media?…
Ambient Tensions
As part of our second research seminar on September 22 (which, by the way, was an excellent conversation between the whole team and their deliciously complementary approaches), I wanted to surface some tensions in the concept of ambience that I hope we can work through in our research programme. We might begin from the everyday use of the idea of ambience, as something like atmosphere, a quality of place that is sensed and felt as a background quality. That is not to assume that an ambience is passive; a cathedral, a dancehall, or a shopping mall will all have distinct ambiences that will produce different repertoires of embodied behaviours. Most commentators also point out that the term derives from ‘ambire,’ the Latin for to ‘go around.’ So an Ambient Literature might be a literature that ‘wraps around us’ like an ambience. A literature that has a background quality. But how…
Kate Pullinger on Writing for Ambient Literature
As I move forward with planning the creative work I’ve been commissioned to write for the Ambient Literature project, I find myself thinking about the affordances of the smartphone and how important this device has become to many of us, the multiple ways in which it is now a key piece of technology in our daily lives. For this project, I’m interested in the ways in which the smartphone has become a technology for reading. I read on my phone all the time: I read social media feeds, I read journalism, I read academic papers, I read reports and analysis. But I don’t read a lot of long form prose on my phone. I remain fond of print books and have this rather pointless ‘rule’ of buying print when I think the book might be something I’ll want to keep — novels I’ll re-read, non-fiction I’ll want to refer to again…
Exploring the Field
Following on Jon Dovey and Tom Abba’s reports from last week’s ambient literature research meeting, Amy Spencer gives an account of where ambient literature can be situated within a field of other works and research. * * * Knowing where you are not can help you find out what you are. For the past few weeks, I have been exploring the field of ambient literature. I have followed ideas through the writing of countless writers and researchers, trying to see what lies around us as we build our understanding of this new literary field. To guide me, I have been imagining ambient literature as being at the centre of a map. Around us are fields such as locative storytelling, psychogeography, games, spatial theory, site specific art, performance and the history of the book. I am trying to find the points at which these overlap, where the ideas and practices blur…
What is a book and what does it have to do with Ambient Literature?
Below is Tom Abba’s response to the first ambient literature research team meeting. Read more about it from Jon Dovey and Amy Spencer. * * * I had a beer with Duncan Speakman last night. Duncan’s starting to put the shape of his commission for Ambient Literature together and amongst the vagaries of location responsive storytelling, he asked me a question: I still don’t understand what the book has to do with Ambient Literature? And I paused. I thought (as an academic involved in a two year research programme is supposed to do) and then I talked about Ian Gadd’s presentation earlier that afternoon. What is a book? On the one hand, that’s an easy question to answer. A book is a collection of pages (sometimes collected in sections) stitched or glued together and bound with board (or card) to provide a cover. It’s a codex, a container for ideas.…
Ambient Book History
Below is Jon Dovey’s response to the first ambient literature research team meeting. Tom Abba and Amy Spencer also provide reflections on the meeting. * * * At a meeting at the Pervasive Media Studio yesterday, Ian Gadd gave us his first overview of how his particular field of research touches on the Ambient Literature project. Part of Ian’s research profile is into the history of the book – he introduced Leslie Howsam’s (1) idea that a book is how people give material form to knowledge and history. He offered Howsam’s excellent framework as a way that we might be able to test our ideas about how Ambient Literatures are constituted. Taking Howsam’s aspects of the book, Ian ran through several great historical examples that made this connection explicit: To start, books can be understood as a text, which may have specific relationships to place, such as John Stow’s 1598…