Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices [1st ed.] 9783030414559, 9783030414566

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xii
Introduction (Jonathan Dovey, Tom Abba, Kate Pullinger)....Pages 1-26
Ready Reader One: Recovering Reading as an Ambient Practice (Ian Gadd)....Pages 27-51
What We Talk About When We Talk About (Ambient Literature) Context (Michael Marcinkowski)....Pages 53-76
Objects, Places, and Entanglements (Matt Hayler)....Pages 77-102
It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman (Kate Pullinger, Duncan Speakman)....Pages 103-113
Developing Ambient Attention (Michael Marcinkowski)....Pages 115-140
Critical Ambience (Jonathan Dovey, Matt Hayler)....Pages 141-161
The Politics of Ambient Literature (Matt Hayler, Jonathan Dovey, Tom Abba)....Pages 163-186
The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee (Kate Pullinger, James Attlee)....Pages 187-197
Where I’m Coming from: Studying the Novelty of Immersive Algorithms (Michael Marcinkowski)....Pages 199-232
An Aesthetics of Ambient Literature; Experience, Narrative, Design (Emma Whittaker)....Pages 233-262
Breathe: An Artist Interview with Kate Pullinger (Jonathan Dovey, Kate Pullinger)....Pages 263-274
Writing Ambient Literature (Tom Abba, Amy Spencer)....Pages 275-318
Back Matter ....Pages 319-337

Citation preview

Ambient Literature Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices Edited by Tom Abba Jonathan Dovey · Kate Pullinger

Ambient Literature

Tom Abba · Jonathan Dovey · Kate Pullinger Editors

Ambient Literature Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices

Editors Tom Abba Digital Cultures Research Centre University of the West of England Bristol, UK

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

Kate Pullinger Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries Bath Spa University Bath, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-41455-9 ISBN 978-3-030-41456-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: © jason yeomans/Getty Images, Image ID: 1192687371 This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

Thanks as ever to Watershed’s Pervasive Media Studio for providing fertile hosting for this project. The team also wish to thank our production and technical partners, Calvium, Josh Connor, and Editions at Play: Visual Editions, Tea Uglow and her team at Google Creative Labs, Sydney. Our advisory board, Nick Barreto, Sarah Crown, Dan Franklin, Joanna Ellis, Sara Lloyd, Clare Reddington, Jen Southern, Claire Squires, George Walkley and Stella Wisdom, kept us honest and rigorous throughout. Special thanks are due to Duncan Speakman and James Attlee for agreeing to author in a research context with all the unknowns and constraints that imposes, and Amy Spencer for keeping a meticulous eye on this manuscript as it ran toward completion. But our greatest thanks are reserved for Nick Triggs, the research manager at UWE, Bristol’s Digital Cultures Research Centre, for being at the centre of operations over three years and helping us to stay excited.

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Contents

Introduction Jonathan Dovey, Tom Abba, and Kate Pullinger

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Ready Reader One: Recovering Reading as an Ambient Practice Ian Gadd

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What We Talk About When We Talk About (Ambient Literature) Context Michael Marcinkowski

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Objects, Places, and Entanglements Matt Hayler It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman Kate Pullinger and Duncan Speakman Developing Ambient Attention Michael Marcinkowski

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CONTENTS

Critical Ambience Jonathan Dovey and Matt Hayler

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The Politics of Ambient Literature Matt Hayler, Jonathan Dovey, and Tom Abba

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The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee Kate Pullinger and James Attlee

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Where I’m Coming from: Studying the Novelty of Immersive Algorithms Michael Marcinkowski

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An Aesthetics of Ambient Literature; Experience, Narrative, Design Emma Whittaker

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Breathe: An Artist Interview with Kate Pullinger Jonathan Dovey and Kate Pullinger

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Writing Ambient Literature Tom Abba and Amy Spencer

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

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, a member of UWE’s Digital Cultures Research Centre. James Attlee lives in Oxford and works in art publishing in London. He is the author of Isolarion: a Different Oxford Journey and the co-author, with Lisa Le Feuvre, of Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between. Jonathan Dovey is Professor of Screen Media at the Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries and Education at UWE Bristol. Jon works across theory and practice and researches technology and cultural form. Ian Gadd is Professor of English Literature at Bath Spa University. A bibliographer and book historian, he is a past president of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (SHARP) and a General Editor of the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jonathan Swift. Matt Hayler is Senior Lecturer in contemporary literature and digital cultures at the University of Birmingham. His research explores the representation and philosophies of technology and embodiment, drawing on (post)phenomenology, cognitive science, posthumanism to investigate the ways in which humans become entangled with their artefacts and environments.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Marcinkowski is Learning Technologist at the Centre for English Language and Foundation Studies at the University of Bristol. He has previously been a postdoctoral researcher at Bath Spa University. Kate Pullinger is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University and the Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries. Her novel Forest Green will be published in 2020. Duncan Speakman is a composer and sound artist based at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol. He creates narrative sound led experiences that engage audiences in uncontrolled public and private space. His current research is in the relationship between locative urban audio experiences and contemporary ecology. Amy Spencer is a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant and writer. She has an M.A. in English from King’s College London and a Ph.D. from Goldsmiths, University of London. She recently worked at UWE Bristol as a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow as part of the Ambient Literature Research Project and her current research address the affordance of mobile technologies for telling stories. Emma Whittaker is AHRC NPIF Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Discriminate-AR, Falmouth University, Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Plymouth, previously, Postdoctoral Fellow in Ambient Literature Production, UWE, Bristol. She writes about expanded narrative, narratology, experiential pragmatism and William James. Her research is applied in the experience design of locative narrative smartphone apps.

List of Figures

Ready Reader One: Recovering Reading as an Ambient Practice Fig. 1

Breathe by Kate Pullinger

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Objects, Places, and Entanglements Fig. 1 Fig. 2

It Must Have Been Dark by Then p19 It Must Have Been Dark by Then p21

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It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman Fig. 1

It Must Have Been Dark By Then by Duncan Speakman

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The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee Fig. 1

The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee

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An Aesthetics of Ambient Literature; Experience, Narrative, Design Fig. 1

Participant using The Cartographer’s Confession app. Story by James Attlee. Creative Producer, Emma Whittaker. App developed by Calvium. Photograph, Emma Whittaker

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LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

The Cartographer’s Confession written by James Attlee. Creative producer Emma Whittaker. Smartphone app interface and visual design by James Brocklehurst. Illustrations by Grace Attlee and James Brocklehurst App developed by Calvium The Cartographer’s Confession written by James Attlee. Creative producer Emma Whittaker. Smartphone app interface and visual design by James Brocklehurst. Illustrations by Grace Attlee and James Brocklehurst. App developed by Calvium

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Breathe: An Artist Interview with Kate Pullinger Fig. 1

Breathe by Kate Pullinger (Photo Benjie Croce)

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Writing Ambient Literature Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig. Fig.

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Breathe by Kate Pullinger The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming by Tom Abba It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman It Must Have Been Dark by Then Breathe The Cartographer’s Confession Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming Words We Never Wrote

286 297 300 308 309 310 312 313 314 315 316

Introduction Jonathan Dovey, Tom Abba, and Kate Pullinger

This book explores how the combination of place-based writing and location-based technologies are producing new kinds of literary experiences. It shows how situated literary experiences delivered through text and audio running on smartphones and tablets can offer distinctive new forms of reading, listening and looking. This book argues that such encounters constitute new literary forms in which an authored text offers new forms of embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent scenography for storytelling. In each case, there are specific techniques of narration, including, for instance, memory, history, place-based writing, hallucination, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional forms of

J. Dovey (B) · T. Abba Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. Abba e-mail: [email protected] K. Pullinger Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_1

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narrative including the novel, cinematic and audio storytelling. Such techniques are combined with the work of app design, user experience design, interaction, software authoring, networked content management, localization, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ‘ambient’ experiences where the user is taken through a textual, networked or sonic space that engages with the world surrounding us but doesn’t aim to map it, navigate it or be an ‘enhanced guidebook’. Our aim here is to invert Brian Eno’s famous formulation that the ambient should be as ignorable as it is interesting and build on his idea in the same passage that ambient arts should produce ‘a space to think’ (Eno 1978). 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. Our book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. It lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.

Everyday Mixed Realities The category of ambient literary works that we propose arises in response to the conditions of everyday life where mobile acts of reading, listening, watching and sense-making have become the norm. Digital texts of all kinds are interwoven into our daily consciousness. Our ‘on the go’ mobile mediations might be distinguished by the different kinds of attention they both produce and require (see “Developing Ambient Attention” for more on Attention). Firstly, there is instrumental content that produces navigational and wayfinding messaging for the times and places of everyday life, where attention is brief, dynamic and rapidly actionable. Navigational information is available not only through signage, static or dynamic, but through the whole array of GIS systems offering us mapping and wayfinding services in our cars or in our pockets on mobile devices. These bytes of information are supplemented by travel information made available through dynamic text operations that can offer live updates determined by a device’s GPS coordinates. For significant sections of the population these instrumental navigational messages are increasingly intermeshed with calendar-based messaging, arriving via calendar planning software across a variety of platforms; our daily lives are punctuated by a constant reshuffling of our personal timelines as dates and locations are determined by our work arrangements, whether this is for a

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delivery driver or a global executive working across different locations and timezones. Secondly, our wayfinding attention is switched with equally brief but less instrumental scrolling of social media timelines for the tiny pleasurable strokes conferred by the emoji world that produces a different kind of selfconscious attention. Social media design invites us to endlessly check and update our infinitely productive, continually refreshing, timelines (GilroyWare 2016), filling up every interstice of unaccounted time with micromessaging from our virtual social world. As well as that, there is a third kind of mobile mediated text, often accessed through social media clicks but leading to content requiring more considered reading and attention which nevertheless meshes with the informatic flow of daily rhythms. This is content that needs some concentration. Email and other work-related communications, long-form online reading, news services, TV programmes, movies and games: online content of every kind is available wherever we are within distance of a good enough WiFi or phone signal. In practice, all three of these kinds of attention intersect and interrupt one another. The ideal, informatically skilled citizen is adept at constantly reframing their attention between actionable notifications, ‘grazing’ through scrolling and browsing, and bursts of high-intensity concentration. All three of these modes of attention may be accompanied by audio delivered via phone handsets, tablets or laptops using either ear buds or, increasingly, noise-cancelling headphones. These conditions ensure that a more or less always available everyday mixed reality is a very common experience for significant parts of the global population. By mixed reality here we refer to the sensory experience of inhabiting embodied and emplaced time, in the kitchen, the car or the street, simultaneously with an extended sense-making horizon defined by whatever pattern of information and mediation processes we are connecting with at any given moment. These everyday mixed realities will doubtless intensify in the coming years. 5G Network architecture promises a higher density of points of connection with WiFi networks in urban environments combined with greater proximity of server capacities. One of the effects of these developments is that very high quality audio and video signals could soon be made available to mobile device users. The promise of location-sensitive augmented reality experiences is already being realised. Pokemon Go may be seen as a harbinger of real-time high-quality synchronised video and audio content delivered to within

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a few centimetres of precision. Our mixed reality world is only going to become busier. This is territory staked out sixty years ago by Marshall McLuhan (1964) when he argued for the first time that media had become environmental. The ever-increasing density of points of connection to the mediasphere1 will mean that our ambience, our surroundings, are increasingly networked. Our starting point has been that cultural work in this domain begins with an understanding of the ways in which our immediate environments hum not only with the cybernetic cycles of the information loops that sustain biological life but also with human data, information and communications. Our experience is produced through our entanglements and encirclements with the everyday mixed realities produced by the enmeshing data exchanges described above. It is this sense of being surrounded in newly demanding ways that leads us to the ambient as opposed to the locative, or the immersive. The number of possible touch points between user, system and meaning are proliferating. In his discussion of the definition of the ‘ambient’ Ulrik Schmidt (2013) observes: ‘…ambience is the distinctive effect characterised by an intensification of being surrounded’ (our italics). In some sense this is the use of the term that the poet, film maker and teacher Tan Lin mobilises when describing his work as a form of ambient literature. His texts are interwoven with elements from Twitter, news feeds, google search results, and blog posts as well as post-it notes or cookbooks. The work is porous to the networks of textuality that enmesh us (Sanders 2010). These new forms of attention economy have produced both a general level of social unease at the problem of distraction (‘No phones at the dinner table please’) plus a scholarly volte face by formerly enthusiastic proponents of digital technologies now raising the corrosive effects that the distractions of the attention economy have on social and civic life, including the rise of fake news and the privatisation of the internet (see Lanier 2010; Turkle 2011; McCullough 2016). Indeed, it is a challenge to hold a space for a positive aesthetic response to digital networks, postTrump, and after the Cambridge Analytica revelations where Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) reworking of the idea of Surveillance Capitalism sets the general tone for public debate. We want to demonstrate here that there is another route through this debate, a route that takes the very process of distraction as the ground for new cultural and creative forms. Our work is concerned with another kind of attention that produces aesthetic experience from the infrastructure and devices constituting the everyday

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informatic flow and indeed designs those modes of attention as the key experience for a new kind of ambient art work. The everyday mixed realities described above are afforded by mobile and pervasive computing. These mediating technologies have also enabled a range of innovative cultural forms which frequently seek to produce a different mode of attention in a reaction against the informatic distractions of everyday mixed reality. We locate the idea of ambient literature in an emergent tradition of cultural forms and artworks that want to connect us to place, to manipulate time and presence in order to have us attend to the world around us with greater, rather than reduced, intensity (see chapter “What We Talk About When We Talk About (Ambient Literature) Context”).

The Ambient Literature Project This book proposes the category of ambient literature in order to focus some of the trajectories of the everyday mixed realities referred to above on writing and reading. By ambient literature we refer to situated writing practices in which text is able to respond to the site of reading. The book is one of the outcomes of a thirty-month research project funded by the UK’s Arts & Humanities Research Council led by Professor Jon Dovey at the University of the West of England’s Digital Cultures Research Centre, in collaboration with Bath Spa and Birmingham Universities. The project was practice-led; we commissioned three new works of ambient literature from writers within our networks (including one co-investigator) who we thought could respond productively to our research challenge. We were also commissioned by outside agencies to produce two works as part of our research that were written by co-investigator Dr. Tom Abba. As well as mapping the historical and theoretical contexts for the idea of ambient literature we also undertook empirical research with the writers and the users of the commissioned works. This evidence both grounds our analysis as well as produces valuable insights for future developments in the field by developing the idea of ‘anticipatory immersion’ (see chapter “Where I’m Coming From: Studying the Novelty of Immersive Algorithms”). Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then is a book and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field recordings to bring you stories of changing environments, from the swamplands of Louisiana, to empty Latvian villages and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara. Unlike many audio guides, there is no pre-set route; the

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software builds a unique map for each person’s experience. It is up to you to choose your own path through the city, connecting the remote to the immediate, the precious to the disappearing. In January and February 2017 Duncan Speakman travelled with collaborators across three countries on three continents, visiting environments that are experiencing rapid change from human and environmental factors. What he created on his return is somewhere between a travel journal and a poetic reflection on connection, progress and memory. The experience asks the listener to seek out types of locations in their own environment, and once there it offers sounds and stories from remote but related situations. At each location, the listener/reader is invited to tie those memories to the place they are in, creating a map of both where they are right now and of places that may not exist in the future. The piece requires the audience to switch between a smartphone and a book; the reader/listener is asked to walk, marking specific moments of connection on the phone’s screen. (Full credits for It Must Have Been Dark by Then can found at the end of chapter “It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman”). James Attlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession combines fiction and non-fiction, imagined and real locations, to create a story of migration, loss, betrayal and retribution that builds to a savage denouement. The smartphone app allows the reader personal access to source materials for the film The Cartographer’s Confession, collected by an imagined screenwriter, Catriona Schilling, investigating the life and times of a fictional cartographer, Thomas Anderson. It features audio, prose, illustrations, an original collection of 1940s London photographs, 3D soundscapes and a bespoke musical score by group The Night Sky. Readers in London can immerse themselves in the film’s locations, experiencing elements of the plot in the places where they happened. A chapter at a time, cassette tapes of Thomas Andersen’s memories, contemporary photographs taken by his childhood friend Alessandro, personal letters and Schilling’s research notes are released, leading the reader on a journey to the dark secret at the story’s heart. The walking experience unfolds over several hours between London’s South Bank, and the West End before taking the reader to Bermondsey for the climax. The app’s ‘Armchair Mode’ offers a different experience, enabling the reader to explore the research materials and construct their own narrative, anywhere they may be. The app is available from either the App Store or Google Play. (Full credits can

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be found at the end of chapter “The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee”.) Kate Pullinger’s Breathe tells the story of Flo, who has the ability to hear ghosts. As Flo struggles to communicate with her mother, Clara, who died when she was a young girl, other voices keep interrupting. Using three APIs—weather, time and location—the story accesses data via the reader’s phone in order to subtly alter the story for every reader. Through the use of conditional text, the story changes according to the temperature, the season, and the place it is being read. Because the story is a ghost story, this often produces an uncanny effect for the reader; for example, the ghosts in the story know where the reader is located. In addition to the APIs, the story also uses visual design to represent the interrupting voices of the ghosts through a sequence of ‘ghost behaviours’, making the most of the haptic qualities of the smartphone screen. As well as these ghost behaviours, the phone also accesses the reader’s camera at the beginning of the story, taking a single image of the reader’s surroundings; this image is brought back into the story several times, making literal the idea of Breathe as a book in a room. Best experienced in one location, the story takes approximately twenty minutes to read. Breathe is available at https://breathe-story.com/. (Full credits can be found at the end of chapter “Breathe: An Artist Interview with Kate Pullinger”.) The Ambient Literature project was commissioned in turn by two external bodies to make work under the overall aegis of the research programme. Bristol Festival of Ideas commissioned Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming (2016), and the Hay Festival commissioned Words We Never Wrote (2018). Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming takes the form of an audio file delivered by smartphone, and an accompanying wrapped package. The work was sited on Bristol’s harbourside, although can take place in any urban locale, and requires approximately twenty minutes to complete. Within it, narration, reflection and nested storytelling combine to produce a disorienting experience, the conclusion of which—the relevance of the package the participant has been carrying since the start—is an uncontrolled event in the experience. Participants are given no instruction as to when to open the wrapped item, merely that it should take place ‘when the time feels right’. Inside is an unremarkable secondhand book, one page of which is largely redacted to leave a fragment of sentence visible. The relevance of this page, and the book itself, to the narrative experience is only made clear at the conclusion of the work, and

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constitutes an experiment to illustrate the extent to which a reader will manufacture a personal connection to a random sequence of words, a kind of exploded steganographic trigger. The work was written by Tom Abba, with music composed by Sarah Anderson & Duncan Speakman. Words We Never Wrote explores the meaning of writing, language and storytelling. It uses a beacon-based system to deliver localised, indoor, audio content to a smartphone The work comprises physical artworks, containing low-energy bluetooth beacons, which trigger content on a participant’s own phone dependent on their proximity to each of the six ‘chapters’ of the piece. An audio introduction provides the foundation for this non-linear work, which inducts each participant into the posthumous history of the Polish writer Bruno Schulz’ lost novel The Messiah. The novel—lost on the occasion of Schulz’ murder by occupying German troops in 1942—has been physically manifesting as sentences, paragraphs, figures and characters in multitudinous works produced over the last 80 years. Words We Never Wrote draws this fictional history together (Schulz and The Messiah are real though), presenting it as a map to be explored within a physical space to be decoded by travelling from one fragment of narrative to another. On completion of all of the six fragments, a concluding ‘chapter’ triggers, directing the participant to leave the work, and figuratively (by means of a narratorial dissolution of the storyteller herself) reinforcing the nature of the whole piece as a story being told and experienced. The work is delivered through smartphone and audio, and is ‘read’ between the physical artworks, audio narration and movement around the installed space. The work was written by Tom Abba and music was composed by Sarah Anderson & Duncan Speakman. The developer was Josh Connor. Presented for the first time at the Hay Festival 2018, Words We Never Wrote was also installed in Arnolfini’s Front Room in Bristol from 8 to 9 June 2018. Readers can find more information about the research project and ways to access some of the works above by visiting our website at https://amb ientlit.com/. The Ambient Literature research project was a mapping and fielddefining project, an attempt to focus traditions of new media scholarship and locative media on the literary. Our research team, the co-authors of this volume, brought expertise in literary history, digital reading and writing, narrative theory, new media scholarship, HCI and informatics, creative writing, and design to bear on our research questions. Our field

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mapping bears the marks of these disciplinary approaches, and is in no way exhaustive. We are interested in particular in how we write for placebased experience design and in the nature and quality of the experiences that such writing produces. It seems to us that the role, quality and significance of writing as a literary practice has been effaced by digital media processes in which different cultural practices have all become ‘content’; poetry, drama, cinema, photography, television, journalism all become reduced to the ‘content’ that fills the pipes that deliver attention to platforms, brands and advertisers. Writers of fiction have however experimented with new platforms across an astonishing range of speculative form, for instance Eastgate Press’ experiments with hyper fiction in 1990s, the book-as-app as pioneered by Touch Press, or the more recent web-based Editions at Play. There has always been a small audience for authors interested in the creative affordances of digital, none however has moved beyond a niche experimental space. The mainstream publishing industry has found itself unable to respond to digital disruption beyond its repurposing of ‘assets’ in the e-book market. Literature in the 21st Century (Bhaskar et al. 2017), commissioned by Arts Council England, reported that the overall prospects for literary fiction were poor; it argued that a very big fall in sales following the 2007 recession has been accompanied by the rise of a millennial generation filling their cultural leisure time with social media, casual gaming or streaming content from box sets to movies and music videos on YouTube. They quote ACLS data showing that between 2005 and 2013 the numbers of writers making a living from their work fell from 40 to 11.5% (Bhaskar et al. 2017, 20). Overall sales of literary fiction are in gradual decline as is the price of books. However, the picture is not relentlessly gloomy; most of the major publishing conglomerates had healthy profit growth in 2015–2016 (Bhaskar et al. 2017, 22) and there has been an unprecedented boom in the UK in new independent publishers. Mainstream publishers are adapting to market changes and small-scale publishing is maintaining innovation and risk. The ebook has driven the biggest impact of digital on publishing, peaking at a market share of 33% in 2014 falling back to 25% in 2016 (Bhaskar et al. 2017, 29), however, the authors of the report argue that e-book sales are driven by genre fiction rather than literary fiction. They also acknowledge that, apart from the e-book, digital opens up new opportunities for publishing start-ups, offering new relationships with readers (Bhaskar et al. 2017, 32). Just as pertinently for our research the audio book market is growing very steadily with near 20% year on year increase

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in sales reported in the last three years (Audiobook Publishers Association Report 2017) and podcasts (from National Public Radio) reaching 40% of the US population in 2017 according to the Pew Research Centre (Pew 2017). Our research project has been conducted in active dialogue with advisors from the publishing industry. Our aim has been to focus industry attention on the idea of ambient literature with a view to supporting exchange between mainstream and emergent digital practices. As such the project website blog and our work with the advisory board tried to construct a broad conversation around our themes that included running sold-out workshops at Hay Literary Festival and partnering on sharing the research at the British Library. James Atlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession won the UK New Media Writing Prize for 2017 and our third commission, Kate Pullinger’s Breathe, was shortlisted for the same prize in 2018. Breathe attracted a good deal of press interest; a short feature in The Stylist magazine (Saffi 2018) was followed by a wave of other coverage including (surely a research project first), entry into the Evening Standard’s buzz words of summer 2018 list (Mackenzie 2018), and an appearance in the Cambridge Online Dictionaries new words blog for March 2019 (Cambridge Dictionary 2019); ambient literature noun [U] UK /­æm.bi.ђnt. lIt.rђ.tЀђr / US /­æm.bi.ђnt. lIt.Ä.ђ.tЀÄ/ ˇ as a tablet and which use books that are read on an electronic device such information about the current date and time, the reader’s location, weather conditions, etc. to personalise the experience for the reader.

This spontaneous adoption of a popular definition, based on one work, suggests to us not that our thesis is ‘right’ but that our work speaks to cultural potential that is recognisable and real. Rather than look for definition, our working method has been to draw together a range of histories, forms and approaches under the umbrella of ambient literature, to test the proposition by commissioning and evaluating new work and to gather these perspectives and findings for wider use and future development. What follows is our attempt to trace this terrain in a spirit of creative collaboration rather than, we hope, one of colonisation.

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Situated Readings We have developed the idea of situated writing and reading practices as a way to start to describe the field we propose. We want to stress continuity with cultural and literary histories rather than technologically determined ‘disruptions’. (For more on the history of situated reading, see chapter “Ready Reader One: Recovering Reading as an Ambient Practice”.) Thus, our first caveat must be that all writing and reading has always been situated. Situated reading practices have been a feature of urban life for the past three hundred years (McCullough 2013, 81 and 236–242). The ‘solitary reading’ paradigm of the private collection or university library is actually a comparatively minor part of the history of reading. Coffee houses, newspapers, handbills, flyposters, letters and signage have all been part of the daily experience of the city. In his writing on ‘Private Reading’ Alberto Manguel (1996) acknowledges; …there is no doubt that the act of reading in time requires a corresponding act of reading in place, and the relationship between the two acts is inextricable. There are books I read in armchairs, and there are books I read at desks; there are books I read in subways, on streetcars and on buses. (151)

The market for books for ‘subways, streetcars and buses’ describes the first formulation of the literature of mobility; in the UK the WH Smith bookstall business was founded in 1792 and later found its niche as the print outlet for the railway stations that burgeoned all over the country in the following 100 years, creating a new market for a situated reading of distraction (where our attention migrates deliciously between page, the uncomfortable intimacy of the carriage, and the dreamscape of the train window). Later in the UK, the Penguin imprint for the easily affordable but literary, pocket-sized paperback (1935) supplied the growing need for literature to made available in mobile form for increasingly mobile social classes. The current boom in bespoke e-readers and e-reader mobile apps and e-book sales are the most recent manifestations of mobile literary experience. Reading has always been ‘situated’ in the sense that it is an embodied practice, habituated to a very fluid range of contexts. In an essay called You Are There Anne Fadiman wrote about the pleasures of reading literary fiction and travel literature in situ: ‘The consummate You-Are-There

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experience requires us to see exactly what the author described, so that all we need to do to cross the eidetic threshold is to squint a little’ (Fadiman 1999, 54). More recently, the writer of place Robert Macfarlane used his Twitter account to ask his followers to share their experiences of what he called ‘in situ reading’; he had more than 400 responses, including Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath while driving across the Oklahoma panhandle, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the Sangha River in the Cameroon, and The Hound of the Baskervilles on Dartmoor (Macfarlane 2017). This strand of place-based reading is clearly an attractive practice. We would wish to distinguish it from either guidebook reading, or the more recent explosion of the success of nature writing that sits under the Nielsen Book Scan’s category of ‘animals and wildlife’ where sales have increased dramatically, from 426,630 books in 2012, to 663,575 books in 2015 (Flood 2016). This genre includes memoir such as Helen MacDonald’s (2014) H For Hawk as well as more conventional nature writing such as James Rebanks’s (2015) The Shepherd’s Life. The distinction for us lies precisely in Fadiman’s squint above—this is not a book about writing and reading practices that map, or ‘grid’ text to place. Rather we are interested in a more ambiguous and conditional poetics of suggestion in which readers encounter their relations to places, histories and environments. To these kinds of reading and writing practices we also need to add listening. Firstly, because listening to all kinds of texts from podcasts to novels has become, as we noted above, a part of the everyday mixed reality experience (see Bull 2000; Thibaud 2005). Since 2012 the e-book experience has been supplemented by audio in the seamless continuity of Amazon’s Whispersync Kindle service which currently makes it possible for the user to switch between text reading and voice narration in over 85,000 titles that have now been recorded. Secondly, because the tradition of work that has produced our research has, as we will see, frequently been characterised by the use of audio as its most frequent mode of delivery. In recently published research on audio books Anežka Kuzmiˇcová (2016) argues that ‘Unlike print reading, audiobook listening is environmentally situated’ (230); although as we have seen above we would disagree with the idea that print is disembodied and despatialised, it is obvious that when listening to a story the eyes are free to look. The environment of the listener can become the setting for the narrative. The research literature looking at situated and place-based new media forms commonly claim the experience as the technological embodiment

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of the flaneur (Barber 2014, 95), with the potential to afford a Situationist derive (Levine 2014, 148), frequently understood as a tactic in a de Certeau inspired reclamation of space (Koefed Hansen 2014, 129). As early as 2005 Simon Pope has described this theoretical framing as more often than not a ‘wilful skimming’ of the Situationist’s pyschogeography that evacuates its critical responses to urban capitalism (Pope 2005). Without wishing to completely disregard this well-worn path we would stress ambient literature’s continuity with wider and deeper cultural traditions rather than it being the technological correlative of a dessicated Situationism. We might draw for instance on the history of instruction-based art that includes the work of Sol De Witt and or Yoko Ono (1964) coming out of conceptual traditions like Fluxus that aimed to make art experiences part of everyday life. In work produced by the Oulipo group instructions become constraint as literary works are produced according to arbitrary formulae. These traditions of instruction and constraint inform aspects of contemporary experience design as well as performance and composition. Instruction-based practices here also build on art practices-based around walking (see, e.g., the works of Francis Alys, Richard Long and Hamish Fulton) where the action of finding a route by the artist is combined with an instructional tradition of experience design: the audience participant becomes the walker. In designing their own walking route through either following the instructions on a map, or from a device, the audience participant has an embodied form of ‘ambulant agency’. The act of walking and attending to both the content and the contextual environment produces a particular kind of embodied experience by engaging movement as well as the other senses. The artists Nadir & Peppermint (EcoArtTech) have for instance produced Indeterminate Hikes + supporting walkers using smartphone mapping to go for a walk in which a series of instructions transposes wilderness experience into urban spaces. Even in non-walking forms of ambient experience the embodied interface that uses sensors and movement to produce content produces an experience of attentiveness that is different from page to page or point and click screen reading. In a work like Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke (2009) the audience participant is given instruction through a voiced narration that not only explains the screen interface but also asks us choose a name, go to a place that holds a special memory and record our own memories or feelings into a database that houses all participants’ contributions.

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The instructional frame produces an individual experience of emotionally mapping an urban landscape. To these traditions of instruction and embodied interaction we would also add a tradition of particular kinds of writing, a broad tradition of urban and landscape-based writing that produce visionary, even hallucinatory accounts of the way that subjectivity is enacted through intermingled interactions with our environments. From the modernist peregrinations of Joyce’s Harold Bloom and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway to the contemporary work of Sebald (2001), Solnit (2005), and Cole (2011), ambient literature can draw on a rich tradition of techniques that attempt to portray the operation of consciousness in context. When we move to thinking about situated literary experiences, the tropes of these traditions are translated into platforms where the narrator becomes you. The text often addresses this directly, through the use of the second person, i.e. ‘You look to the right.’ These techniques were first developed using media technologies in a small body of work that included the ethnomusical audio research at R. Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in the late 60s and early 70s that developed the idea of the ‘Soundwalk’ (Schafer 1977) and later by Janet Cardiff (subsequently with Georges Bures Miller) in Forest Walk (1991) and many other audio walks and sound installations, and subsequently explored widely in sound studies (see, e.g., Behrendt 2018, 249–257). The use of sensor-based systems and devices further developed the potential of this work by making sound, text and image all responsive to device location.

Are We not Locative? Combining these cultural traditions with the emergent technologies of ubiquitous and pervasive computing has to date produced the field first described as ‘locative media’ by Kalnins in 2003 (see Wilken 2012, 243– 247). The period between 1999 when GPS data first became publicly available and 2005 when it was designed into the mobile phone spawned a wave of new location-based cultural forms from Sat Nav voice artists to hi-tech treasure hunts that used geocaching as well as the first generation of location-based games such as Botfighters (Valve 2002). Google Maps’ open API and the development of the smartphone from 2005 have, as Rowen Wilken (2012, 243–247) observed, made the availability of location-based media banal. The period immediately preceding

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and following Kalnins formulation witnessed the first blooming of locative media. Jeremy Hight (2006), for instance, used the term ‘locative narrative’ to describe work he made in 2002 34 North 118 West (with Naomi Spellman and Jeff Knowlton). Subsequently, the work of the Proboscis Studio in London pioneered the use of oral history techniques to tag content to place (Lane and Angus 2006). Dublin’s Media Lab Europe, the Mobile Bristol Project and the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab were all leading research collaborations where narrative content was attached to places and made available through the kinds of personal digital assistants that pre-dated the smart phone. The Bristol experiments were notable for the production the Riot 1831 (Crowe and Hoyte 2004), one of the few projects from the period to have a notable literary aim, written by a poet and a filmmaker, and described at the time as an ‘interactive play’ that gave listeners the opportunity to explore the events of a riot that happened in Bristol’s Queen’s Square. Riot 1831 has, at the time of writing, recently been made permanently available through its rebuild as an app (see, e.g., Tuters and Varnelis 2006; Rieser 2011; Farman 2014; Wilken 2012, for further historical survey of this period of locative research and experimentation). For us the widespread acceptance of location-based sensing into the fabric of everyday life is also to be understood as a sign of the ‘Smart City’ discourse. The rhetorical application of ubiquitous and pervasive computing finds its most receptive terrain in the discourse surrounding the Smart Cities movement; it promises that the problems of traffic, health, air quality, public safety, energy and well-being can all be ameliorated through the imbrication of data infrastructures into the city fabric that depend on input devices, sensors, city-wide connectivity and visualisation systems. Our own instrumental uses of ubiquitous communications and locative technologies for wayfinding in time and space mesh into this bigger systemic understanding of the instrumental surveillance and control benefits of the smart city. However, while ambient literature may depend on the affordances of digitally enabled environments, it also offers non-instrumental benefit, as Dourish and others argued ten years ago; … urban computing isn’t simply about the city. It’s also part of the city, and its meaning and consequences arise not simply as informational accounts of urban space (directories, maps, listings, and so on) but as sites for new sorts of individual and collective meaning-making. In a word, urban computing is situated rather than dislocated. Framing the city as

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a source of experience rather than a source of trouble raises the design question: how are information technologies implicated in the aesthetics of everyday practice? (Bassoli et al. 2007)

We want to argue for an ambient literature that is part of such an ‘aesthetics of everyday practice’, making a space for culture and for art within the urban data framework. Why shouldn’t every major city curate its own permanent collection of place-based artworks, augmentations and installations that become part of its story through its wireless infrastructure? Framing the city as a site for collective cultural experience rather than just a site to be managed is a key task for arts and cultural industry interventions with evolving ‘smart’ infrastructures. However, for this to occur we need to reach out from the niche of the ‘locative media’ space to find a more authentic and everyday way to describe the practices at hand. One objection to the idea of locative media is that it feels immediately like a term that only specialised academics would ever use. Secondly, the kinds of work that begin to constitute a ‘locative canon’ emphasised mapping, data visualisation, participatory annotation as well as walking practices (see, e.g., Hemment 2006), none of which privileged narrative or textual experience. We want to see much more in this emergent form than a pedestrian audio guide or a community mark-up language. Thirdly, the idea that in the history of locative media that content is tied to context predominantly through GPS is inaccurate. In fact, we can deliver contextually dependent content using not only GPS systems but also, for instance, RFID, QR, beacons, APIs, accelerometers, compasses, cameras, or microphones—all of which can trigger content. This array (and it changes all the time) offers a far more sophisticated set of opportunities for interaction and engagement than a simple Google Maps blue dot form of content delivery or a data visualisation. The alleged promise of next-generation mobile internet is that it will deliver content to an accuracy of a few centimetres. This array of sensing re-emphasises a sense of the subject surrounded and produced through constant exchanges with our attentive networks of communication, and while this sense of being surrounded is located, we want to stress its ambient quality rather than a narrow geography. Finally, we want to insist on the importance of ambiguity rather than the precise mapping of space that is the gridding proposition of the locative. Ambient literature might more usefully propose an aesthetic of

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spatial ambiguity. The use of ambiguity in interface design has already been developed as a unique strand of HCI by one of the leading UK centres for mixed reality research (Beaver et al. 2003) in which they elaborate methods for producing the effects of ambiguity in order to; …be intriguing, mysterious, and delightful. By impelling people to interpret situations for themselves, it encourages them to start grappling conceptually with systems and their contexts, and thus to establish deeper and more personal relations with the meanings offered by those systems.

Here ambiguity is understood not as a trade-off for inaccurate locationsensing systems but as a key aesthetic tactic; users are drawn into an interaction with and awareness of the systems that they inhabit and co-constitute—political, cultural, ecological and technological. These encounters might well involve us in feeling a bit lost, not being sure about what’s happening or where we’re going, but trusting in the work’s creators, being ‘held’ by the form of the work we’re experiencing.

Ambience and Immersion Developing the category of the ambient from our dissatisfactions with the locative produces a number of new critical problems. As we will see this project has necessitated an attempt to reframe and, perhaps, reclaim the ambient, especially where it segues into the even more problematic category of the ‘immersive’ (see chapter “Critical Ambience”). It seems to us that the appeal of ambient literature as a term is not that it looks for literary experiences that produce comforting wraparound environments or seeks to treat language as if it were ambient music. Rather our hope is for works that can produce particular forms of attention that are a necessary response to a complexity of experience that feels increasingly like the outcome of enmeshed systems beyond our understanding (political, technological, economic and ecological). Our attempt to reclaim and reframe practices of ambience is in conscious contradistinction to the contemporary focus on immersion. Ever since the purchase of Palmer Lucky’s Oculus Rift by Facebook for $2bn in 2014, we have seen large scale research and development investment in immersive technologies. However, the current interest in immersion is not merely part of the ‘hype cycle’ that characterises technological evolution. There are at least three strands of cultural development

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and research interest. The first is in those cognitive and phenomenological approaches to understanding media that focus on the states of attention produced in the biophysical ‘reader’ (rather than that reader’s processes of interpretation and meaning making). This work can be found in literary studies (see Gerrig 1993; Nell 1988), in the development of neuroaesthetics (see, e.g., Zeki 1999; Lauring 2014), and frames some of the ways we understand the immersive states of concentration produced by games or cinema. Secondly, a growing body of research that responds to newly experiential forms of theatre and film which have been gathered under the banner of ‘immersive theatre’ (see Biggins’ [2017] book on Punchdrunk and Kennedy and Atkinson’s [2017] recent collection on Live Cinema). Finally, technological R&D into VR, AR and Mixed Reality platforms with associated research into motion and volumetric capture, and 3D audio. (For more on immersion and ambience, see chapter “Critical Ambience”.) There are some refracted media histories at work here. The first wave of enthusiastic interest in VR in the 1990s (see Woolley 1992; Heim 1993) prompted more widespread critical reflection interest in immersion in new media studies (see, e.g., Murray 1997; Ryan 2001; Lister et al. 2002, 107–136). In her account of literary immersion, Ryan (2001) argues for three types of immersion: spatial immersion in which we become involved in the setting of the story world, temporal immersion, that keeps us turning the page, and emotional immersion that gives us character identification (123–148). Subsequently, although academic fascination with domestic VR declined due its technological and economic limitations, academic interest in immersion was sustained by the rise of game studies where the obvious holding power of gameplay provided ample examples of everyday immersive states (see Jennett et al. 2008; Calleja 2011). In the background of these approaches to immersion in game studies we often find Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) idea of ‘flow’, which is in fact a description of optimal musical and sports-based performance states derived from observations of task-oriented situations, hence its applicability to game play. Throughout the history of attempts to describe, classify and analyse immersion there is a strong tradition that resists immersion in favour of criticality. This critique of immersion has, in the past, been led by feminist commentary, especially in relation to VR; in 1991, Allucquere Roseanne Stone pointed out that ‘forgetting the body is an old Cartesian trick’ (Benedikt 1991, 113). Throughout the 1990s the idea of VR was widely

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understood by feminist writers to be, in the words of Judith Squires ‘The dreary dreams of Texan boys’ (Squires 1996, 199), in which the dream of escape from the body was just another example of ‘the disembodiment of the political’ that resulted in ‘an amnesia about embodied difference which served to transform man into a paradigm of humankind’ (199). This line of resistance to disembodied immersion overlaps with a tradition that can be traced through critical net art and critical gaming practices that see immersion as precisely what artists should resist in their work. Immersion is here a dangerous state of ideological complicity that should be punctured, poked and perturbed so that the people formerly known as the audience are reminded that the work, the text or the experience, is in permanent dialogue with the world, so that rather than be submerged in some alternate reality we are engaged with the world with a heightened sense of engagement and mobilisation. We want to reposition our approach to ambience within this critical tradition. We understand the production of the ‘immersive-ambient’ continuum at this time as the direct reaction of the technological imaginary to the very anxiety produced by our everyday mixed realities.2 As the input/output demands of day to day life become ever more exhausting, we produce a cultural demand for a particular kind of comforting, calm ambience, for immersive art installations, for colouring books and mindfulness apps. In short, the busier our minds become the more we need Eno’s media that are an ignorable background to life. Our project is to reframe this version of ambience in order to have a more critical engagement with the signal-rich environment constituted by our communication networks. This production of the immersive /ambient continuum is in some ways another version of ‘transportation’ theory, that is to say the idea that what we want most from cultural production is to be ‘lost in a book’, or film, or game (Green and Brock 2000). This assumes a mental model where the phenomena of the embodied and material world slip away in favour of a realm of imagination. The ontology of an attention-directing subject able to bring concentration to bear on forms that support brief transportations seems like an idealised and impossibly privileged notion of how we now make sense of our worlds. Instead we are learning to live inside fast-changing frames of attention, shifting between foreground and background, here and there, past and present. Here our aim is to think about work that makes the phenomena of the embodied and material reader a

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key determinant of the text, not a problem to be elided. Our proposition is that cultural work that starts with this proposition offers readers, users and audiences some important potentials for contemporary culture. It offers us encounters with the technological, historical and ecological systems that shape us in the here and now. It puts memory and identity into play with mobility and place. It has the potential not to distract us but to connect us with place and with one another. When our public spaces are increasingly filled by people who are, in some senses, cognitively elsewhere, talking to disembodied friends, gaming, listening to music, then these works offer the potential to reconnect with the social reality of the present.

The Book This is a necessarily cross-disciplinary attempt to define the field. As such we aim for the book to make a significant contribution to the new wave of digital humanities research that combines creativity and scholarship. The book is co-authored; the overall shape and content of the book has been designed by the research team to take the reader through the material so that an argument emerges. Although some chapters only have one lead author, all the content has been co-designed by the team and contributions made from each of our fields and approaches. The book is designed to make a coherent whole; however, the cross-disciplinary nature of the investigation will mean that there is some repetition where authors come at the same topic from refracted angles. We hope that through this process we will not attempt to come to conclusive positions that close off potential lines of future development. We have learnt that writing in fields associated with technological development is better when it does not foreclose possibility. While it is our hope that the kinds of writing and reading that we champion here will thrive in the future, too much manifesto-like claiming of territory at this stage is not useful. Equally, it is important to us to start to share a critical framework for understanding and producing works of this kind and for understanding why they may, or may not, be important and how they may be supported. The reader will encounter different disciplinary and theoretical inflections in different parts of the book as the team pick up the analytic and descriptive resources that deal most effectively with our findings and our argument. The shape of the book is to start with the historical work that locates our traditions and practices before moving onto the critical approaches

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and arguments that have informed our research. We then move on to thinking about critical aesthetics before concluding with practical considerations and ways forward for the field. The book opens with an account of situated reading practices that surveys a body of evidence that sees disembodied reading practices as a relatively late addition to our cultural repertoire and sees ambient literature as having the potential to recover the situation of reading. This is followed by a chapter on context which develops an application of Actor–Network Theory from literary studies with the AI and HCI histories of contextually aware computing. It argues that context here is ‘fully realist’, it acts, it does things to us and to the text. This lays the ground for theoretical elaboration where this contextual ‘doing’ is reframed through thinking about how consciousness, place and ambient works are always entangled and enmeshed processes, using the central image of the palimpsest to arrive at an argument for a politically conscious presence. This is followed by an interview with Duncan Speakman in which some of these issues of presence, contextual awareness and ecological entanglement are explored in practice. Chapters “Developing Ambient Attention” and “Critical Ambience” conclude the main features of our theoretical terrain; “Developing Ambient Attention” takes a multi-dimensional approach to the history of attention, bringing these perspectives to bear on the tensions between focus and distraction in two of the commissioned works. “Critical Ambience” takes this position further, arguing that the reflexive encounter with contextual systems that ambient literature produces has critical potential, and that ambience, from being a mode of ‘comfort’ media, has the potential to challenge the reader. From this point, the book becomes more pragmatic and we report on the making, writing and poetics of the work. “The Politics of Ambient Literature” picks up the theoretical inquiry of seven and traces the line from critical to political by thinking about the category of the literary, the assumptions we may have made about ‘space’ and the differential fields of both access and interpretation available to readers. “The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee” is the second of our author interviews, with James Atlee discussing the many challenges of authorship within the complicated production system for a piece like The Cartographer’s Confession. While reader responses are scattered throughout the book, “Where I’m Coming From: Studying the Novelty of Immersive Algorithms” looks in detail at the kinds of responses we gathered from readers of our commissioned works. This process itself does original work

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in trying to think about what methodologies could capture readers’ experiences of these kinds of porous texts, as well as offering a first taxonomy of such experiences. “An Aesthetics of Ambient Literature; Experience, Narrative, Design” develops an approach to attention derived from John Dewey and William James and applies it The Cartographer’s Confession as a way of developing an aesthetic framework that can be mobilised in the production choices and processes of actually putting a work such as this together. This is followed by an interview with Kate Pullinger, the author of Breathe, that completes our account of actually writing for these emergent forms with particular reference to the work of the designers in the process and of how constraint produced success. The book concludes with some work on trying to frame and elucidate some principles for other writers who may want to take this form further in the future. “Writing Ambient Literature”, picks up a particular strain of our theoretical inquiry, the tension between mimesis and experience, and uses it to offer some broad dimensions for writers to work with. As the editors, we wish to sincerely thank our co-authors in the research team for staying with the challenging process of planning and executing a collaboratively authored work. Ian Gadd, Matt Hayler, Michael Marcincowski, Amy Spencer and Emma Whittaker—we thank you. Jon Dovey, Tom Abba, Kate Pullinger, March 2020

Notes 1. The introduction of 5G networks requires the ‘densification’ of the mobile internet; 5G will use very short wavelengths that travel very short distances necessitating a lot more masts. 2. The concept of a technological imaginary draws attention to the way that (frequently gendered) dissatisfactions with social reality and desires for a better society are projected onto technologies as capable of delivering a potential realm of completeness. It is used here, therefore, as a characteristic of many of those arguments for new media that see them as a solution to social and cultural ills (Lister et al. 2002, 429).

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References Audiobook Publishers Association Report. 2017. “Audiobooks Continues Double-Digit Growth.” Accessed April 9, 2019. https://www.audiopub.org/ uploads/pdf/APAC2017PR_final.pdf. Barber, John. 2014. “Walking-Talking: Soundscapes, Flaneurs, and the Creation of Mobile Media Narratives.” In The Mobile Story Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, edited by Jason Farman, 95–110. New York: Routledge. Bassoli, Arianna, Brewer Johanna, Martin Karin, Dourish Paul, and Mainwaring Scott. 2007. “Underground Aesthetics: Rethinking Urban Computing.” IEEE Pervasive Computing Conference. Accessed March 15, 2015. http://services. carstensorensen.com/media/BassoliEtAl2007.pdf. Beaver, Jake, Steve Benford, and William Gaver. 2003. “Ambiguity as a Resource for Design.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 223–240. New York: ACM. Behrendt, Frauke, 2018. “Soundwalking.” In The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies, edited by Michael Bull. Abingdon: Routledge. Benedikt, Michael‚ ed. 1991. Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bhaskar, Michael, Iain Millar, and Nick Barreto. 2017. Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction. London: Arts Council of England. Accessed April 20, 2019. https://www.artscouncil. org.uk/publication/literature-21st-century-understanding-models-support-lit erary-fiction. Biggin, Rose, 2017. Immersive Theatre and Audience Experience London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blast Theory. 2009. Rider Spoke. Arnolfini. Accessed April 4, 2019. http://arn olfini.org.uk/whatson/blast-theory-rider-spoke. Bull, Michael. 2000. Sounding Out the City: Personal Stereos and the Management of Everyday Life. Oxford: Berg. Calleja, Gordon, 2011. In-Game: From Immersion to Incorporation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cambridge Dictionary. 2019. About Words: New Words. March 11. Accessed April 1, 2019. https://dictionaryblog.cambridge.org/2019/03/11/newwords-11-march-2019/. Cardiff, Janet, and Georges Bures Miller. 1991. Walks 1999–2014. Accessed April 20, 2019. http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/. Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City: A Novel. New York: Random House. Crowe, Liz, and Ralph Hoyte. 2004. Riot 1831. Bristol: Calvium. Csikszentmihalyi, Mikail. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper. Eno, Brian. 1978. Ambient Music from Liner notes Music for Airports/Ambient 1. Accessed February 5, 2019. http://music.hyperreal.org/artists/brian_ eno/MFA-txt.html.

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Levine, Paula. 2014. “On Common Ground: Here as There.’ In The Mobile Story Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, edited by Jason Farman. New York: Routledge. Lister, Martin, Jon Dovey, Seth Giddings, Iain Grant, and Kieran Kelly. 2002 (and 2009). New Media—A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge. Macfarlane, Robert. 2017. “Putting Books on the Map.” The Guardian, July 21. Accessed January 23, 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ jul/21/robert-macfarlane-why-its-time-to-put-our-reading-experiences-onthe-map. Mackenzie, Malcolm. 2018. Quiz: Do You Speak Summer 2018? ES Magazine, Evening Standard, August 23. Accessed April 1, 2019. https://www. standard.co.uk/lifestyle/esmagazine/summer-2018-quiz-a3916151.html. MacDonald, Helen. 2014. H Is for Hawk. London. London: Vintage Books. Manguel, Albert. 1996. A History of Reading. London: HarperCollins. McCullough, Malcolm. 2013. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2016. “Inscribing the Ambient Commons.” In Throughout, edited by Ulrik Ekman, 443–454. Cambridge, MA and London. MIT Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1964. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. Toronto: McGraw Hill. Murray, Janet. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Nadir, Leila, and Carey Adams / Peppermint. 2016. Indeterminate Hikes. Accessed February 3, 2018. http://www.ecoarttech.net/project/indetermi nate-hike/. Nell, Victor. 1988. Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ono, Yoko, 1964. Grapefruit. New York: Simon & Schuster. Pew Research Center. 2017. Audio and Podcasting Factsheet. Accessed April 9, 2019. https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2018/ 07/State-of-the-News-Media_2017-Archive.pdf. Pope, S. 2005. The Shape of Locative Media. Accessed April 2, 2019. http:// www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/shape-locative-media. Rebanks, James. 2015. The Shepherd’s Life. London: Penguin Books. Rieser, Martin, ed. 2011. The Mobile Audience Media Art & Mobile Technologies. Amsterdam & New York: Rodopi. Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press. Sanders, Katherine. 2010. “Tan Lin.” BOMB, March 29. New York. Accessed April 2, 2019. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/tan-lin/. Saffi, S. 2018. “The Immersive New Book Trend You Need to Know About.” The Stylist, October. Accessed April 1, 2019. https://www.stylist.co.uk/ books/ambient-literature-reading-writing-books-technology-phones-iphone/ 228309.

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Schafer, Raymond Murray. 1977. The Tuning of the World. New York: Random House. Schmidt, Ulrik. 2013. “Ambience and Ubiquity.” In Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Ulrik Ekman, 175–187. Cambridge, MA. MIT Press. Sebald, Winfried Georg. 2001. Austerlitz. New York: Random House. Solnit, Rebecca. 2005. A Field Guide to Getting Lost. New York: Viking. Squires, Judith. 1996. “Fabulous Feminist Futures and the Lure of Cyberspace.” In Fractal Dreams: New Media in Social Context, edited by Jon Dovey, 194– 216. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Stone, Allucquere Roseanne. 1991. “Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?” In Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Thibaud, Jean,.2005. “The Sonic Composition of the City.” In The Auditory Culture Reader, edited by Michael Bull and Les Back, 329–341. Oxford: Berg. Turkle, Sherry, 2011. Alone Together. New York: Basic Books. Tuters, Marc, and Varnelis Kazys. 2006. “Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things.” Leonardo 39 (4): 357–363. Wilken, Rowan, 2012. “Locative Media: From Specialized Preoccupation to Mainstream Fascination.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 18 (3): 243–247. Woolley, Benjamin. 1992. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Zeki, Semir. 1999. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs.

Ready Reader One: Recovering Reading as an Ambient Practice Ian Gadd

Pick up and read Kate Pullinger’s Breathe on your phone and it begins with what looks like the title-page of a printed book: an upright rectangle of white space with the work’s title and subtitle (‘A Ghost Story’), and the author’s name. At the bottom are two short lines of text, exactly where one would expect an imprint. Everything is centred and while the title itself is the most prominent object, white space dominates, echoing the simple, balanced elegance of to be found at the start of any contemporary Anglophone printed novel. The ‘title-page’ is here strictly bounded by the edge of the screen—it is not possible to move up/down or left/right— but twist the phone at right-angles as if to play a video, and the title-page yields to an admonishment (Fig. 1). Above is an infographic showing how the screen should be re-oriented. Below, extending beyond the screen edge, are the stylised static silhouettes of ten shelved volumes: the first five stiffly vertical while the remaining five slowly tumble towards the horizontal. The contrast between a fixed print-like page of text to a scrollable mix of text and image is reinforced by a switch from a ‘bookish’ serif typeface (Inknut Antiqua) with capitalisation following the usual ‘letter case’

I. Gadd (B) English Literature, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_2

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Fig. 1 Breathe by Kate Pullinger

practice of upper- and lower-case words, to a loud all-capitals serif typeface (‘Montserrat’).1 ‘I’M A BOOK’ proclaims your horizontally-held phone at the same time as signally its non-bookishness with a streetsign typography on a screen too small for its content. Borne this way, Breathe becomes unreadable—in effect, a closed book—but in so doing it asserts itself as a book. Of course few readers are perverse enough to begin reading with a phone oriented in this way but whether one is conscious of it or not, Breathe requires the reader to first acquiesce to its page-like layout: we cannot read it any other way. The reader’s compliance extends beyond how the phone is held. The title-page’s ‘imprint’ reads ‘Pick up your phone | I’m ready’, with the latter underlined to indicate it is a hyperlink. Clicking brings up a short paragraph: This book is sensitive to the world around you. For the best experience, we’d like to access your camera & location. None of this data is stored online, but it may be stored locally, on your device, to enhance the reading experience.

Underneath is another explicit, performative affirmation: ‘I understand’. Next is what in a printed book would be called the ‘fly title’, a version of the title-page that immediately precedes the first page of text. Here, under the work’s title, are a few lines about Breathe’s protagonist, Flo, and at the bottom are two lines that in their placement, form, and content echo

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those on the title-page: ‘Is your phone in your hand? | Yes. I’m ready.’ Only with this one final act of readerly consent does the story seem to begin. In this way, Breathe blurs the relationships between book, reader, and story, whether through multiplicity of first-person pronouns from the title-page through to the start of the ‘story’—‘I’m ready’, ‘I am a book’, ‘I talk to my mother’—or the fickleness of the object itself, variously described as a ‘book’, a ‘phone’, and a ‘device’. This instability of subject and thing may seem harmless enough—at worst, another manifestation of late-capitalism’s twee personification of commodities—but it reminds us that books have long played with our identities as readers and our interaction with them as material objects. A reader might believe that the story of Breathe begins with the first numbered ‘page’ but as we have seen our reading begins from the moment the phone is picked up. The titlepage asks us to be ‘ready’: to hold the phone in a particular way and to perform a sequence of assents. But all books, digital or otherwise, demand a ‘readiness’ from readers, which is always something more than simply giving them our ‘attention’. Reading means willingly submitting ourselves to a situated and embodied encounter with a text’s material form. We might not be as conscious of it as in the case of Breathe but any fluent reader has, as we shall see, already been very well schooled. As Leslie Howsam observes, a book is not simply a ‘text’ or a material object: it is a cultural transaction and an experience—all at once (Howsam 2015, 2– 6). Our encounters with books are, in Johanna Drucker’s words, ‘always circumstantial and situational’, and their materiality is ‘exposed by the performative dimension of use’ (Drucker 2013, §§11, 12). Put another way, as Breathe reminds us, to ‘pick up and read’ is to affirm the material object as a book. Books ‘live’ only in the hands, literally or figuratively, of the reader. Breathe is, emphatically and explicitly, a work of ambient literature. It responds to your temporal and geographical location, the orientation of your screen, the tremor of your hand and the rub of your finger. It glimpses your immediate surroundings and speaks about your world. Its other subtitle, given not on the visible ‘page’ but in the tags of the HTML, is ‘[t]he book that comes to you’: it is a work that responds directly to the reader’s own situation. The effect is deliberately disconcerting, as many of us prefer to read just like we breathe, seemingly unaware of the bodily labour required to do either. In fact,

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the metaphors of modern western reading practice, especially as associated with novel-reading, actively seek to displace and disembody the reader. We ‘escape’; we become ‘lost’ or ‘absorbed’; we even ‘forget ourselves’. Such language frames reading primarily as inward, cognitive, affective or even transcendental. Even the physicality of reading is downplayed as the ‘good’ reader is silent, still and solitary. A reader who is distracted by, or finds meaning in, the activity of reading itself is either juvenile (they are still learning ‘how to read’), sentimental (they read in a particular place), pathological (they take sensory pleasure in a book’s physical form) or even weak-minded, capable of only ‘shallow’ or ‘fragmented’ reading. However, as Breathe shows, ambient literature demands a radical reorientation of how we understand and value reading. It not only offers the possibility of transformative reading experiences but also has the capacity to become a critical practice in its own right, making us actively re-attend to our reading experiences and reassess the consequentiality—and experientiality—of ourselves as reading, breathing bodies. Yet it is not new. Breathe, like the other works commissioned for the Ambient Literature project, relies on the affordances of pervasive computing but ambient literary experiences predate digital. Readers in the west have found meaning in their own situated and embodied encounters with books for centuries but this kind of reading has, it seems, become increasingly undervalued in the last few centuries. It is the purpose of this chapter to recover some of this history and to show how a work like Breathe re-enables a reading practice that seems to have been otherwise forgotten. Breathe is not the first book to ask that it be picked up and read. Some sixteen centuries ago, in a garden in Italy and in the throes of spiritual anguish, St Augustine heard a voice: ‘Pick up, and read, pick up and read’ [tolle lege, tolle lege] At once my countenance changed… I checked the flood of tears and stood up. I interpreted it solely as a divine command to me to open the book and read the first chapter I may find…. So I hurried back to the place that Alypius [Augustine’s companion] was sitting. There I had put down the book of the apostle [St Paul] when I got up. I seized it, opened it and in silence read the first passage on which my eyes lit: ‘Not in riots and drunken parties, not in eroticism and indecencies, not in strife and rivalry, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh in its lusts’. (Rom. 13, 13–14)

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I neither wished nor needed to read further. At once, with the last words of this sentence, it was as if a light of relief from all anxiety flooded into my heart. All the shadows of doubt were dispelled. Then I inserted my finger or some other mark in the book and closed it (Augustine 1992, 152–153).

This is one of the most famous moments of reading in western culture. For twenty-first-century readers, the familiarity of this reading experience—who has not read a book outside?—intensifies Augustine’s moment of revelation. However, in a fourth-century context, the episode reveals Augustine’s exceptionality. Highly literate and a book-owner, he handled volumes with remarkable ease: despite the sacred nature of the words they contained, these were not precious objects. The book he picked up was a codex (that is, a bound volume, not a scroll) and he read the passage silently rather than out loud—features of the reading experience that were still establishing themselves in this period. As privileged and as modern as Augustine’s reading experience was, it was also emphatically embodied and situated. He was outside, under a fig-tree in the garden of his Milanese lodgings, and he was not alone. The voice he heard instructed him not merely to read but to pick up the book.2 Notwithstanding their author’s multimedia experience on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1–9), the epistles of Paul had not been written to be read at a specific time or location: nevertheless, for Augustine, the particularities of moment and place combined with the senses of sound (a child’s voice), sight (words on a page), and touch (the book in the hand) to transform his reading into a uniquely rich, complex, and meaningful experience. Revelation here was predicated on Augustine’s ‘readiness’ for the multiple contingencies of reading itself (Kennedy 2013). In contrast, the same volume had been earlier ‘picked up’ from a gaming table by a visitor who was ‘astonish[ed]’ and ‘amazed that he had suddenly discovered this book and this book alone open before my eyes’ (Augustine 1992, 142): another powerfully embodied and situated encounter with a book but one in which the sacred and the profane were jarringly juxtaposed. Much like Augustine himself had been in the years, months, and days prior to that moment in the garden, this reader was just not ready. The readiness of the reader has to begin with the object, even though our terminology is slippery and inconsistent. Augustine picked up what we would readily call a ‘book’, although he actually used the Latin term ‘codicem’ (in English, ‘codex’) to distinguish it from the scrolls that

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had been the standard textual form in the Roman empire for centuries. ‘Codex’, defined as a ‘book made from hinged leaves’, is now seldom used in English outside of academic or bibliographical circles (Suarez and Woudhuysen 2010, 618), while ‘book’ is, of course, the standard term in common English parlance although it is often distinguished from pamphlets, magazines, and newspapers despite sharing the same codex form. ‘Book’ is also frequently used to conflate text with object (as in ‘have you read any good books lately?’), which is perhaps why ‘e-book’ now refers only to the text in electronic form as formatted and distributed by a publisher rather than the device used—which in turn is confusingly referred as an e-reader.3 Scholars who work on the ‘history of the book’ use ‘book’ very capaciously, able to comprise all kinds of written texts including digital ones. For my purposes here, though, I will focus only on ‘books’ that contain written texts, although this means excluding some of the most interesting and evocative kinds of ‘books’, what Sydney Shep calls ‘memory archives’, such as ‘landscapes, visual and aural media, inscriptional spaces, maps, buildings and performative sites’ (Shep 2016, 36). This also means, reluctantly, excluding audiobooks: while sound is often a crucial part of contemporary ambient literature (such as Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then and James Attlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession), it usually exists in combination with a printed or digital book of some sort. One of the first things we are taught as readers is how to pick up a book. We learn how to hold it, how to position it in our hands and to keep it a certain distance from our eyes, how to ‘open’ and ‘close’ it, and how to turn the pages. This is not necessarily intuitive or easy, which is one reason why printed books for toddlers are as physically forgiving as they are.4 Nor do we learn these actions only once: we learn them afresh whenever we encounter a new kind of ‘book’, such as a Kindle, smartphone, or even a different type of reading software on our computer. It is why Breathe has to remind us how to hold the phone. However, regardless of the many diverse forms that books take, the continuities are striking. For a start, the reading ‘space’—the papyrus scroll, the wax tablet, the manuscript or printed page, the digital screen—is invariably rectangular.5 It is usually oriented as ‘portrait’, that is with a distinctive text-area that is taller than it is wider even if, as with scrolls and codices, the reader is presented with an opening rather than a single ‘page’ unit.6 The book’s size is nearly always scaled to the human, even at its rare extremes such as the seventeenth-century Klencke atlas that takes two

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people to turn the pages or the 1878 edition of Dante that can only be read with a magnifying glass. Indeed, the vast majority of books, from the first codices to the latest digital tablets, remain within much the same size parameters, and resemblances often persist across centuries and different material forms: the duodecimo-format novels of the mideighteenth century, for example, are almost exactly the same size as the modern ‘A-format’ used for mass-market paperbacks, and both are only a little taller and wider than a large smartphone. As remarkable as this may seem, it is not altogether surprising. Developments in technology or media will often deliberately echo earlier forms and books, at least since the emergence of the codex, have long been valued for their portability, whether to allow the transportation of a volume from shelf to desk and back again with relative ease or, as in Augustine’s case, to be read in the hand.7 In a striking turn of phrase, the scholar William Bathe noted that his linguistic manual, Janua Linguarum (1617), while not a ‘pocket-booke’ in size, would still serve as ‘a Pectorall or bosome-booke, to be carried twixt jerkin and doublet’ (sig. Q1r).8 There is an enduring association between a book’s size and particular kinds of texts, whereby more ‘intimate’ genres (such as devotional works or novels) use more mobile (‘handy’) book-sizes than grand works of scholarship. But the embodied relationship we have with books goes beyond their size: Andrew Piper marvels at the typical book’s ‘shapeliness’ that ‘fits it to our hands’ (2012, 2) while Jan Tschichold observes that a reader’s ‘healthy eye’ is always best placed ‘always about two [hand-]spans away from the book page’ (1991, 36). Reading, as Breathe reminds us, usually depends on the intimate interplay between hand and book. Braille enables entire works to be read with fingertips but even sighted readers read books by touch. ‘[E]very physical feature of a book shapes the reading experience and constitutes a kind of material thinking that impacts the processing of information’ (Shep 2016, 41–42) but few are conscious that they are finding meaning in a book’s size, shape, heft, and surfaces. I often begin my university course on the history of the book by handing out printed books to blindfolded volunteers and asking a series of questions about their contents, a task that reveals that adult readers are extraordinarily adept at being able to distinguish illustrated and non-illustrated books as well as identifying likely genres and even estimating dates of publication—all without being able to see the book (Gadd 2006, 65; McKenzie 1993, 3–7).

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Such haptic knowledge—literal fingerspitzengefühl (‘fingertips feeling’) to adapt the German word for intuition—is learned through repeated encounters with printed books throughout a lifetime but a book’s tactility is often considered to be a distraction, an anomaly, or even a fetish. The palpable frisson prompted by a copy of a 1640 English translation of Machiavelli’s The Prince reputedly bound in human skin seems to lie beyond the scope of reading.9 So, it appears, do the sensual if not erotic pleasures of readers such as Charles Lamb (for whom George Daniel kept ‘a book of old songs and ballads…specially for [him] to finger and dogear when he came to visit him, in the same way that a parent gives a child some worthless toy to play with’); Leigh Hunt (who liked ‘to be able to lean my head against [my books]’); R. W. Chapman (who rhapsodised of how his ‘fingers thrill to the touch of old vellum’); Bessie Craigmyle (who declared that her books ‘seem to know and care for/ The tender touches that I give/ To every well-worn cover, / And, as I love you, friends of mine, / I could not love a lover’); or Eugene Field (who spoke of holding a book ‘lovingly in my hands and press[ing] thee tenderly to this aged and slow-pulsing heart of mine…how tenderly do they respond to the caresses of my hands, and with what exultation do they respond unto my call for sympathy!’) (Rees 1887, 173–174; Hunt 1823, 1; Chapman 1920, 65; Craigmyle 2011, 692; Field 1896, 89, 98). Only exceptionally do writers comment on the book in a reader’s hand, such as Jane Austen’s passing nod that ‘the tell-tale compression of the pages before them’ in her novel signals ‘that we are all hastening together to perfect felicity’ (Austen 1994, 234) or Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller that repeatedly reminds the reader that they indeed ‘reading Italo Calvino’s novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller’ and revels in the situated and embodied contingencies of reading: You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only the book you are taking with you but its novelty as well, which could also be merely that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the binding becomes dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries…Perhaps you started leafing through the book already in the shop. Or were unable to, because it was wrapped in its cocoon of cellophane?…Or perhaps the bookseller didn’t wrap the volume; he gave it to you in a bag… (1998, 1, 6–7)10

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However, as Calvino makes clear, even as they may mock the ‘bibliomania’ (to use the term coined in the mid-eighteenth century) of Lamb and others, modern readers will have their own pleasing physical rituals: preferred locations, positions, circumstances, times of day (Littau 2006). Paradoxically, the goal is often to find the most precise ways of reading that enable you to forget that you are reading: ‘Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.’ (Calvino 1998, 3). The imperative that the reader must dissolve the world beyond the text is, I argue, fundamental to contemporary attitudes to reading. I have already mentioned that we have, through language, valorised a kind of reading that forgets itself but this depends on a twin illusion about books and readers that they belong only to the ‘world around you’ and have no place in the reading experience itself. Andrew Piper’s stimulating exploration of ‘reading in electronic times’ takes its title from a line by Gertrude Stein—‘Book was there, it was there’—but does not pick up the irony that it comes from an elliptical passage of stream-of-consciousness about a misplaced book (Piper 2012, vii, ix; Mitrano 1998, 92). The book is not there; nor, it seems, are our hands. ‘Good’ reading forgets the book as an object and the reader as a subject. As Augustine and Breathe demonstrate, this effacement is neither innate nor essential to the act of reading itself but is a consequence of how we read, how books are designed, and the changing cultural value we place on books and reading. Paradoxically, it is the habituation of reading that makes forget how we read, it is the materiality of the book that makes reading feel immaterial, and it is the learned intimacy between book and reader that makes them both disappear. Book in hand, the literate eye will first glance at the centre of the page to orient itself, before, most likely, looking to the corner where it expects the written lines to start: top left for readers used to the Western left-toright horizontal written arrangement (Heie 2006). On finding a series of words, the eye will flit along them in a series of hyper-fast jerks known as saccades; for a language such as English, the eye will fixate on approximately 10–12 characters, then skip rightwards about eight letters, fixate again, and so on. Each fixation is about 50 milliseconds and each skip lasts 25–30 milliseconds; reading cognition can take up to 500 milliseconds per word (Altmann 1997, 172–178; Wolf 2008, 145–154; Dehaene 2009, 13–18). The reading ‘eye’ is only ‘on’ when it is focused on the group of characters: consequently, readers neither ‘see’ the repeated jerking nor ‘feel’ the cognitive lag. Instead, we experience what we believe is a smooth scan across the page. This illusion, especially as we become faster readers

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capable of reading over 500 words per minute, accentuates the sense that reading is, physically speaking, effortless. It is an illusion that has been facilitated by generations of printers and designers. The size of the book, the proportions of the page and pageopening, the margins, the typeface and type-size, the line-spacing, the line-lengths, the spacing between words and even individual characters all help to shape ‘readability’, that is the ‘ease’ with which a book can be read (Tschichold 1991, 36–64; Bringhurst 1999, 143–178; Dowding 1995).11 ‘Readability’ depends on the disappearance of book and reader. ‘Printing should be invisible’ is the subtitle of a highly influential twentieth-century essay by Beatrice Warde while more recently Robert Bringhurst talks of the ‘statutesque transparency’ of the well-designed printed page: ‘typography must draw attention to itself before it will be read. Yet in order to be read, it must relinquish the attention it has drawn’ (Warde 1956; Bringhurst 1999, 17). Warde talks of the reader’s preference for the ‘quietly set’ printed page but the silence of the page is something readers have to learn to hear (17). Take, for example, the contemporary Western preference for books, whether digital or printed, to be set in serif typefaces (that is, typefaces whose characters carry extra lines at the end of the letter stroke) rather than sans-serif. This is often explained in terms of the greater ‘readability’ of the former but familiarity may well be as important a factor. Up to World War II, Germany and Scandinavia routinely used fraktur typefaces (what we could call gothic or black letter) for book printing and although we may struggle to decipher it we cannot assume that the original readers of Goethe or Mann found it anything other than straightforward. The use of a sans-serif typeface in a novel such as Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time creates a cognitive ‘drag’ for the eyes and brain of a reader conditioned to serif typefaces has to adjust. For a while, the reader is unexpectedly conscious that they are looking as they read: a contextual distraction that, in a diminished way, mimics the hyper-perception of the novel’s narrator who has a form of Asperger’s.12 After a while, a reader may shake that feeling only to rediscover it as they pick up an article or book set in a conventional serif typeface. Finally, a serif typeface is often no friend of anyone diagnosed with dyslexia.13 The easy familiarity of the Western page extends beyond simply the choice of typeface. I have already noted the ubiquity of the page’s rectangularity across the millennia and the similarity in size and proportion of the earliest codices and contemporary novels and even e-readers.

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The preferred proportions of the ‘text-block’ within the page and the surrounding margins can also be traced back into at least the medieval period (Bringhurst 1999, 144, 162). In other words, Western readers have repeatedly encountered written objects whose physical form and design have been, in certain fundamental ways, unchanged for centuries if not longer. But there have been crucial transformations too, the most significant of which was the introduction, well over half a millennia before the arrival of print in the West, of visible spacing between written words. The book that Augustine held in his hand was almost certainly written as scriptura continua, that is as a continuous stream of characters with little or no interword spacing or punctuation. Augustine made a point of noting that he read Paul’s Epistles ‘in silentio’ but many scholars have seen scriptura continua as indicative of a textual culture in which reading aloud remained the dominant practice: silent reading, the argument runs, is more difficult with unspaced and unpunctuated text (Saenger 1997). Reading out loud has its own long and enduring history: there are several references in the Old Testament to reading ‘in the audience of the people’ and ‘in the ears of the people’ (and variations), and to this day, priests, poets and parents continue to read aloud.14 It was a distinctive practice in many seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century family households, and remains a valued skill in societies with relatively low literacy rates (Loveman, 20–21, 32–4; Williams 2017). Regardless of whether Augustine read silently (in the Middle Ages, reading ‘in silentio’ was understood to mean quiet rather than silent reading) or whether silent reading was more widespread in antiquity than previously thought, it is only relatively recent that silent reading has become the expected norm in the west (McCutcheon 2015; Saenger 1997, 268). Around the start of the eighteenth century there seems to have been a decisive shift in the English-speaking world towards a presumption of silent reading as the model for reading practice. According to the work of Elspeth Jajdelska, this can be traced through stylistic and narratological shifts in eighteenthcentury writing, and it enabled the emergence of a new kind of literary narrator, paralleling the rise of the novel as a genre. The ‘storyteller’ (who ‘brings the text to completion through performance’) was replaced by the ‘narrator’ (who ‘cannot be encountered in person and indeed may well have properties (such as omniscience) which a real person could not have’. What is most striking, however, is the language she uses to describe the impact of the transition upon readers: from the reader as ‘embodied speaker’ with an audience, to the reader as ‘non-embodied

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hearer’ listening to the words of a ‘imagined, non-embodied, and absent writer’ (Jajdelska 2007, 169, 7). The establishment of silent reading as the dominant mode of reading practice was predicated on readers becoming disembodied and passive. The timing of this shift is significant. In Britain, the eighteenth century was a period of increasing literacy, rapid urbanisation, and a rising middle class, creating a larger marketplace of readers and with it a demand for new kinds of books (Kernan 1987; Hunter 1990; Raven 2007, 83–319; Lyons 2010, 119–136). New readers and new books, however, fuelled a growing moral anxiety about the dangers of reading. Novels, with their casual subjectivity, ambivalent morals, and self-indulgent readers, were seen as particularly dangerous (Hunter 1990, 157–158; Littau 2006, 63– 76). ‘[T]here seem to me’, thundered the preacher James Fordyce in mid-century London: to be very few, in the style of Novel, that you can read with safety, and yet fewer that you can read with advantage.—What shall we say of certain books, which we are assured (for we have not read them) are in their nature so shameful, in their tendency so pestiferous, and which contain such rank treason against the royalty of Virtue, such horrible violation of all decorum, that she who can bear to peruse them must in her soul be a prostitute, let her reputation in life be what it will. But can it be true—say, ye chaste stars, that with innumerable eyes inspect the midnight behaviour of mortals—can it be true, that any young woman, pretending to decency, should endure for a moment to look on this infernal brood of futility and lewdness? (1766, 1.148–149)15

Moreover, the eighteenth century was decisive in establishing cultural attitudes to readers and books that persist to this day, with the origins of many if not all of the elements identified in this chapter as indicative of modern reading practices being found in the period. The middle decades of the century may have seen a spate of what Christina Lupton calls ‘self-conscious novels…[that] distinguish[ed] themselves by soliciting readers literally as partners in the processes of bringing characters to life, solving problems, and finishing or destroying the book they are reading’—Tristram Shandy is the most famous exemplar—but ‘the pleasures of reflexivity’ they prompted in readers were soon eclipsed by a dominant realist literary mode that demanded readerly ‘self-forgetting’ (Lupton 2012, 27, 45). Similarly, the abstraction of ‘literary work’ (writing as ‘purely the product of a disembodied intellect’) came to supplant the

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idea of ‘text work’ (‘writing as always concrete and physical, mediated by technology, subject to market forces, and shaped by audience demand’), an effacement reinforced by the emergence of new conceptions of intellectual property (Maruca 2007, 4). Other contemporary factors played important roles: the emergence of public circulating libraries, for example, and a significant growth in the international antiquarian book market by the end of the century (Raven 2006; Jensen 2011). As books came to be valued and treated in different ways and as readers acted differently, the reading experience itself changed: the book and the reader began to disappear. Notwithstanding debates about the exceptionality of silent reading in the ancient world, the developments of word spacing and punctuation were intended to facilitate reading and in that respect they belong to a whole web of textual features that help a reader better navigate themselves through a book. Some are purely visual, such as the disposition of space on a page; some have clear pragmatic functions, such as page numbers or chapter headings; others are substantive in their own right, such as title-pages or indexes. These elements are variously understood as ‘bibliographical codes’ (McGann 1991, 56) and ‘paratext’ (Genette 1997) but their shared purpose is to provide a set of ‘physical and cognitive architectures’ that make the page (and the book as a whole) an ‘expressive space…a cultural artefact…a technological device…[and] all of these at once’ (Mak 2011, 18).16 The origins of these features can be traced back centuries and their familiarity to the experienced reader makes them seem intuitive if not actually invisible but, again, each has to be learned. Harry Belafonte, for example, spoke wondrously of his first encounter with the footnote—‘I discovered that at the end of some sentences there was a number, and if you looked at the foot of the page the reference was to what it was all about’ (Grafton 1997, 235)—while the semi-literate subject of Alexander Masters’ biography Stuart: A Life Backwards is happily bewildered by the purpose of epigraphs (Masters 2005, 278–285). Even Jane Eyre, one of the most famous readers in the English literary canon and whose seclusion in a window-seat at the start of the novel appears to romanticise her as a young reader, singularly fails to read Bewick’s History of British Birds correctly, distracted by the tiny and incidental vignettes printed at the end of the chapters: she ignores what she should be reading and reads what she should be ignoring (Brontë 2001, 6–7).17 Good readers, though, know the codes: all of them. In N. Katherine Hayles’s words, ‘navigational functionalities are…part of a

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work’s signifying structure’; indeed, their meanings overlap to the point of ‘redundancy, enfolding more sensory information into what we see and therefore what we read’ (McCutcheon 2015, 20–21; Piper 2012, 3). Familiarity with the book as an object and with our role as a reader means that we expect to know where we are and where we are about to go, even when we do not know what the story will do next. We come to trust the story’s relationship to its material form so that, as much as we want to get lost in a story, we learn not to get lost in a book. Reading has become an act of faith that depends on a belief about the immutability of books as objects and readers as subjects. However, the limits of such certainties are exposed by new textual forms, much as they try to mimic pre-existing ones just as the earliest printed books did with manuscripts. Readers look for familiar cues, only to struggle when they are absent or more opaque: books on Kindles, for example, habitually ‘open’ at the first page of the first chapter, overlooking epigraphs and prefatory matter, not to mention title-pages and copyright declarations (Malone 2015, 22–26). Digital editions of previously printed books can be confounded by the particularities of the printed page (Galey 2012). There are, though, radical new opportunities. E-readers allow readers to manipulate, albeit within strictly defined limits, a range of paratextual and bibliographical codes (most obviously typeface, type-size, line-spacing, justification, even colour and contrast) that would otherwise be determined by the printer and the publisher. As there are no pages to turn or pile up—dynamic e-readers ‘reflow’ the text on the fly depending on typographical choices, and measure a reader’s progress not in pages but in percentages and reading speed—it is possible too to suppress the reading progress indicators on a Kindle, facilitating a reading experience that, in the absence of ‘the tell-tale compression of the pages’, becomes hypersensitised to the inconclusive rhythms of narrative. That such readerly interventions in a digital text seem incidental is not surprising given the book and reader are seen as essentially irrelevant to the meaningfulness of the reading experience, but they belong to a long and at times contested history that, again, has no place in the contemporary model of reading practice: that of a reader meddling with a text. At one extreme, this includes the deliberate destruction of a book (such as in public book burnings) and the radical repurposing of a book, whether for spiritual motives such as the extraordinary Gospel harmonies constructed by the Ferrar family in the 1630s or for profane non-readerly activities such as wrapping, lining, or wiping (Smyth 2015; Donaldson

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1998). Less drastically, readers annotate, doodle, underline, highlight, mark with fingernails and fold down the corners of pages. Many of these practices were considered commonplace markers of readerly use during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to such an extent that a dogeared bible was seen as an outward manifestation of piety, but from the late eighteenth century they were increasingly considered to be evidence of book abuse: witness, for example, the OED’s pejorative definitions, and supporting quotations, for ‘dog-ear’ (Jackson 2001; Sherman 2008; Gadd 2018). The ideal reader is one who leaves their books seemingly untouched; even breaking a book’s spine is taboo. Like their printed counterparts, digital books too strive to be invisible, often by drawing attention to their own material form. Weight and size are distinctive selling points. Design developments in the successive generations of the Kindle, for example, focused on making it lighter and thinner, while the latest model, the Kindle Oasis, has an asymmetric design to facilitate one-handed use: ‘[t]he ergonomic design shifts the centre of gravity to your palm so that Kindle Oasis rests in your hand like the spine of a book’ (Amazon, ‘Kindle Oasis E-reader’). Lack of weight is, of course, a major selling point, and while data does have a literal weight, there is no discernible difference for the reader in the feel of an accountancy textbook and a novella in digital form (Ray 2011). The Kindle Paperwhite, for example, prides itself that its weight allows for ‘long reading sessions’ (Amazon, ‘Kindle Paperwhite–Previous Generation (7th)’). The feel and shapeliness of digital reading devices, especially multi-functional devices such as smartphones and tablets, are always considered by reviewers (with the reviews themselves often entitled ‘hands on’). Touch itself is now a ubiquitous feature of portable digital reading interfaces. Readers click, press, or swipe, with the latest devices simulating haptic feedback, such as the iPhone’s ‘3D touch’ or the Kindle’s ‘PagePress’ (‘turn the page without lifting a finger’) (Amazon, ‘Kindle Voyage E-reader’). Taken together, transparent typography, silent reading, a predictable and familiar layout, an unmarked page, and an unfingered book all help to create the illusion that neither book nor reader is there. This is an ambience of absence, an effect only accentuated by the fact that we learn these skills and codes at such a young age that most fluent adult readers simply cannot remember how they learned to read. The lack of vocalisation and the apparently effortless glide of the eye over the page enables a kind of reading practice that we characterise as intimate, interiorised,

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and affective. This may seem irreconcilable—how can an ‘absent’ reader feel emotion?—but what I have been describing throughout this chapter is a reading practice in which the reader as a reader is not there. The reader is ‘present’ within the text itself, capable of thought and feeling but they become disembodied, reading not with the eyes or the hands but ‘with the heart’ to use the fifteenth-century French term (lire au coeur) for silent reading (Saenger 1997, 268). ‘Good’ reading means remaining within the text and its success depends on a co-operation between the book and the reader, facilitating a readerly ‘readiness’ that, while of a different kind to that which we encountered with Augustine and Breathe, is nonetheless still embodied and situated. This kind of reading practice is what N. Katharine Hayles has termed ‘deep attention’: ‘concentrating on a single object for long periods…ignoring outside stimuli while so engaged, preferring a single information stream, and having a high tolerance for long focus times’, and it is striking that she twice cites a nineteenth-century novel as the prompt for such a cognitive phenomenon (Hayles 2007, 187–188). She contrasts this with ‘hyper attention’, (‘switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation and having a low tolerance for boredom’), choosing as her exemplar a pre-adolescent boy vigorously engaged in a computer game, in marked contrast to his seemingly inactive and ‘oblivious’ older sister with her volume of Austen (187–188). The game that she places in the hands of the ten-year old is Grand Theft Auto, notorious for its adult themes, implying a distinction between ‘serious’ and popular culture and between ‘good’ reading (disembodied, quiet, and morally edifying) and ‘bad’ entertainment (agitated, noisy, and corrupting) that has unfortunate echoes of Fordyce’s condemnation of novel-reading 250 years earlier.18 Others have been more forthright about the potential impact of digital technology upon reading. Only a few years after the arrival of the internet, Sven Birkerts feared what technology had already wrought on ‘the “feel” of the literary engagement’: being online and having the subjective experience of depth, of existential coherence, are mutually exclusive situations…We are experiencing the gradual but steady erosion of the human presence, both of the authority of the individual and, in ways impossible to prove, of the species itself. (Birkerts 1994, 6, 219, 228)

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The threat to ‘deep reading’ was the subject of Nicholas Carr’s influential and polemically titled, The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. More recently still, Maryanne Wolf argues that we are at a ‘cultural, cognitive crossroads’, where ‘deep reading’ itself is at risk: will the very plasticity of a reading brain that reflects the characteristics of digital media precipitate the atrophy of our most essential thought processes—critical analysis, empathy, and reflection—to the detriment of our democratic society? …will the formation of these same processes be threatened in our young? (Wolf 2018, 204, 205)

Wolf, herself a cognitive neuroscientist and developmental psychologist, cites the ongoing work of the multinational, multi-disciplinary EUfunded E-READ project on the ‘evolution of reading in the age of digitisation’. This research will make a major contribution to our understanding of the neuropsychology of reading, and it is not my place to anticipate, let alone question, its findings. However, what is striking about much of the writing about the effect of digital technology on reading is the tendency to assume that ‘deep’ reading—Jane Eyre in the window-seat, Hayles’s university student in the easy chair—is not only a transhistorical and transnational experience but also that it is the ‘best’ kind of reading. For example, Wolf draws on Aristotle to argue that, for the contemporary reader, the life of contemplation is ‘daily threatened in our culture’, yet we know very little about how Aristotle would have himself read; we do know, though, that his mentor Plato reported that Socrates was deeply sceptical of the value of writing itself: ‘it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it’ (Wolf 2018, 13; Plato 2001, 81). In fact, for most of its history, reading has not been silent, sedentary, or solitary. For the Romans, reading was a demanding cognitive, affective, and physical experience—one read standing up for a start—and it was prized for its challenging nature (Willis 2018, 132–133). Then as now, many readers read while doing other things. Samuel Pepys frequently read on the move: on coaches, in boats, and while walking, the last a recommendation by contemporary physicians (Loveman 2015, 26–30). John Wesley read ‘History, Poetry, and Philosophy’ on horseback, while the young Robert Burns read songbooks while driving his cart (Wesley 1775, 92; Burns 1819, 1.62). Thomas Ballard, a nineteenthcentury painter, was ‘always reading in the streets, and by long practice

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he steered in and out among the passengers on the pavement in a most skilful manner’ (Jones 1919, 1.139). Napoleon, a ferocious reader who installed a bookshelf in his carriage, would throw from the moving window, ‘all the reports he does not wish to file…all the newspapers he has read; and, finally, books which he glances at when he has a moment to spare, and then consigns their fate in the mud of the highway’ (Ludwig 1922, 335): the very epitome of a pre-digital ‘hyper reader’ to use James Sosnoski’s term (Hayles 2012, 61). The desire to be able to switch rapidly between texts prompted the sixteenth-century Italian engineer Agostino Ramelli to develop a ‘book wheel’ specifically to hold multiple volumes (Petroski 1999, 114–118). Sacred reading—perhaps the most profound kind of reading experience—was frequently embodied. In Christian tradition, kissing or rubbing books or images contained within them was a sign of pious veneration: Elizabeth I famously kissed the bible as part of her public procession before being crowned while Kathryn M. Rudy has catalogued the effects of repeated such encounters on the surfaces of medieval manuscripts (Holinshed 1577, 1792; Rudy 2011, 21–30). In seventeenth-century Scotland, Protestant readers were reminded that the Bible ‘should be a well-finger’d Book in gloomy times’ (Hutcheson 1691, sig. Hh1r). In contrast, the Qu’ran instructs its readers to be clean or purified before being touched, which is usually interpreted as meaning that wudu or a formal ablution needs to be performed first, while the surface of the Torah scroll is not to be touched during a synagogue service by anything other than a yad, a dedicated pointer in the shape of a hand (Robinson 2016). Reading is, by its very nature, an ambient act. It is, and has always been, an embodied and situated activity that requires a ‘readied’ reader: one who understands how to read not just the words but the material form of the work itself. It requires attention, of course, but it also requires an informed understanding of the potential relationships between subject, object, and text. The apparent similarities of book shapes and sizes should not beguile us into thinking that readers and their reading practices are also much the same. During the eighteenth century, enabled by a matrix of shifts in writing, reading, and publishing as well as wider social, economic, and cultural changes, one particular kind of reading practice began to predominate in the west. It simultaneously valued subjectivity and interiority—key markers of individualism—while at the same time subordinating, or even completely effacing, the individuality of a reader’s own body and situation. Two centuries or so later it still

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remains the ascendant mode of reading but latterly its pre-eminence and assumed universality has been challenged by resistant, sceptical modes of critical reading and by the work of historians of reading who have begun to recover alternative reading experiences, such as those of women or African-Americans (Radway 1984; Littau 2006; Jackson 2010; Willis 2018, 68–107). New technology too is providing opportunities for new reading experiences, whether banal or profound, but these do not mark an abrupt fissure with the past. Just as the dog-eared page has been rehabilitated as an emblem of textual use through the ubiquitous desktop icon for the document, so digital technology is enabling us to rethink and rework older ways of reading (Johnson et al 1989, 16, 18–19). Sixteen hundred years after Augustine found himself poised exquisitely between orality and writing, Breathe is unsettling its readers by blurring the line between book and digital device—and is fostering new kinds of readerly ‘readiness’.

Notes 1. ‘[It] is designed to evoke Venetian incunabula and humanist manuscripts, but with the quirks and idiosyncrasies of the kinds of typefaces you find in this artisanal tradition’—(Google, n.d., ‘Inknut Antiqua’); ‘The old posters and signs in the traditional Montserrat neighborhood of Buenos Aires inspired Julieta Ulanovsky to design this typeface and rescue the beauty of urban typography that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century’ (Google, n.d., ‘Monserrat’). 2. Traditionally, the phrase has been translated as ‘take up and read’. Piper (2012, 1–23) uses ‘take it and read’. 3. A shift in the definition of the ‘e-book’ is dated to the end of twentiethcentury: OED, s.v. ‘e-book’. A similar shift takes place with ‘e-reader’. 4. See for example two modern parodies of the codex as a technology: the Norwegian comedy-sketch, ‘Medieval helpdesk with English subtitles’ (Nærum, 2001), and IKEA’s mock-advert ‘Experience the power of a bookbook™’ (2014). 5. See, for example, the statue of an Eygpytian scribe dating from c.1400BCE in the Brooklyn Museum, and illustrated in Houston 2016, 246. Initially, this may have been a function of how the payprus sheet was constructed and, subsequently, how sheets were attached to one another (Houston 2016, 10–14, 243–244; Mak 2011, 10–15). 6. Although the screens of desktop and desktop computers are oriented differently, when text fits the width of the screen, it most likely belongs to a ‘page’ that extends well beyond the vertical reach of the screen.

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7. In Christian countries, the most obvious exception was the ‘lectern bible’, whose cumbersomeness meant it remained on the church’s lectern at all times. It was, though, still sufficiently portable that copies were often chained. 8. I am grateful to John Gallagher for this reference. 9. Copy in Bath Central Library, UK. 10. Some of the contingencies Calvino explores, though, are strikingly localised: a passage about cutting through the bolts of the pages with a paper-knife reflects Italian book-manufacturing practices rather than British or North American (42–43). 11. A key term for Warde (13) and subsequent type- and book-designers. OED, however, does not distinguish between this specific meaning and the way in which a text might be ‘easy to understand and enjoyable to read’ (OED). 12. Haddon is not alone among contemporary authors in using typography to represent a ‘neurodivergent’ character; indeed, as Kayt Lackie has argued, it has become ‘a pervasive conceptual metaphor’ that risks a kind of ‘othering’ of such characters (2017, 323–324, 350). 13. The British Dyslexia Association recommends sans-serif faces ‘as letters can appear less crowded’ (2018, 1). 14. Exodus 24:7; 2 Kings 23:2; 2 Chronicles 34:30; Nehemiah 13:1; Jeremiah 29:29, 36:6, 13–15, 20–21 (all from King James’ version). 15. Silent reading may well have exacerbated the fear that young women might be reading the wrong books in secret. 16. Genette would have seen these textual features as part of the ‘peritext’ which together with the ‘epitext’ made up the ‘paratext’. 17. It is worth remembering that the young Jane is exactly the kind of female reader that James Fordyce was worrying about only two generations earlier. 18. Hayles’s later work on these different types of attention is more nuanced (Hayles 2012, 55–79, 99–101).

References Altmann, Gerry T. M. 1997. The Ascent of Babel: An Exploration of Language, Mind, and Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Amazon. n.d. “Kindle Oasis E-reader—Graphite, Waterproof, 7” HighResolution Display (300 ppi), Built-In Audible, 8 GB Wi-Fi.” Accessed March 1, 2019. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B06XDK92KS/ref=ods_cc_ eink_cog. ———. n.d. “Kindle Paperwhite–Previous Generation (7th), 6” Display, Built-in Light, Wi-Fi, Black, with Special Offers.” Accessed March 1, 2019. https:// www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00QJDO0QC/ref=ods_cc_eink_mu.

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———. n.d. “Kindle Voyage E-reader, 6” High-Resolution Display (300 ppi) with Adaptive Built-in Light, PagePress Sensors, Wi-Fi—Includes Special Offers.” Accessed March 1, 2019. https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Kin dle-Voyage-6-Inch-4GB-eReader/dp/B00IOY8XWQ. Augustine, Saint. 1992. Confessions. Translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austen, Jane. 1994. Northanger Abbey. London: Penguin. Bathe, William. 1617. Janua Linguarum, Quadrilinguis. Or a Messe of Tongues: Latine, English, French, and Spanish. Neatly Served Up Together, for a Wholesome Repast, to the Worthy Curiositie of the Studious. London. Bible. 1997. The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Birkerts, Sven. 1994. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. New York: Fawcett Columbine. Bringhurst, Robert. 1999. The Elements of Typographic Style. 2nd ed. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks. British Dyslexia Association. 2018. Dyslexia Style Guide 2018: Creating Dyslexia Friendly Content. https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/common/ckeditor/filema nager/userfiles/Dyslexia_Style_Guide_2018-final.pdf. Brontë, Charlotte. 2001. Jane Eyre. Edited by Richard J. Dunn. New York: Norton. Burns, Robert. 1819. Letters of Burns. 2 vols. London. Calvino, Italo. 1998. If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. Translate by William Weaver. London: Vintage. Carr, Nicholas. 2010. The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember. New York: W. W. Norton. Chapman, R. W. 1920. “Old Books and Modern Reprints.” In The Portrait of a Scholar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Craigmyle, Bessie. 2011. “My Bookcase.” In Decadent Verse: An Anthology of Late-Victorian Poetry, 1872–1900, edited by Caroline Blyth. London: Anthem Press. Dante Alighieri. 1878. La Divina Commedia. Padua. Dehaene, Stanislas. 2009. Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention. London: Viking. Donaldson, Ian. 1998. “The Destruction of the Book.” Book History 1: 1–10. Dowding, Geoffrey. 1995. Finer Points in the Spacing & Arrangement of Type. London: Wace & Company Ltd. Drucker, Johanna. 2013. “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 7 (1): 1–43. Evolution of Reading in the Age of Digitisation (E-READ). n.d. Accessed March 1, 2019. https://ereadcost.eu/.

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Field, Eugene. 1896. The Love Affairs of a Bibliomaniac. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Fordyce, James. 1766. Sermons to Young Women. 2 vols. London: Andrew Millar and Thomas Cadell. Gadd, Ian. 2006. “From Printing Type to Blackboard™: Teaching the History of the Early Modern Book to Literary Undergraduates in a ‘New’ UK University.” In Teaching Bibliography, Textual Criticism, and Book History, edited by Ann R. Hawkins, 65–71. London: Pickering & Chatto. ———. 2018. “The Forgotten History of the Dog-Ear.” Lecture given at State Library of New South Wales, Sydney, 7 July. Galey, Alan. 2012. “The Enkindling Reciter: E-Books in the Bibliographical Imagination.” Book History 15: 210–247. Genette, Gérard. 1997. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google. n.d. “Inknut Antiqua.” Google Fonts. Accessed March 1, 2019. https:// fonts.google.com/specimen/Inknut+Antiqua. ———. n.d. “Montserrat.” Google Fonts. Accessed March 1, 2019. https://fonts. google.com/specimen/Montserrat. Grafton, Anthony. 1997. The Footnote: A Curious History. London: Faber & Faber. Haddon, Mark. 2004. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. London: Vintage. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2007. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.” Profession: 187–199. ———. 2012. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heie, Niels. 2006. “Eyetrack Between Text and Image.” Presentation at Graphics Art Institute of Denmark, Copenhagen, 21 April. Holinshed, Raphael. 1577. The Laste Volume of the Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, with Their Descriptions. London. Houston, Keith. 2016. The Book. New York: W. W. Norton. Howsam, Leslie. 2015. “The Study of Book History.” In The Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book, edited by Leslie Howsam, 1–13. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hunt, Leigh. 1823. “My Books.” In The Literary Examiner 1: 1–6. Hunter, J. Paul. 1990. Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction. New York: W. W. Norton. Hutcheson, George. 1691. Forty-Five Sermons upon the CXXX Psalm. Edinburgh. IKEA Singapore. 2014. “Experience the Power of a Bookbook™.” Published September 3, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOXQo7nURs0.

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Jackson, H. J. 2001. Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jackson, Leon. 2010. “The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian: African American Cultures of Print.” Book History 13: 251–308. Jajdelska, Elspeth. 2007. Silent Reading and the Birth of the Narrator. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Jensen, Kristian. 2011. Revolution and the Antiquarian Book: Reshaping the Past, 1780–1815. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Jeff, Teresa L. Roberts, David C. Smith, Charles H. Irby, Marian Beard, and Kevin Mackey. 1989. “The Xerox Star: A Retrospective.” Computer 22 (9): 11–29. Jones, Henry Festing. 1919. Samuel Butler, Author of Erewhon (1835–1902): A Memoir. 2 vols. London: Macmillan. Kennedy, Duncan F. 2013. Antiquity and the Meanings of Time: A Philosophy of Ancient and Modern Literature. London: I. B. Tauris. Kernan, Alvin. 1987. Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Klencke, Johan. 1613–60. Orbis Terræ Compendium. Lackie, Kayt. 2017. “An Extraordinary Treatment: Multimodality and Interiority.” PhD diss., Bath Spa University. Littau, Karin. 2006. Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania. Cambridge: Polity. Loveman, Kate. 2015. Samuel Pepys and His Books: Reading, Newsgathering, and Sociability, 1660–1703. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lupton, Christina. 2012. Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-Century Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ludwig, Emil. 1922. Napoleon. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. Lyons, Martyn. 2010. A History of Reading and Writing in the Western World. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Machiavelli. 1640. Nicholas Machiavel’s Prince. Translated. London. Mak, Bonnie. 2011. How the Page Matters. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Malone, Cynthia Northcutt. 2015. “Noses in Books: Orientation, Immersion, and Paratext.” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 40 (1): 17–28. Maruca, Lisa. 2007. The Work of Print: Authorship and the English Text Trades, 1660–1760. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Masters, Alexander. 2005. Stuart: A Life Backwards. London: Fourth Estate. McCutcheon, R. W. 2015. “Silent Reading in Antiquity and the Future History of the Book.” Book History 18: 1–32. McGann, Jerome J. 1991. The Textual Condition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McKenzie, D. F. 1993. ‘What’s Past is Prologue’: The Bibliographical Society and History of the Book. [London?]: Hearthstone Publications.

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Tschichold, Jan. 1991. The Form of the Book: Essays on the Morality of Good Design. Point Roberts, WA: Hartley & Marks. Warde, Beatrice. 1956. “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible.” In The Crystal Goblet, Sixteen Essays on Typography, edited by Henry Jacob, 11–17. Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company. Wesley, John. 1775. An extract of the Rev. Mr. John Wesley’s Journal, from May 14th, 1768, to Sept. 1st, 1770. London. Williams, Abigail. 2017. The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in The Eighteenth-Century Home. New Haven: Yale University Press. Willis, Ika. 2018. Reception, New Critical Idiom. Abingdon: Routledge. Wolf, Maryanne. 2008. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Cambridge: Icon Books. ———. 2018. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. New York: HarperCollins.

What We Talk About When We Talk About (Ambient Literature) Context Michael Marcinkowski

The title of this chapter is play on the title of a seminal (in some circles, at least) paper coming out of the field of human-computer interaction research, “What we talk about when we talk about context”—its title a take off of the Raymond Carver short story, “What we talk about when we talk about love”. Written by Paul Dourish (2004b), the paper laid out in broad strokes the various epistemic and ontological approaches to the question of context as it appeared in discussions around the development of systems for ubiquitous computing in the 1980s, 1990s, and into the 2000s. For Dourish, there was an important question in circulation at the time as to how to understand this idea of context in a way that allowed for both functional and useful systems of contextual computing. For ambient literature, which has come to rely on the paradigms and technologies that resulted from this work in the area ubiquitous computing (at least from a technical perspective), understanding what we are talking about when we talk about context remains of central importance, not only because of the still-unresolved technical questions of how to build adequate systems for contextual applications, but because of the importance of the added layer of complexity that comes when delving into the realm of literature.

M. Marcinkowski (B) Centre for English Language and Foundation Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_3

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The awkward interjection of “ambient literature” into our chapter title isn’t just sloppy editing or poor writing. It highlights a crucial point to be discussed: as much as works of ambient literature are meant to be integrated into the situation of the reader, they are not, like so much ambient music or systems of ubiquitous computing, meant to fall neatly into the background of experience. They are there to stand out, to be charged with meaning and leave audiences without something, some feeling. These are works that jut out from the present-ness of any context while at the same time relying on this very present-ness of context. This chapter will, through a reading of an essay by Rita Felski (2011) and building on these germinal discussions of the idea of context in computer science, draw out an idea of what the concept of “context” comes to mean for ambient literature as it begins to interject ideas of a literary context, of the contexts of meaning, language and art, across various technologies of reading. In doing this, our aim is to examine an idea of context that is as much material as it is meaningful, one that is able to support understanding works of ambient literature as they are embedded within the personal, situated, and global lives of readers today. Bound up with this question of the contexts engaged by the works themselves, as will be detailed, remains the question of the contexts through which works of ambient literature are made and how they are understood.

The Cartographer’s Context So what do we mean when we talk about context? James Attlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession gives one particular answer to the question. In it, readers are led around London by a smartphone app, unlocking new chapters of a story as they visit specific, real-life locations corresponding to locations appearing in the narrative. In this, the narrative of a story set in the middle of the twentieth century and told in part through period photographs is laid out across the corresponding, contemporary locations in London, with the contemporary landscape providing a context for the fictional narrative. Even in this, however, the idea of context is not so simple. The London of the story, set in the mid-twentieth century differs, of course, from the London of today. The piece encourages readers to engage with this difference in an almost archaeological way, with the contemporary city giving enough of a hint of the “original” fictional setting of the story to offer a keyhole glimpse into the world of the story and vice versa: the fictional

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story directs readers’ attention and colours their impression of the city. As the two contexts are brought together, there can never be a perfect match between them and that is the point. They are left to rub against one another. The narrative context does not simply sit beside the real-life context of the reader in London: the two seep together, one implicating the other in the moods and conceptual landscapes that are developed. Each half of this simplified model of a dual context infects the other. Placed together in the reader’s experience, these two distinct contexts of the city and the narrative create a third, hybrid context within which the experience of the work exists. From this, there are countless other contexts that spin off: for each reader, their experience of the bustling streets of London are different each time, creating a new context in the interplay of the programmed narrative and the really existing landscape.1 This is multiplied throughout the story, the context of the reader’s experience at each site reverberates on to the next, with the feelings and moods created hanging over them as they continue on. For readers already familiar with London, there is an additional contextual carrying over as they bring with them to the narrative a diverse set of experiences, histories, and memories about the city. For readers to whom the locations explored in London are new, they bring with them impressions of the city built from books, movies, TV and so on. They carry over their impressions and expectations of other urban environments. But what are we to make of this idea of context as it exists within the work itself? If we are to be rigorous readers of The Cartographer’s Confession, we need to say that there are yet more contexts at work in the narrative of the piece. The main narrative thread is itself housed within a framing device, with the story being told to readers originating from materials supposedly discovered by the story’s (fictional) author who worked to reconstruct the narrative from old letters, audio tapes and photographs rescued from a failing maps shop in London. But there is more: The account given by the (fictional) author of the story is itself framed as being recounted as part of a DVD extra for the (fictional) movie of The Cartographer’s Confession, with readers navigating what seem to be DVD menus as they read and trace the “backstory” for a movie that can never be seen. The conceit of this context hinges, of course, on the reader recognizing that they are not viewing the special content of a DVD for a movie that they recognize does not really exist, and that they are using a smartphone

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in a particular way that leads them around the city. The reader has to know about DVD menus and special features and know that stories can be represented in different ways, that they can suspend the immediacy of their experience, and allow for framing devices to function. For this to happen, the experience of the piece has to be wrapped in the awareness of how a smartphone works and what a smartphone is able to do, that they are miniature computers that can display different representations within a single (usually black) frame. Readers have to be aware of the interactive modalities of the smartphone, as well as be conditioned to how they work. The reader has to understand, or take it as an article of faith, that the app will behave in some consistent fashion and, that, through the invisible (save for previous experience) power of digital networks, the phone uses satellites and cellular networks in orbit in order to lead the reader on their way in an accurate manner. Readers have to understand how there is a congruence between the context detected by the smartphone and the streets of London around which they are guided. All these various narrative and epistemic frames of the work are finally given to the reader in the form of a smartphone app written by the author James Attlee (of whom they may or may not know something already, able to place his writing into some frame of genre), which guides them through the real streets of London, putting them into the locations featured in the story. But it is not as if this question of context stops there either: for it to work, the smartphone app has to be downloaded and installed on a reader’s smartphone, supported by the phone’s operating system and the various frameworks and programming languages that make it possible for the app to function. Readers have to find the app on an app store, have access to Wi-Fi networks to download it, and have available storage capacity among all the other apps, photos, and data that we come to accumulate today. Such systems in turn rely on international communication networks, server farms, electrical power grids and even extra-global systems of satellite communication in order to support location detection. The Cartographer’s Confession is a work that exists within a cultural trajectory of locational works, a history of how we think about the situation of reading, and even a broader consideration of the idea of writing and literature, the history and context of which is far too broad for us to consider here. Its story is one that taps into the histories of global war, economic pressures, shared and disputed values of nationalism, and the

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history of the movements of populations. It builds on a knowing appreciation of the possibility that something like historical fiction exists, that stories can be located in particular temporal contexts while readers are safely in the present. Even these contexts which press the work into the present are not enough. It is impossible to think of the contexts engaged and created by The Cartographer’s Confession without considering how it was commissioned as part of an academic research project (as detailed in part in the introduction of this volume), its creation guided, in some ways, by versions of discussions and inquiries present in this book. Within this academic setting, there are multiple and overlapping groups and identities at play, each guided more specifically by their own unique histories and trajectories. Different participants in the project have different histories and ideas about what it is to be a writer, a creative producer, an academic or even a member of a research project. As the author of the work, Attlee himself and the work that he produced comes to be implicated by the epistemologies and paradigms present as part of discussions of the project. The Cartographer’s Confession is not a work that was made in a vacuum or born whole from the head of Zeus. It arrived not only out of the work of the Ambient Literature research project, but through the efforts of a team of producers, developers, musicians, actors, voice actors, designers, artists, testers, sound engineers and videographers, all of whom had some hand in shaping the project. More than this, as a smartphone app, the work relies on the hundreds and thousands of people responsible for maintaining both the technical and computer infrastructures and systems that the work relies upon (engineers from Google, Apple, internet providers, phone companies; the United States Air Force, open source developers, chip fabricators, component manufacturers, mineral mine operators; and on and on) as well as the countless other people who, in any countless number of ways, support the physical infrastructure of the city of London, both directly (such as the case of those who maintain roads and footpaths) and indirectly (as in the case of those working in the financial industry whose taxes support the continuing existence of the city). What, of course, is central to all of this, as already mentioned, is the individual experience of the readers themselves, with each reader confronting a different city in a different way. For every participant who

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finds Leicester Square to be taken over by a Christmas market as the narrative veers towards discussion of the commercialization of public spaces, another encounters a vegan protest inserting an unfamiliar contemporary political landscape into the work. For a work that can take upwards of five hours to complete, with readers navigating across London via a combination of walking and public transportation, traffic, the weather and crowds all have a bearing on the context of the work. There are wider, yet to be examined, factors that play into what might too generally be called the “social fit” of such a work that can fall to the question of context as well (some of these will be discussed further in Chapter Nine “The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee”). For those who might hope to experience something like The Cartographer’s Confession, there is a question about how other activities and commitments (work, family, etc.) frame and provide context to the work. What are the decisions and choices made by audiences when they take up a work like this one? What does it mean when the cost for a work comes not in an easily understood monetary transaction, but a commitment of time and effort? The Cartographer’s Confession invokes a sense of commitment, relying on the resilience and interest of a dedicated audience, the kind of which has to be built up and groomed over long spans of time. Among this mash of contexts, how are we to understand this idea of context in works of ambient literature in a productive way? Is the concept of “context” even a valid one when engaging with these works? As Brenda Dervin (2003) asserted in a review of the development of the idea of “context” in information science: “there is no term that is more often used, less often defined, and when defined so variously as context” (112). How can we think of the idea of context in a work like The Cartographer’s Confession when confronted thus?

Context Stinks(!) In a piece reproduced in his book Reassembling the Social , Bruno Latour (2005) plays out a kind of Socratic dialogue between a professor (one can’t help but reading it as Latour himself) and a student struggling with their PhD research; Student: But you always need to put things into a context, don’t you? Professor: I have never understood what context meant, no. A frame makes a picture look nicer, it may direct the gaze better, increase the value,

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allows to date it, but it doesn’t add anything to the picture. The frame, or the context, is precisely the sum of factors that make no difference to the data, what is common knowledge about it. If I were you, I would abstain from frameworks altogether. Just describe the state of affairs at hand. (144)

While Latour here is dealing with the idea of context in a specifically sociological and theoretical sense, works of ambient literature find themselves in a radicalized version of this predicament described by Latour. Like the description of the various contexts evoked in The Cartographer’s Confession above, there is a question of how works of ambient literature, both in their function and analysis, are able to be bounded, how the work is able to be separated from its context, if it can be at all. When so much outside of the work impacts the work, how should we determine what counts as context? Works of ambient literature seem to force us to both disagree and agree with Latour: context makes no difference to the state of affairs, except for when it is this context that is a part of that state of affairs being considered. In this, we are left to the task of describing context. But if it is context that matters and it can no longer be described as a frame or “the sum of factors that make no difference”, then what is it? The title of a 2011 article by Rita Felski also quotes Latour on the issue of context, saying, simply enough, that “context stinks” (2005, 148). This quotation from Latour, as Felski points out, is in fact a double quotation, with Latour referring back to Rem Koolhaas and Mau’s (1995) own disregard for the concept. Of course, Koolhaas is more famous for the more direct and more active “fuck context” (502) when discussing how his buildings should fit into their surroundings. For him, as an architect responsible for the instantiation of new physical forms, his is not just a consideration of the present state of context, a descriptive frame to be applied to a work of literature or a sociological study, but an active encounter towards the re-making of context. Whatever the exact phrasing one might wish to use, the sentiment remains the same: across the various disciplines represented as the quotation has moved (from architecture to sociology to literary studies, and now here), the question and importance of context remains a persistent complication. What is interesting for us in particular, is that in tracing the movement of this quote (“context stinks”) from one source to another, it (and the attendant antagonism towards the idea of context) cuts a path through areas that, in various ways, map out a terrain of concern for ambient literature. Whether in their literary nature, the social forms

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and habits of readers that they engage, or the way that they address the built environment around us, these are works are bothered, in some way, by the question of context and the wide mandate that such a question engages. In her article, Felski (2011) lays out a reconsideration of the idea and importance of context in literature. While her aim in the article seems largely to introduce a Latourian reading of actor-network theory to literary studies, her intervention is particularly interesting in the ways that, with no intention of her own, her text points towards a cluster of aims found in works of ambient literature as they engage various contextual determinations. Building her argument for a reappraisal of how we should understand the various contexts which guide our understanding of what might be considered canonical literary texts, Felski is not concerned with ideas of ubiquitous computing, locative narrative, electronic literature, or any of the other touchstones that ground our current project. For Felski, the importance of context is in the tension that exists between the work of literature itself and the historical placement of its composition. As Felski puts it, “[w]e cannot close our eyes to the historicity of artworks, and yet we sorely need alternatives to seeing them as transcendentally timeless on the one hand, and imprisoned in their moment of origin on the other” (575). In this, there is a concern for how the context of a work’s creation comes to implicate our understanding of the textual object of the work and how that object comes to serve as the locus for this history. What this sets up for ambient literature is to press us to think about the way in which these kinds of works rely on the context not only of their authorship and the issues invoked in our contemporary moment, but also on the contexts of their reception. After all, these works are neither defined best by their historical moment nor by the timeless objects that they are, but by the way that this particular historical moment is able to result in literary artefacts which (through the utilization of computer technologies) actively engage the context of their reception. They explicitly evoke the two types of literary ambience called out by Clive Scott (2012) in his development of a phenomenological and performative literary reading: “one connected with radial reading, with the activation of the reader’s own associations and memories … the other connected with the absorption into text of the world beyond the text” (6). As much as It Must Have Been Dark By Then deals with issues of

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climate change and land use, or as Breathe engages the question of migration, they each do so in a way which refactors the context of their initial composition into the present as they exist in the hands of readers. The span of the question of the historical context within which these works are understood is expansive and variable. They are works which deliberately incorporate mechanisms which, while not eradicating it entirely, at least complicate the question of how to place the context of the work, as it exists as an object within history (as will be discussed more in Chapter “The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee”, Breathe, in particular, removes the necessity or even possibility of any sense of human contextual intervention). They function, as Felski says in describing Latourian actors, as “not just channels for conveying predetermined meanings, but configure and refigure these meanings in specific ways” (2011, c583). They are not just works that sit back for us to read, but instead “only survive and thrive by making friends, creating allies, attracting disciples, inciting attachments, latching on to receptive hosts” (584). In this, works of ambient literature can be understood to be “actors” (or “actants”, depending on your preferred level of anthropomorphism or anti-humanism), themselves playing a role in the creation and implications of their context; An actor, in this schema, is anything that modifies a state of affairs by making a difference. Nonhuman actors do not determine reality or singlehandedly make things happen—let us steer well clear of technological or textual determinism. And yet, as Latour points out, there are “many metaphysical shades between full causality and sheer inexistence”, between being the sole source of an action and being utterly inert and without influence. The “actor” in actor-network theory is not a self-authorizing subject, an independent agent who summons up actions and orchestrates events. Rather, actors only become actors via their relations with other phenomena, as mediators and translators linked in extended constellations of cause and effect (2004, 582–583). Such a process of enrolment can be seen very explicitly in a consideration of the context of The Cartographer’s Confession: it brings in entire networks of other actants to become part of its assemblage. The context of a work becomes embroiled in the work itself, with one being part and parcel with the other. As Felski appropriately puts it in addressing the traditional divide between the context of a literary text and the text itself: “There is no zero-sum game in which one side must be conclusively crushed so that the other can triumph” (584). Without having any intention towards (or perhaps even awareness of) the

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kinds of issues that have propelled the present development of ambient literature, Felski’s text finds its way to help us think about these kinds of works. As will be discussed in more depth in the next chapter, it is the entanglement with the presence of the reader that makes a work of ambient literature what it is. As Felski puts it, “art’s autonomy—if by autonomy we mean its distinctiveness and specialness—does not rule out connectedness but is the very reason that connections are forged and sustained” (584). These are works that, compelled by the algorithms and systems that support them, actively engage the reader in a way that makes the agency of texts (normally difficult to recognize) explicit. Felski further asserts the agency of literary texts in general when she says; The significance of a text is not exhausted by what it reveals or conceals about the social conditions that surround it. Rather, it is also a matter of what it makes possible in the viewer or reader — what kind of emotions it elicits, what perceptual changes it triggers, what affective bonds it calls into being. (585)

Works of ambient literature, in their explicit and conscious engagement of both the social conditions of their reception and the feedback loop that is initiated by the presence of the reader as they navigate through a landscape or interact with their phone play with this concern for context as laid out by Felski. Without meaning to describe it, the argument that Felski lays out sets up some of the key concerns of ambient literature. That is, her own text displays its autonomy is being able to be picked up here, by us, and be received and read in new ways that stand apart from the historical grounding of its composition.

Computers and Context While it is possible to peg the rise of interest in the kind of contextual computing we see with smartphones today to the development of the kinds of mobile (Schilit and Duchamp 1991) and ubiquitous (Weiser 1991) computing that works of ambient literature depend on, the seeds of the question of computing’s relationship with context were first laid in a serious way by Hubert Dreyfus (1979, 1992) in his critique of claims made in the field of artificial intelligence. Responding to attempts to design intelligent systems based on representative accounts of the world,2

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Dreyfus presented a Heideggerian and hermeneutic-phenomenological account of contextual interaction as it played a fundamental role in basic questions of the intelligibility of meaning.3 For him, when aiming to build computer systems able to display the kind of general intelligence as found in humans, there are various contextual frames that needed to be accounted for beyond the immediacy of direct representation. You can’t really understand what a chair is through a series of representations or through its relationship to other objects. You have to know what it means to sit, what kinds of situations might be amenable to sitting, what the human meaning, value, and implication for sitting is. To Dreyfus, the objects which AI sought to understand were not able to be understood in isolation from one another or, importantly, isolated from human practice. To understand them, it was necessary to understand them in context. As Dreyfus put it, the “meaningful objects embedded in their context of references among which we live are not a model of the world stored in our mind or brain; they are the world itself” (1992, 265–266). To be understood, the world is not reducible to a table of definitions or even relations, but needs to be lived. Based on his reading of Heidegger and the later Wittgenstein, Dreyfus argued that “one could not have a theory of the everyday world” (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1988, 26).4 In this, he drew a contrast between those approaches that attempted to formulate a systematic and symbolic account of the meaningful world without accounting for the context of the world and those that sought to engage the world in its emergent and contextual holism. Such a phenomenological link between context and computing was taken up in the wake of Dreyfus’s research around how to both interact with (Winograd and Flores 1986) and to design (Ehn 1988) computer systems. For both interaction and the work of design, the question of context came to be seen as central to the success of computing applications, with the organizational and cognitive contexts of computing playing a key role in developing usable and efficient computer systems. These approaches took cues from a Heideggerian hermeneuticphenomenological ontology “in which human activity is treated as an ongoing temporal process of language and interpretation, rather than a series of separable perceptions, each of which frames and fixes the world as a set of symbols or signs” (Chalmers 2004, 224). In its various guises (ranging from the application of Lev Vygotsky’s Activity Theory to Heideggerian Phenomenology to J. L. Austin’s speech action theory), this development in the consideration of the wider social context of

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computing expanded the scope of what was to be considered in the design and use of computers. This heightened awareness of the context of computing influenced the rise of participatory and collective approaches to the design of computer artefacts. For systems to be effective, it came to be seen to be necessary for designers to fully understand their context of use as in the famous example of attempts to design systems for air traffic controllers without observing their specific material practices (Hughes et al. 1993). They were also encouraged to consider the context of the work of design as being central to the success of new systems, with the process of design coming to implicate the outcome of any resulting artefacts (as in the case of participatory design and its offshoots (Kensing and Blomberg 1998; Ko et al. 2011)). In the case of the Scandinavian DEMO and UTOPIA projects of the 1970 and 1980s (Ehn 1988), this push for the inclusion of direct input from users who understood the context of the work practices connected to new computer systems came to implicate not only work practices themselves, but broader questions of social organization, economic policy and democracy. It was not possible to consider the context of a use without considering the context of a system’s making and the reflexive manner in which the setting of a system came to engender its ultimate meaning. At the same time that the scope and contextual concerns of computing were expanding (Grudin 1990), these concerns came to be theoretically deepened through the work of Lucy Suchman and her conception of situated action. Starting from a re-evaluation of the basic premise of the possibility of programmatic accounts of human actions, Suchman (2006) took “the boundaries between persons and machines to be discursively and materially enacted rather than naturally effected and to be available, for better and worse and with greater and lesser resistances, for refiguring” (12). In this, there was a continuation of the shift from an interactivity of universality and permanence (as exemplified in the cognitive modelling of control structures) towards an interactivity of context and potentiality.5 Such reconfiguration in the wake of the blossoming of the idea of context extended to not only practices, but to the function of institutions and the physical architecture of human life (Agre 2001), with the idea of context linking the three (institutions, practices and architectures). This active and reflexive account of the implications of context is something that is highlighted by Felski in her account of literary context. In developing her argument, Felski cites the work of Tony Bennett (1985), whose concept of “reading formations” highlights the various and

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sometimes complex assemblages of factors which influence our reading practices. How texts are read is defined by the matrix shaped by the text itself, the social frameworks within which they exist, as well as (and perhaps most importantly), the “cultural frameworks and interpretive vocabularies we have unconsciously absorbed” (Felski 2011, 586).6 What Felski highlights in Bennett’s account is, however, that in tracing out a more nuanced picture of the reception of literary works, the influence of this formation is not a one-way street; While we indisputably learn to read literary texts by internalizing particular interpretative vocabularies, by the same token we learn to read and make sense of our lives by referencing fictional or imaginary worlds. What counts as text and what serves as frame is more mutable and fluid than Bennett allows; works of art occupy both categories rather than only one; they are not just objects to be interpreted, but also reference points and guides to interpretation, in both predictable and less foreseeable ways. (587)

It is exactly this sentiment that is internalized both tacitly and explicitly in the commissioned works of ambient literature: The travels that are narratively present in It Must Have Been Dark By Then refract readers’ own travels and vice versa; the interactive paradigms of Breathe write themselves onto the experience of the reader. They are works which bind literature to our lives in a similar manner to how alternate reality gaming binds players’ lives to the game world: the work becomes pervasively ingrained within the social patternings of their lives as the two overlap. Like Felski’s claim for the reflexive role of literature in general, works of ambient literature directly and consciously place the normally restricted economy of the text into play as part of a more general economy of social exchange. For works of ambient literature, it is the context of the work itself, both situated and literary, that comes to be engaged in the works. As in Felski’s account, these are works that enrol a wide variety of cultural and physical conditions in the presentation and life of the work. They are guided by and play a part in the wider lives that are led by readers and, importantly, the people who make them.

Living in the Background This early consideration of context in computing came to take on a heightened importance with the arrival of ubiquitous computing

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(ubicomp) and contextual computing in the 1990s (Schilit and Duchamp 1991; Weiser 1991, 1993; Schilit et al. 1994). Ubicomp, in particular as it was initially put forward by Mark Weiser (1991), with its vision of a world in which computing is all around us, always on, and always ready to step in and fulfil our needs, relied on a specific understanding of what context was and how computing fit into such a picture. For Weiser, computing was meant to be something that could be forgotten, that could allow users to go about their business without having to stop to consider how they should interact with computer systems. Lights would turn on when someone entered a room, coffee would be automatically brewed in the morning, meetings would be effortlessly scheduled at the best time. The tedious minutiae of everyday life could be ignored, leaving people free to exercise their creativity and uniquely human skills. It is this vision of ubiquitous computing that undergirds (though not entirely) the thinking around ambient literature: smartphones and the technologies that allow ambient literature to be moulded to readers’ surroundings are built on design concepts and interactive paradigms that stem from this early work in ubiquitous computing. In its emphasis on the ability of computing to fall into the background of experience, the version of ubiquitous computing put forward by Weiser relied on a distinctly Heideggerian version of hermeneutic phenomenology (Dourish 2004a; Weiser 1991). Just as in Dreyfus’s account, the world comes to be intelligible through our interactions with it. For thinking about ubiquitous technologies, this particular kind of relationship with the world is exemplified in Heidegger’s consideration of tool use. For Heidegger, there was a split between how we approach a tool, such as a hammer, when it was in use versus when it was simply laying there to be considered. In the one case, when it was taken up by a skilled craftsperson and put to use, the hammer could be seen as being “ready-to-hand” (Zuhanden). In this, it was forgotten and became embroiled in the practice of its use. If the hammer were to break in the course of use, however, it would cease being “ready-to-hand” and become “present-at-hand” (Vorhanden), as the craftsperson had to look at it in an intentional fashion in order to come to understand what caused the breakdown. In this, there is a shadow of the divide seen by Dreyfus in approaches to artificial intelligence. On the one hand, human meaning in the world is like the hammer as it is in use. On the other, when the broken hammer lays on the workbench, it has to be inspected in a theoretical and representational way. For systems of ubiquitous computing,

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the aim was to come to function in a “ready-to-hand” fashion: falling into the background of human practice, able to be used without a second thought. Given this phenomenological rendering of so-called “calm computing”, the question of how to enact such a system in a computational manner—how to build a system that would allow computational processes to adapt to the context of different human practices—invigorated discussions in the 1990s of how computers may best be designed in order to engage human contexts in an easy and automated fashion. The need for computer systems to be able to accurately detect and identify the (culturally inflected) context of use came to be a central concern and subject to a number of different solutions. In particular, two broad trends towards approaching the question of context were identified (Dourish 2004b; Chalmers 2004). These epistemic trends, positivist on the one hand and phenomenological on the other, each served different, somewhat complementary purposes, and each led to notable differences in the manner in which systems were designed. Where those favouring a positivist epistemology focused on the automated detection and computational representation of context which guided the actions taken and content delivered by a ubiquitous system (e.g. Dey 2001), phenomenological approaches (e.g. Bardram 2004) sought to explicitly leverage human interpretive faculties and an embodied sense of cognition (Dourish 2004a) in order to link computing with contextual activities. In the one, questions of context are left to the system while in the other such questions are left to users. From a positivist perspective, “context” is something to scoop up, to detect, and something that exists in an independent way. These are systems which take action on their own, by detecting location, for instance. From a phenomenological perspective, “context” is derived from human practices, through interaction and intention: users are responsible for the ultimate determination of context, like when selecting a language at a cash machine.7 Put succinctly, for formal, technical systems, positivist theory makes contextual computing possible; phenomenological theory makes contextual computing useful.

The Problem of Context Throughout the history of the idea of context in computing, there is a tension between positivism and phenomenology, between representation and enactment, between the pre-givenness of plans and their cultural

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interpretation. Within this ontological and epistemic space, there is a basic contrast between notion of the human and the technological and how we should think about each. For ambient literature, these questions of human-technological relations and context are bound together in the explicit manner in which technologically defined contextual objects are set up to evoke humanistic literary effect. Theoretically positivist approaches, while computationally helpful, falter when confronted with the explicitly humanist demands of literature. Similarly, as has been pointed out elsewhere (Chalmers and Galani 2004), phenomenological approaches which rely on a Heideggerian account of tool use likewise fail when they are called upon to explicate the movement between explicit present-at-hand and tacit ready-to-hand interactions, between the world of human practice and that of theoretical enframing.8 As Yvonne Rogers (2006) and Matthew Chalmers and Areti Galani (2004) have argued in different ways in the wake of ubiquitous computing, it is neither possible nor desirable to have systems that are only in the background of experience. After all, computers are meant to have a noticeable effect on our lives, not just run in the background. This is something that is even truer for something like ambient literature which is meant to stand out from the world and provide some sense of explicit experience for the reader, to provide some break from the present context. Weiser (1994) acknowledged this deficit in the vision of calm computing, calling for a form of “seamful” computing, in which the background of computing was designed in such a way that how it functioned and what it did was visible to users (like the seams on a jacket). This perspective encouraged interaction designers to look to the moments of disjunction as a resource from which they would be able to produce meaningful interactions.9 As is seen in the example of The Cartographer’s Confession, works of ambient literature inhabit two distinct worlds: the world of the fictional narrative and the real world of actual life. These two worlds are bound together by the technological artefact of the smartphone and the form of ubiquitous computing that it represents. For works of ambient literature, the aim is not to have the narrative disappear into an invisible background, but to have it stand out, be evocative and hold the attention of readers, even as it silently (from a computing perspective) engages their context. As in the disjunction that exists between the (lightly historical) world of the narrative and contemporary London, it works in the seams that exist between different representations of context. Like Genevieve Bell

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and Paul Dourish’s (2007) account of really existing systems of ubiquitous computing, the idea of context in works of ambient literature is messy, with no sharp distinctions that are able to delineate what kinds of contexts matter or how different contexts interact. No distinction, that is, except when they become meaningful. By this token, the very idea of what context is becomes debased, coming to illustrate Dervin’s critique of the idea of context, that it can come to mean anything. How useful is the idea of context anyway? Can it do anything other than provide a useful shorthand for whatever might be proximate to something else? For thinking about ambient literature, and the kinds of entanglements that come to exist among the reader, the work and the situation of reading, perhaps Latour’s slightly smug definition that context is “simply a way of stopping the description when you are tired or too lazy to go on” (2005, 148), seems appropriate.

Context Is Everything Following Felski in approaching the idea of context in literature through the lens given by Latour, it is possible to develop some sense, however difficult, of what context means for these works of ambient literature. In this, the context that is activated by a work is determined by all those actants which might implicate its meaning, both within and without the narrative of the piece. As Felski puts it; The Latourian model of the nonhuman actor, moreover, presumes no necessary measure of scale, size, or complexity. It includes not only individual novels or films, but also characters, plot devices, cinematography, literary styles, and other formal devices that travel beyond the boundaries of their home texts to attract allies, generate attachments, trigger translations, and inspire copies, spin-offs, and clones. We are far removed, in other words, from an aestheticism in which art works are chastely sequestered from the worldly hustle and bustle, their individual parts relating only to each other. (2011, 587)

It is this last line that, for us here, has the greatest impact: that there is no way in which the narrative world of the work can be understood as existing, in all its layered and multiply entangled forms, without an appeal to the conditions that surround it. “Texts do not act by themselves, but only in tandem with countless other, often unpredictable,

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co-actors” (588), as Felski puts it in a consideration of the lasting power of some literary reputations over others. “Literary works”, for Felski, “are not actors in this rugged, individualist sense, not lonely rebels pitted against the implacable forces of the contextual status quo” (589). They are entangled within their contexts. Works of ambient literature revel in these contextual concerns, both as they invoke a sense of context in their function, and as they extend outward along the wider networks of context that are made possible by contemporary information technologies. They are defined neither by the work itself nor by the surrounding context. For Felski, [f]rom the standpoint of actor-network theory, as we are starting to see, neither perspective holds water. The glory of the “text” is not to be defended by rescuing it from the slavering jaws of “context.” There is no zero-sum game in which one side must be conclusively crushed so that the other can triumph. (2011, 584)

Importantly, in enlisting actor-network theory in her argument, Felski opens the door for the kind of reflexive concern so befitting to the present question of context in works of ambient literature: “The context concept is itself an actor, one that has enjoyed a remarkable long and successful run”. (590). What all of this concern for the question of context reveals is that context comes to be defined by the contemporary limits of what we are able to take in as being important and edifying bounds of context, it is all we can describe before we are too “tired or too lazy to go on”. After all, context is a multiplying problem. Giorgio De Michelis (2015) put it well when he said that contextual computing systems “cannot fully solve the situatedness problem, since they create and rely on spaces for collaboration among different users that are separate from their individual workspaces” (197). Anytime you try to insert a system to manage or define context, it becomes part of the context as well.10 Even asking the question “what is context?” just adds further context to the problematic.

Ambient Contexts In thinking about all these various ideas and complaints about context that can be seen floating in the background of discussions of ambient literature, what kind of concept are we left with? For us, collectively engaged in the instantiation and study of ambient literature, there is a curious

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notion of context that begins to develop, one that, as Whitman had it “contains multitudes”. For these works, what we are left with is a sense of the ever-shifting and ever-changing assemblages of elements that come together to make the context of a work. Each work of ambient literature addresses the topic of context in different ways, but there remains a central core idea that is very much like Latour’s account: when considering context, what matters is what makes a difference. Context, like Ian Hacking’s (1983) conception of knowledge, is not defined by its ability to be represented, but by our ability to do something meaningful with it. We know that electrons are real, not because of atomic theory, but because we can do things with them. In this, it is not simply a phenomenological context, but a fully realist one. We can know that the contexts activated by these works are real—that they really exist—in the effects that they can have on readers and the world around them. This is not a context defined by human perception or engagement or only established as a frame which can bind together a narrative. This sense of context is that really existing assemblages of meanings, technologies, environments, histories, practices, and everything else that implicates how these works come to be understood. “Context” for these works comes to be both what is there and what these works make possible.

Notes 1. This is a central aspect of the concept of context that can be found in the work of Rita Felski (2011), one that is very much in line with a Gadamerian hermeneutics that insists, in Felski’s words, “the work of art is not just a historical artefact, but is newly actualized and brought to life in the hermeneutic encounter” (573). 2. As in the early work of Allen Newell and Herbert Simon’s Physical Symbol System Hypothesis (1976) or the structural primitives of Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert (2017). 3. It is interesting to note given the kind of making non-presence present in ambient literature, the limits that a symbolic sense of context had in the development of AI, particularly in the division that exists between symbolic systems and neural network approaches; A feature used in a symbolic representation is either present or not. In the net, however, although certain nodes are more active when a certain feature is present in the domain, the amount of activity

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not only varies with the presence or absence of this feature but is affected by the presence or absence of other features as well. (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1988, 35) 4. Elsewhere, this argument was framed as one that was part of a longer philosophical continuum, focused on the divide between atomic or wholistic philosophies; According to Heidegger, traditional philosophy is defined from the start by its focusing on facts in the world while “passing over” the world as such. This means that philosophy has from the start systematically ignored or distorted the everyday context of human activity. The branch of the philosophical tradition that descends from Socrates through Plato, Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant to conventional AI takes it for granted, in addition, that understanding a domain consists in having a theory of that domain. A theory formulates the relationships among objective, context-free elements (simples, primitives, features, attributes, factors, data points, cues, etc.) in terms of abstract principles (covering laws, rules, programs, etc.). (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1988, 24–25) 5. For Suchman, this consideration of the continual reconfiguration of human-machine relations draws on wide terrain of theoretical work, mixing ideas from Latour, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, and Harold Garfinkel (among others) in order to sketch out these networks of resonances across domains. 6. For thinking about our interactions with computers, this can be understood as the cognitive models (Norman 2013) that set our expectations for use. More broadly, this notion appeals to Thomas Kuhn’s (1996) consideration of scientific paradigms or Michael Polanyi’s (1983) account of tacit knowledge, each of which can be seen resonating in the background of Dreyfus’s argument against AI. 7. These two models of interaction can be seen in different ways and in different combination in our commissioned works of ambient literature. On the one hand, The Cartographer’s Confession first relies on a positivist sense of context that is purely driven by location in order to trigger portions of the narrative. It Must Have Been Dark by Then, on the other hand, relies on a phenomenological account, allowing readers to choose locations that seem fitting to the themes addressed. As literary works, they each, of course, allow for a certain valence of distinctly human interpretation of context throughout the work, with readers’ embodied account of

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their context engaged where they are, however best suited to the narrative (where to look, what smells to consider, what to feel, etc.). 8. This is something raised in a philosophical context by Graham Harman’s (2002) schema of object-oriented ontology. Harman’s perspective finds one of its major theoretical explicative devices in a critique of the model of Heideggerian tool use that has proven so foundational for ubiquitous and contextual computing. Roughly put, Harman argues that to assent to a traditional Heideggerian ontology is to illegitimately leave the hammer out of an ontological conception of the world once it is broken. If, in Heidegger’s ontology, the hammer is only properly “here” when in use, then how are we to think of the object that is the hammer when it breaks? Are there then in fact two ontologies, one of broken hammers and another of those that work? With this basic example in mind, Harman lays out an object-oriented account in which objects themselves, not the relationship that they have to human action, come to be the defining characteristic of his ontology. This realist account of the independence of objects as they might remain outside of any necessary relations sets up the “object” of systems of digital reading as being locatable to both authors and readers in the same, real ways. 9. To an extent, ambient literature seems to answer the challenge to a vision of ubicomp as existing in the background laid out by Rogers (2006) when she argues “that people rather than computer should take the initiative to be constructive, creative and, ultimately, in control of their interactions with the world — in novel and extensive ways” (406). In their literary forms, works of ambient literature are just such applications that use techniques developed out of ubiquitous computing in order to create evocative connections with the world. 10. As Jacques Derrida (1997) put it in making a similar claim “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,“ indicating that there is nothing that can exist outside of the bounds of context.

References Agre, Philip. 2001. “Changing Places: Contexts of Awareness in Computing.” Human-Computer Interaction 16 (2): 177–192. https://doi.org/10.1207/ S15327051HCI16234_04. Bardram, Jakob E. 2004. Applications of Context-Aware Computing in Hospital Work: Examples and Design Principles. ACM. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm? id=968215.

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Bell, Genevieve, and Paul Dourish. 2007. “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Notes on Ubiquitous Computing’s Dominant Vision.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 11 (2): 133–143. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-0060071-x. Bennett, Tony. 1985. “Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 18 (1): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.2307/1315101. Chalmers, Matthew. 2004. “A Historical View of Context.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work: CSCW: An International Journal 13 (3–4): 223–247. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-004-2802-8. Chalmers, Matthew, and Areti Galani. 2004. “Seamful Interweaving: Heterogeneity in the Theory and Design of Interactive Systems.” In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, 243–252. https://doi.org/10.1145/1013115.1013149. De Michelis, Giorgio. 2015. “Interaction Design at Itsme.” In Designing Socially Embedded Technologies in the Real-World, edited by Volker Wulf, Kjeld Schmidt, and David Randall, 193–215. London: Springer. https://doi.org/ 10.1007/978-1-4471-6720-4_10. Derrida, Jacques. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Corrected. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press. Dervin, B. 2003. “Given a Context by Any Other Name: Methodological Tools for Taming the Unruly Beast.” In Sense-Making Methodology Reader: Selected Writings of Brenda Dervin, edited by B. Dervin, L. Foreman-Wernet, and E. Lauterbach, 111–132. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Dey, A. K. 2001. “Understanding and Using Context.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 5 (1): 4–7. https://doi.org/10.1007/s007790170019. Dourish, Paul. 2004a. Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2004b. “What We Talk About When We Talk About Context.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 8 (1): 19–30. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779003-0253-8. Dreyfus, Hubert L. 1979. What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence. Rev. ed. New York, NY: Harper & Row. ———. 1992. What Computers Still Can’t Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Stuart E. Dreyfus. 1988. “Making a Mind Versus Modeling the Brain: Artificial Intelligence Back at a Branchpoint.” Daedalus 117 (1): 15–43. Ehn, Pelle. 1988. Work-Oriented Design of Computer Artifacts. Stockholm: Arbetslivscentrum. Felski, Rita. 2011. “‘Context Stinks!’” New Literary History 42 (4): 573–591. https://doi.org/10.1353/nlh.2011.0045.

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Grudin, Jonathan. 1990. “The Computer Reaches Out: The Historical Continuity of Interface Design.” In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 261–268. https://doi.org/10.1145/ 97243.97284. Hacking, Ian. 1983. Representing and Intervening. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Harman, Graham. 2002. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court. Hughes, John A., Dave Randall, and Dan A. N. Shapiro. 1993. “From Ethnographic Record to System Design: Some Experience from the Field.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work: CSCW: An International Journal 1 (3): 123–141. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00752435. Kensing, Finn, and Jeanette Blomberg. 1998. “Participatory Design: Issues and Concerns.” Computer Supported Cooperative Work: CSCW: An International Journal 7 (3): 167–185. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1008689307411. Ko, Andrew J., Brad A. Myers, Mary Beth Rosson, Gregg Rothermel, Mary Shaw, Susan Wiedenbeck, Robin Abraham, et al. 2011. “The State of the Art in End-User Software Engineering.” ACM Computing Surveys 43 (3): 21–21. https://doi.org/10.1145/1922649.1922658. Koolhaas, Rem, and B. Mau. 1995. “Bigness or the Problem of Large.” In S,M,L,XL. The Monacelli Press. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1996. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/978022645 8106.001.0001. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Minsky, Marvin, and Seymour A. Papert. 2017. Perceptrons: An Introduction to Computational Geometry. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Newell, Allen, and Herbert A. Simon. 1976. “Computer Science as Empirical Inquiry: Symbols and Search.” Communications of the ACM 19 (3): 113–126. https://doi.org/10.1145/360018.360022. Norman, Donald A. 2013. The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. London: Hachette UK. Polanyi, Michael. 1983. Tacit Dimension. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. Rogers, Yvonne. 2006. “Moving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing: Engaging Ubicomp Experiences.” In UbiComp 2006: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Paul Dourish and Adrian Friday, 4206, 404–421. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/11853565_24. Schilit, B., N. Adams, and R. Want. 1994. “Context-Aware Computing Applications.” In Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications, 85–90. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCSA.1994.512740.

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Schilit, Bill N., and Dan Duchamp. 1991. “Adaptive Remote Paging for Mobile Computers.” TR CUCS-004-91. Columbia University. Scott, Clive. 2012. Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Suchman, Lucille Alice. 2006. Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Weiser, Mark. 1991. “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Scientific American. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican0991-94. ———. 1993. “Some Computer Science Issues in Ubiquitous Computing.” Communications of the ACM 36 (7): 75–84. ———. 1994. “Creating the Invisible Interface: (Invited Talk).” In Proceedings of the 7th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology, 1. UIST ’94. New York, NY: ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/192426.192428. Winograd, Terry, and Fernando Flores. 1986. Understanding Computers and Cognition. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corp.

Objects, Places, and Entanglements Matt Hayler

It said, “pause for a moment and listen.” I wasn’t quite sure why, but it kind of gave me the feeling of “are they listening? Can they hear what’s outside?” (from project interview with reader of Breathe). Instead of reading the story in a book you experience the story in the place that you are. And the layers of the city and the layers in the book and the layers on the audio all make a new story that doesn’t exist; it only exists when you walk the story (from project interview with reader of It Must Have Been Dark by Then).

In this chapter, we start by defining “entanglement” before exploring how reading an ambient literary work is an entangled process capable of producing similarly entangled effects. We focus in particular on (i) the meaning-making role of the reading devices used to access and codetermine ambient works and (ii) how texts can draw attention, including with their own materiality, to the ways in which place is also always an entangled product. Throughout this book we consider the long histories of situated artistic production that help in understanding this kind of literature, how situated works have been theorised, and how situation has always mattered to reading. By looking at two specific ambient literary

M. Hayler (B) Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_4

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works here, Kate Pullinger’s Breathe (2018) and Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then (2017), we explore the ways in which the reader might also, in co-producing the texts’ meanings alongside the objects and environments of their encounter, better perceive the daily production of their own lives and places. We do not argue that lives and places are, or are like, literary texts, but rather that lives, texts, and places are each produced at nexus points where humans, artefacts, and environments meet and mutually affect one another (entanglements). Works of ambient literature can reveal the nature, and contribute to the production, of these moments that we are each always engaged in during the acts of reading and living. This chapter demonstrates why Pullinger and Speakman’s texts are so effective as both literature and commentary, and we locate that success in their combinations of form, narrative, and a commitment to co-authoring experiences with their readers and the locations in which they read.

Entanglements Reading has always been an entangled act. Works of ambient literature are insistent in their bringing to light aspects of their own, specific entanglements (particularly as they relate to place), but they also often have their most significant effects in the realm of the always-already: books were wrapped up in their readers and the world whenever they were meaningful, and ambient literature has a unique potential to reveal this and to show its significance. Entanglement, as we conceive of it here, is about meaning, action, and agency always being realised by more than one thing at a time. As we tend to conceive of our action, for instance, we think, “I do this. I intend to do this thing and then I execute it. I pick up this object (a book, say) and I do this action.” But this isn’t entanglement, and it isn’t reality. As we discuss throughout this chapter, intention, action, and cognition are always co-shaped and mediated phenomena: we may well intend to do something, but that intention is impacted upon by a whole host of physical, cultural, and psychological phenomena. We may well wish to do a specific act or produce a specific effect, but its final realisation can never neatly be what we designed; we may find meaning in artworks or events, but that meaning never neatly inheres in some discrete thing.

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The cognitive archaeologist Lambros Malafouris offers an example of this kind of entanglement in his description of throwing a clay pot on a wheel: We should assume…that every mental recourse needed to grow a vessel out of clay may well be extended and distributed across the neurons of the potter’s brain, the muscles of the potter’s sense organs, the affordances of the wheel, the material properties of the clay, the morphological and typological prototypes of existing vessels, and the general social context in which the activity occurs…I do not mean to deny that an intricate computational problem may well arise for the brain the moment the potter touches or is touched by the clay; I simply mean to emphasize that part of the problem’s solution is offered by the clay itself (2013, 213 and 219).1

Thinking, as Malafouris describes, doesn’t neatly take place within our skulls.2 When the potter sets out to make her pot she unites the clay, the wheel, the environment in which she sits, her body, and everything that’s going on in her brain, some of which we would normally call “thinking.” She picks up a hunk of wet clay, slaps it onto the wheel, starts the whole thing turning, and lays on her hands. At this point we would tend to say that the final form of the pot which emerges is the result of her bringing an image in her mind out into the world. But what Malafouris draws our attention to is the ways in which that image in her mind is conditioned by a history of what she has built before and her culturally trained expectations of what a pot can and should look like. And then, when she starts to create, the density of this batch of clay, the humidity and heat of her workshop, the cramp in her hands from working all morning, her rush to finish by lunch (or her revelling in a long and productive session) all condition the final shape that will be made, the steepness of its curves, or the fineness of its details, the decision of when it will be finished, and all of this before it hits the chaos of the kiln. The final pot isn’t a product of that tiny slice of experience that we already call “cognition”; it’s a coproduction borne of all of these factors, and yet even the potter herself may look at it in pride and think “I made what was in my mind.” Perhaps this describes expertise: the increase in a subjects’ control over their body, materials, equipment, environment, and social training such that they can better predict the outcome of their actions. But this control can never be total—the materials and environment always speak. This is entanglement.

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When we say that ambient literature reveals all reading as entangled, and prioritises reflection on the role of environment in a text’s coproduction, this is what we have in mind. Neither the reader, nor the author, is neatly in control of the meaning of an ambient literary work (a revelation at least as old as deconstruction and reader-response theory), but what’s new here is just how rich we might have to consider literature of all kinds to be, how distributed in its meaning and how bound up in its enaction.

Reading Objects There are many descriptions of how objects3 play a role in our perceptions of, and interactions with the world. Malafouris, above, gives us the view from cognitive science, but philosophers and science and technology studies (STS) researchers such as Bruno Latour (with actor–network theory),4 Donna Haraway (cyborgs and companion species),5 Andrew Pickering (mangles of practice),6 Karen Barad (intra-action),7 and Jane Bennett (vibrant matter)8 have also made influential ontological, epistemological, ethical, and phenomenological claims about the ways in which human and non-human actants unite and co-determine the production of perceptions, actions, worlds, and phenomena. Entanglement with nonhumans is not just about the ways in which things impact upon our experience however (e.g. that we cannot drive without the existence of cars), instead it’s about coexistence and co-dependency. Barad gives the strongest definition of entanglement in this sense, emerging from her take on quantum theory: “[t]o be entangled is not simply to be entwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair” (2007, ix). For Barad, there is nothing outside of entanglements; the world is comprised of relations that produce the phenomena we encounter as individual objects. It is not our task here to defend this ontology of deep entanglement, but, as we will show, texts and places do lack an “independent, self-contained existence”; they are phenomena produced at meetings, and between actions, across space (what we will call “horizontal entanglements”) and time (what we will call “vertical entanglements”). In this way they are four-dimensional, which means nothing more or less complex than that history, location, materiality, and action matter and must be taken into account when it comes to these artworks’ creation and how we might understand them critically.

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However we might describe them, the complex networked effects of living things, artefacts, objects, and environments are increasingly being articulated as philosophy and science stemming from enlightenment European traditions have begun to wrestle with the active role of non-human agents in thought and action. Many branches of nonEuropean thought (e.g. Daoism, Shinto, South American Shamanism), and traditions outside of enlightenment humanism (from Old Norse to Neopaganism), get there first, have long emphasised the role and significance of animals and ecologies alive with agency, and human codetermination with and reliance on their activities. But for a dominant scientific and philosophical tradition that has long emphasised the anthropocentric importance of “rational” and isolated human subjects, to draw out (and care for) the unnoticed or even incomprehensible effects of the others that surround us is proving increasingly revelatory.9 Ambient literature rests upon these effects as much as any other human activity, but in addition it can highlight their formation whilst also consciously drawing meaning-making potential from them; the devices deployed, and, as we’ll go on to see, the environments invoked and explored, become a part of the text to be read. As with artists books,10 or the experiments and restrictions of William Burroughs’ cut-ups or E. E. Cummings typewriter poems, ambient literature calls on us to pay attention to the substrate of a work and note the ways in which all texts bring medium into meaning.11 The effects of the artefacts we read from (or with which we read, or which structure our reading) are perfect examples of entanglement. A text cannot be produced for the reader without them, and the reader cannot produce a meaning without its being structured by the underpinning device. In ways both obvious and subtle, our read texts are co-determined by the substrate on which they will sit and the network of relations that enable these artefacts to be created and in which they persist after they are made. With the increase of literary reading on screen, largely driven by the success of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, the role of reading artefacts has come under increasing scrutiny. In the Digital Humanities, researchers including Katherine Hayles (2002, 2008), Matthew Kirschenbaum (2008), and Anne Mangen (2009) have written from literary theory backgrounds to challenge the seeming disembodiment of digital texts and explore the effects of materiality on the production of meaning, particularly in comparison to print.12 In codex reading, the opacity of pages,

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their linear crawl, and the growing transference of the weight of the wedge from left hand to right as we read all play a part in our experience of the text, conditioning our reception of how much story there is to go, how much there’s been, and the ordering and significance of events. Similarly, the covers of a printed book separate it from the world, marking it as both bounded and complete, an instance of knowledge that can be possessed and shelved. In these sorts of ways, the physicality of paper book reading shapes our perceptions and, as writers such as Mark Danielewski (2000), Julio Cortázar (1963), or Ali Smith (2015) have shown, when these expectations are challenged or recomposed they can be used to create powerful narrative and phenomenological effects upon the reader.13 For digital works, the inverse of paper’s effects seems true: texts appear to be open, eternally editable (and therefore unfinished), and phenomenologically ephemeral, with no material markers of progress that can be felt by the skin. As Mangen puts it, [w]hen reading digital texts, our haptic interaction with the text is experienced as taking place at an indeterminate distance from the actual text, whereas when reading print text we are physically and phenomenologically (and literally) in touch with the material substrate of the text itself. (2008, 405)

Digital texts, in short, bear a different relationship to the bodies of their readers. Glass and plastic are so different to the organic softness of wood pulp, glue, leather, and thread; they exist on different timescales and resist and breakdown in a way we know doesn’t appear in nature. Bodies and books don’t crack and shatter, but they do age and crease; bones may break, but we experience a fleshliness that has more in common with a paper book’s pliancy than a phone’s spider-webbed screen. It’s not that digital texts don’t have a materiality,14 it’s that that materiality is strange to us. A novel and its printed body are mistaken for one another, wrapped up in each other, but a novel and its digital body have a more complex relationship: a text is brought into sight only at the moment that it is accessed, but it always resides, latent in another form, in the memory of the device we hold. These kinds of differences in the bodies of the texts we read might not appear to matter that much at first glance. We might worry about being

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distracted, or about never really owning our texts if they’re not something we can shelve, or of losing the rich history of the codex, but the words remain much the same; The Odyssey as an oral tale, a codex, or an ebook is still The Odyssey after all. But if we look back a little further, to the inception of a text, then the importance of medium starts to become more immediate. The Odyssey only appears as it does because of its origins as an orated story; the novel as a form develops in line with the reading and writing practices of the times. And now, at a moment where stories (and everything else) can be met on screen, ambient literature shows how the new medium, and its infrastructure, can be a spur to new kinds of writing capable of capturing new kinds of insights about the world, work which might theoretically be translated into other forms, but which appears as it does because of its response to the shape that it is expected to take. Form and content are always entangled, with forms supporting, competing with, or codetermining the meanings of their contents. But in ambient literary works, how we engage with form, the reading practices it demands, can have an even more profound impact on the potential of the text as a composite of every meaning-making aspect of which it is comprised. In this light, in the next section we look at how Pullinger’s Breathe uses the artefacts of reading to intensify the effects of its narrative.

Reading Breathe Breathe is a ghost story. We encounter a woman, Flo, attempting to contact her recently deceased mother, but she and we meet a number of other spirits instead, constantly deferring that connection. The reader accesses the story from a web page in the browser on their smartphone with location data and access to their phone’s camera enabled; when the ghosts begin to appear, the camera will bring in images from your surroundings and you’re required to tilt and move the phone and rub at its screen in order to access their messages and warnings. What you might not notice at first, however, is that the words of the narrative will also include places from nearby; it will be set at your time of day; the weather you read will be the weather outside. For all of the success of Breathe as a traditional ghost story, what stands out, the more that you engage with it, is how much it makes you reconsider the device in your hand. Pullinger’s work demands that we pay attention to our phones, even as that device seems to melt away in the act of reading (much as the codex is assumed to do). This is significant

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as digital technologies are typically experienced as either wholly present (as with video games being difficult and requiring our attention,15 or things being obtrusive and not working16 ) or disappearing from view (as with our lack of attention to the workings of a TV screen or speaker, or the keyboard’s unconscious reliability for the experienced typist). But the mobile phone is made to oscillate with Breathe: sometimes we are alert to the glass and black-boxed electronics of the device as we manipulate the screen in unfamiliar ways and interrupt our established grammars of practice; sometimes it melts away to become a simple carrier for the story; and sometimes the device assumes a different kind of transparency, at a space beyond or below the page, as the rear-facing camera kicks in and drags our environment into the storyworld. This movement between layers of attention and interaction feels pleasingly like breaking through veils of reality, fitting the story and granting us a modern act of scrying,17 but it also neatly reminds the reader that they have had these kinds of experiences with paper books too. The process of being sucked into a story, of going to other worlds with text, has happened before, but Breathe shows how it might take on different and more literalising forms as the reader becomes entangled with new systems with new affective and meaningful potentials. Mobile phones, for all of their familiarity, still feel new. Many users still see relatives and friends who don’t have phones, or who operate them awkwardly or explicitly criticise their use. Phones are also different to, for example, television and recorded music in that they’re not so meticulously written into the cultural fabric, even as they’re similarly ubiquitous.18 Representations of horror and spookiness further demonstrate this: the static and hidden voices of a haunted radio or gramophone are totems of the eerie, and televisions can similarly glitch, be filled with ghostly sounds and images, or even, in the case of The Ring (Nakata 2005; Verbinski 2002)19 or Poltergeist (Hooper 2007), see the plane of the screen transgressed to let things out into our living rooms. Whilst the frightening voice at the end of the phone is a staple of slasher horror, mobile phones themselves aren’t particularly scary, and in their bright screens and always-available connectivity they’re more of a reassuring presence than a threat.20 Breathe, however, challenges precisely this sense of reassurance. In making the user’s mobile phone a source of tension, rather than familiarity, Breathe works to make it join the ranks of media whose subversion is uncanny. But if a spooky television is about making the inert

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furniture of our lives into an active threat, Breathe does both this and something slightly different: making us realise what real threats might already be lurking in our artefacts. Whilst telling a story about hauntings and unveilings, Breathe alerts us to just how much our phones, and unseen parties with access to them, might know. The story plays with the device’s knowledge of its location, internal clock, and API reports of local weather to make it seem that Pullinger knows more than she could (or should) of where her text is being read. Once the conceit is realised, however, and the reader understands that the feelings of being watched produced by the story are dependent on the properties and infrastructure of the reading device, then the fact still remains that our phones are capable of what we feared in the author.21 In a time of hacking and information breaches, corporate data harvesting, and security agency spying, your phone’s twin cameras facing your environment and your face mean something. Your phone’s knowing where you are means something. Your phone’s connection to a network where it can push, pull, and have information intercepted means something. And maybe you don’t feel that as something frightful, but the luxury of not having to worry about your data, of course, has its own politics: not being an enemy of the state; not being in the sights of a large corporation; not being a target market; not being of a marginalised or oppressed group; not having a secret worth hiding; your movements not being worthy of note to anyone with the power to care. These fears and privileges aren’t the stuff of a typical ghost story, but they are a new kind of haunting. The fear of being watched is legitimate; the wandering eyes of a painting in a Gothic novel have been replaced by the panoptic gaze of our always-on devices. That we experience Breathe initially as something spectral testifies to the beauty of what Pullinger has done, but the story sticks with you a little longer because of how we reconsider our devices as spooky things, as things legitimately worth fearing, and also as an amazingly rich site for meaning-making that’s starting to approach the printed novel, and other forms of media, in possessing a history of use which can be drawn on by writer and reader alike in the production of the text. Breathe shows how we become wrapped up with our artefacts during the practice of reading, but it also pushes us further into reflecting on our entanglements with the technical system of interceptable mobile communication more broadly. Pullinger’s work, in short, makes us look at a device and feel surrounded—let’s call this “horizontal” entanglement, a

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being dependent upon and shaped by the features of the world we inhabit. The text, the meaning of this work, is produced in this horizontal enwrapping: the network, your location, and your actions literally change the words and images of Breathe; no two instances of the story can look quite the same because of the effects that the reader and their situation have on the text. In the next section we’ll look at Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then which similarly explodes the boundaries of the text’s location and draws on some of the same semiotic potential identified by Breathe, moving the story from being neatly located in the package of a printed book or digital artefact to incorporate the environment in which it is being read. Speakman’s work also allows us to think about depth, or “vertical” entanglement, the effects of the past and possible futures on the present. It’s not that Breathe doesn’t rely on chronology (on histories of textual and technological production in particular, and the futures that they might lead to), or that It Must Have Been Dark… ignores the horizontal wrap of the present; it’s a matter of emphasis. Ambient literature, as we’re about to see, often relies on the combination of these horizontal and vertical entanglements because it investigates place, and place is four-dimensional.

Reading Palimpsests It Must Have Been Dark by Then is a story of human enmeshment in global trade and the outcomes of late capital and its ever-more intensive industrialisation of being alive. The work combines a printed book; a soundtrack of narration, music, and found sounds; and an app where the reader draws a map with their movements through an outdoor space. The themes of the narrative often emerge subtly as the reader, script, and audio narration dance around one another with planned steps and room for interpretation, mixing the reader’s current location with written and spoken descriptions of the Sahara, Louisiana, and Latvia, places each marked by water crises. Worries about impermanence, and possible futures determined by past and current actions, recur throughout. As Speakman notes, he “began with a desire to seek out change, to travel through places whose printed maps and data might become records of things that no longer exist, through a world being visibly and rapidly reshaped” (2017, 8).

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The multimedia form that the work takes reinscribes its narrative and political concerns, whilst also drawing our attention to other kinds of mutual interaction that occur in both meaning-making and the practices of daily life. Simultaneously, the story guides you to pay attention to all of the things that play into making your experience of your surroundings what it is, whilst also demanding that you enter into a familiar technological system, one that signals the wealth disparity between the richest and poorest nations and actively contributes to the ecological crisis reshaping those relationships and the landscape of the world. In this way, and as with Pullinger’s Breathe, Speakman makes us look again at our devices and at what they and we rely upon. The story, and the way in which it is told, never lets you forget your dependencies, a non-trivial aspect of all entanglements; as we increasingly realise how actions and events are co-determined then we might also become more alive to whose backs digital technology rests upon (conflict minerals, planned obsolescence and e-waste, sweatshop production), and who stands to suffer most from the entailed effects of billions of electronic devices sucking at our shared global resources. More prosaically, the familiarity of headphones and digital maps and mobile devices remind us of the privilege inherent in being able to rely on digital technology and the potential effects of those reliances. In order to encounter It Must Have Been Dark… you need four things: (i) a physical book, printed on-demand for the project, (ii) a GPS-enabled smartphone with the It Must Have Been Dark by Then app downloaded and updated, (iii) a set of decent headphones, and (iv) an outdoor environment to walk around in. The work frequently moves you between reading a printed page; reading a phone screen; listening to music and found sound; listening to a story being read; and navigating a physical place with a digital map—it demands and explores its own medial ecology. This is a uniquely twenty-first-century triggering of the sensorium, a bringing together of sound, image, data, and action where acoustics and accents produce sized, located, and felt space; maps assist navigation; telephony collapses distance; and story-telling collapses time, and all of this supported by a technical network that we can access from nearly any location on the planet. In these engagements, the spatial depth of print, its “in,” is juxtaposed with the normally flat surface of the “on” of the phone; we tend to think of information as in books and on screen, buried vs. presented. It Must Have Been Dark…’s digital map, however, inscribed in each reading by

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the walking of the reader, turns the otherwise flat screen into a virtual transparency placed across the landscape, and the occasional see-through pages in its codex further emphasise the layering of information (Figs. 1 and 2). To offer one example, page 19 of It Must Have Been Dark… is a translucent leaf printed with a full page of narrative text. Page 20 (the reverse of page 19) is blank. Page 21 has nine words and 16 punctuation

Fig. 1 It Must Have Been Dark by Then p19

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Fig. 2 It Must Have Been Dark by Then p21

marks (commas and full stops), and each are located at the same position as they appear on page 19 so that they cannot initially be seen. Turning page 19 therefore seems to lift away a layer of text, revealing what was behind, a foundation that is ahead in the book, but that feels as if it predates and determines what we’ve just read: “the light / , / . / . / , / . / left / , / , / , /in / , / , / . / , / , / empty houses / , / , / . / will come / back” (Speakman 2017, 21).

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Layering, superimposition, or, better, palimpsests are a clear motif at every level of the text, both as form and entwined content, and these too read as performances of entanglement. Palimpsests are very particular kinds of layering. Like the occasional transparent pages of It Must Have Been Dark…, palimpsests rely on things previously cast out of sight reappearing and meeting and affecting the surface currently being encountered. A palimpsest typically describes any text where different writings are superimposed on top of one another, but the term also, more usefully and specifically, refers to the erasing of one script, the writing of a second in the same space, and the ensuing return of the original so that the two scripts intermingle. In monasteries across Europe, monks transcribed works onto soft, calf skin leather pages called “vellum”; when that material was needed for new works, the scribes soaked it and scraped it clean. This occurred throughout the seventh to fifteenth centuries primarily in the scriptoriums of the great monastic institutions such as Bobbio, Luxeuil, Fleury, Corbie, and St Gall. Such recycling of vellum arose due to a combination of factors: scarcity and expense of writing materials; physical deterioration of existing manuscripts from which reusable vellum was then sourced; and changing historical and cultural factors which rendered some texts obsolete either because the language in which they were written could no longer be read, or because their content was no longer valued. (Dillon 2005, 244)

With the vellum seemingly stripped bare, the monks went back to work, inscribing the pages with new writing. Over time, however, the original script began to reappear, “its ghostly trace [emerging] in the following centuries as the iron in the remaining ink reacted with the oxygen in the air, producing a reddish-brown oxide” (Dillon 2005, 244). The importance of the figure of the palimpsest to It Must Have Been Dark…, and to works of ambient literature more broadly, doesn’t necessarily lie in ghostly returns. Rather, the palimpsest is an important image because of how the overlaid texts (as in the example of page 19 and 21 above) speak to one another; they are vertically entangled. Sarah Dillon describes a useful distinction between the “palimpsestic” (“the process of layering that produces a palimpsest” [2005, 245]) and the “palimpsestuous” (“the complex (textual) relationality embodied in the palimpsest…[;] the structure with which one is presented as a result

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of…[the] reappearance of the underlying script” [2005, 245]). Ambient literature, then, is palimpsestuous, and asks to be read palimpsestuously, because it’s precisely not about the search for the text (or world) hidden behind the story right in front of you, but instead the text produced in the interaction between the reader, device, narrative, the place(s) that it recruits, and the historical echoes that emerge to make up aspects of each of these elements. As Dillon puts it, “palimpsestuous reading…does not focus solely on the underlying text, for to do so would be to unravel and destroy the palimpsest” (2005, 254)—the palimpsest, instead, is the entanglement. When you read It Must Have Been Dark…, Speakman and the narrator both produce and request the creation of palimpsests, encouraging you to overlay words, ideas, sounds, images, and spaces onto one another through: (i) the transparent pages of the printed book, (ii) using GPS data to write distant locations into your environment and inscribe a digital map by walking, and (iii) blending the recorded audio (which includes music, narration, conversations, and found sound) with the sounds of the location you’ve chosen for your reading. The text emerges in these overlayings; it has its political and defamiliarising power not in drawing attention to a world you might normally ignore which lurks behind the artwork (as a defamiliarising metaphor might seem to call for us to leave a poem behind to refocus on something out in the world), but rather in how new layers of story elements reconfigure the lived space whilst that lived space simultaneously shapes and inflects the artwork. Again, It Must Have Been Dark by Then is the entanglement. Sound is a significant aspect of understanding the palimpstestuous effect of It Must Have Been Dark… It’s a feature of the work that immediately stands out, the voice of the narrator offering story whilst you’re at rest and guiding you through the process of navigation, making suggestions of things that you should pay attention to, water and people in particular. But there’s also the more subtle sound work: musical cues, but also the sounds of voices and environments from around the world captured during Speakman’s own travelling. These aren’t always dense soundscapes, and not always engineered for clarity; often sounds from your current location pass the headphones and make their way into hearing, and the sometimes muted or distant-sounding recordings of the audio tracks can easily be mistaken for what’s going on around you as you read. The sound field for the work always has something going on,

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but it’s often hard to place from where in the world, literally, this or that sound has come. This is a familiar kind of palimpsest, though one that’s often neglected in audio research; as J. Martin Daughtry notes, [m]ost music scholarship resolutely ignores the scrim of ambient sounds that accompanies the vast majority of music listening experiences…[M]any, if not all, of our mobile music listening practices are fundamentally layered…[;] anyone who listens to an iPod in an urban area knows that music coming through headphones cannot fully drown out the sounds of a bus engine or passing police siren. And anyone who has encountered an iPod user in an elevator knows that mobile music listening can frequently become an (inadvertently) shared experience. These moments of layered listening are easy to disregard because they are ubiquitous, ephemeral, largely unconscious and relatively benign. (2013)

It Must Have Been Dark… makes these mundane layerings into something powerful by producing truly palimpsestuous sonic entanglements. Sitting by the river in Bristol, for instance, one reader reported that it took a full minute to realise that the women standing in front of her were not the same women she could hear speaking.22 And this collapse is part of the point: not only can we have our attention drawn to the ways in which headphones so often make our daily experiences of sound a layering and intermingling of present and recorded moments (which otherwise would never meet), but Speakman also always seems to be saying “that place could be right here; you could be right there.” When it comes to some of the traumas depicted in the text, a reader might simply feel the relatively inert compassion of “there, but for the grace…,” but the reading and listening experience is often more compelling, more moving: familiarity, fraternity, recognition. These places are all of our places, and not least because the terror of the anthropocene23 seems poised to touch each of us, unequally but totally. When It Must Have Been Dark… brings someone’s backyard into your own you get to live together, on top of one another, for a while. It would be hard to prove that this sort of experience raises empathy in some predictable way, but it can’t help but make the reader think about two things: their relationship with people living far away under different present and incoming circumstances (with whatever affinity, apathy, antipathy, or guilt the reader might possess)24 and the ways in which places are in part made through sounds, and through layering more broadly.

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In any city, you’re increasingly likely to hear voices and music, see images, and read scripts from around the world as humans connect through technology, trade, and travel. For urban centres in the UK this has long been a blessing, a point of pride and love, despite the everpresent discourses and institutional and societal practices which aim to see the art and imagery of other cultures as an invasion rather than a vivid indication of our interconnection. And cultural practices aren’t static; they say where people have been, whom they’ve met, and what effects they’ve had on one another, positive and ill. As Paul Gilroy described the culture of The Black Atlantic (1993), it is vital to understand routes as well as roots. Our practices, the acts of living, shape our places; they write onto them every day and echo outwards, but they don’t erase yesterday’s work. They are entangled, as It Must Have Been Dark… variously attempts to show. The story, the way it’s told, knows how sound travels and what effects it might have as it does: like scents and tastes, sound transports us, can take us home, take us abroad, or make home feel new. In this layering of global sounds, Speakman encourages us: listen, it’s there, with us, here, right now. Don’t we sound alike? How could you forget that? A wave is coming. Doesn’t it bear thinking about?

Reading Place There’s a last way in which we might consider ambient literature’s relationship to entanglement which unites the horizontal emphasis of Breathe with It Must Have Been Dark…’s more vertical layering25 : places are palimpsests,26 and also made of palimpsests; all a work of ambient literature can do is draw attention to this fact and contribute to its reality. The works we describe throughout this book respond to the ways in which humans always act within, and act upon, layers of information that they both shape and are shaped by. This is a literature aware of how such deep and encircling information is tied to location and history, and also how information as data is becoming more rich, varied, personal, atemporal, and aspatial in an age of digital communication. But all spaces touched by humans have their own overlapping information stretching out over space and time. In our landscapes we have the traces of fossils, bones, cairns and other graveyards, architecture of all kinds, and the worked and reworked soil of farmlands, coal mines, gasworks, orchards, beaches, and forests. In our cultural lives we have oral histories, gossip, overheard conversations, interlocutors, artworks, adverts, announcements, preachers, signs,

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warnings, and portents. And to this patchwork we’ve added radiowaves, microwaves, wifi, Bluetooth, cellular data, transcontinental and transpacific and transatlantic internet cables, and the other trillion wires of ubiquitous computing, household homeostasis, and surveillance infrastructure. Each of these activities overlap, distort, restructure, and mediate one another, sometimes occluding elements for decades, sometimes seemingly destroying them, and sometimes changing them forever. Our sense of a place, our ability to say “this place,” is our perception of a relative fixity in this mesh of four-dimensional content, and ambient literature explicitly responds to this phenomenon whilst recognising its distinctive contemporary character and intensification. In this way, it functions synecdochically with relation to the whole, both performing and contributing to the entangled layers that make up the world. We can see this when It Must Have Been Dark… overlays its stories, within and beyond its book’s covers: it is a palimpsest and it helps to make one too, with its sounds and with its asking an attentive reader to walk through the streets and to be a part of things. The geographer Doreen Massey makes the same claim, of places being palimpsestuous, in doing the important political work of balancing two impulses: (i) resisting seeing places as fixed (as definitional fixity tends to result in change being seen as the destruction of the “true” place, as we’re seeing invoked in various branches of right-wing populism)27 and (ii) preserving the sense of a definable home or environment so important to communities around the world. She asks, “[c]an’t we rethink our sense of place? Is it not possible for a sense of place to be progressive; not self-closing and defensive, but outward-looking? A sense of place which is adequate to this era of time-space compression?” (1994, 147). Massey is thinking of similar entanglements to Speakman: the ways in which technologies of travel and communication bind geographically distant people together, increasing their interdependency and the ways in which they might be positively and negatively impacted. Her response is a mutable palimpsest by another name: what gives a place its specificity is not some long internalised history but the fact that it is constructed out of a particular constellation of social relations, meeting and weaving together at a particular locus…Instead…of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings,

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but where a larger proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent. And this in turn allows a sense of place which is extroverted, which includes a consciousness of its links with the wider world, which integrates in a positive way the global and the local. (1994, 154–155)

Massey is interested here in the ways in which all places, in their being made of the performances of social relations, are connected to the wider world. It Must Have Been Dark… takes this same idea and notes, in addition, that an anthropocene climate doesn’t even require us to travel in order to write upon one another’s environments (and the act of travelling itself writes in pollution as well as more direct interactions). Place, in this view, is something continuously co-constructed, and rather than being immanent in a boundaried location it instead becomes the palimpsetuous product of every voice and act that passes, has passed, and is likely to pass through. As with Dillon’s description of palimpsestuousness as a text comprised of genuinely entangled layers, we’re not arguing here for a focus on an enduring background, to see through the surface to the truth of what’s behind, nor to focus on the stage on which actions take place, but rather to foster an awareness of background’s ongoing entangled activity with the present (background as history) and the foreground (background as setting). Our understanding of ambience as background history or setting isn’t of something inert against which things occur, but something lively, a responsive co-creator quite different from Brian Eno’s description of ambience as “an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint” that “must be as ignorable as it is interesting” (1978). A background is always present (even as it isn’t ever consistent, even if that’s in as simple a way as its slow mutation over time as everything constantly acts), but it’s also intrusive; it structures as an enabler and restrictor of activity, and as something which might be altered through action. Background does. Literary palimpsests’ strata of symbiotic relationships, then, offer a powerful image of how we remember, act in, and create our places. But ambient literature further works between the artistic knowledge of a history of palimpsests (including intentional layering practices like collage, overlays and transparencies, and now digital-augmented and mixedreality platforms) and this practical knowledge of how places are formed

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by an analogous process of layering and interaction. It explores the effects of what we tend to write off as “just” background: the spatial, emotional, technological, and historical signatures of a place. It shows what’s already there, throws things into relief, reveals what’s missing, and introduces new elements into the whole, and in so doing it unites the artistic and the practical, creating new actions in the present (and possible futures) in league with a restless past (rather than giving into the romance of a place or text that is wholly new or reliably stable). As Dillon puts it, palimpsests visibly represent…what [Jacques] Derrida describes as the “noncontemporaneity with itself of the living present” [(1994, xix)]. The “present” of the palimpsest is only constituted in and by the “presence” of texts from the “past,” as well as remaining open to further inscription by texts of the “future.” The presence of texts from the past, present (and possibly the future) in the palimpsest does not elide temporality, but evidences the spectrality of any “present” moment which always already contains within it “past,” “present,” and “future” moments. (2005, 249)

For Derrida and Dillon, there is no present in itself; the present isn’t a simple product of now, as the palimpsestuous text isn’t a simple product of the currently visible words, and a place isn’t a simple product of boundaries, or even of what is currently occurring. Each phenomenon, the present, the text, and the place, is structured by antecedents which won’t stay quiet, which are required in order for them to be, and which enable and delimit what they can go on to become.28 These entanglements are the areas of most interest to works of ambient literature which can combine and recombine them, and which know that the stories that we tell about places become a part of those places as they shape action: “you have to go there,” or “don’t go to that street after dark,” or “they say the basement is haunted,” or “if you’re new to town you might want to look for flats here,” or, in the case of It Must Have Been Dark by Then, “I want you to go and find some water…” Each of these stories can change the way an area is looked at, what is noticed, where people can be found, how they move, what they do—add these things together, layer them, make them responsive to other stories, actions, and historical and environmental features, and you have a place.

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Conclusion Ambient literary works care deeply about these palimpsestuous, horizontal and vertical, four-dimensional entanglements. In their alertness to the nature of places and the technologically mediated circulation of information, ambient stories can’t help but bring to light how such entanglements come about and function, and, in works like Breathe and It Must Have Been Dark by Then, form can do a significant amount of rhetorical heavy lifting, making you feel, as well as explicitly learn, what the authors intend. Our bringing in of Massey’s global approach to place here further highlights some of the political potential inherent in these felt moments. In a time where surveillance, climate, immigration, selfish individualism, and systemic discrimination along the axes of race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability seem to polarise increasing numbers of people (even as serious public discourse in each of these areas also feels possible to an unparalleled extent), attention to the ways in which we are entangled, locally, globally, and historically, isn’t neutral or inert. Seeing our world, and the world to come, as the product of our interdependence, rather than an unchanging series of discrete places with defensible and impermeable boundaries, is the powerful work of entangled art which brings you into contact with the active ambience we each inhabit and help to produce, an art which asks you to look at your phone, look at your street, and to listen, to remember what you’re a part of.

Notes 1. Matt Hayler further explores this image from Malafouris’ work in relation to “4E” (i.e. embodied, embedded, extended, and enacted) cognition in his Challenging the Phenomena of Technology (2015, 194–195), and also with regard to the neglect of entanglement in research in the digital humanities (Griffin and Hayler 2018; Hayler and Griffin 2016a). 2. See also: Clark and Chalmers (1998), Clark (2008), and Hutchins (1996). 3. Here “object” can be read as “artefact” or “device,” but we’re also thinking of non-human actors of all kinds, including non-human animals and even human embodiment as an Other to human subjectivity (revealed when our unconscious drives manifest, our bodies betray us, or we’re reminded of their deep history in vestigial traits in our skeletons and viscera). For more on this take on human embodiment see Trigg (2015). 4. See e.g. Latour (2005). 5. See e.g. Haraway (1991, 2003). 6. See e.g. Pickering (1995).

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

See e.g. Barad (2007). See e.g. Bennett (2009). For more on this topic and its effects see Grusin (2015). See e.g. Drucker (2004). As Marshall McLuhan famously noted, the medium can often speak louder than its specific content (1967). For more on the history of digital texts’ seeming disembodiment within Digital Humanities research, and a comparison of the meaning of materiality between screen and codex reading, see Hayler (2016). Danielewski’s House of Leaves plays with typography, the opacity of pages, the use of footnotes to create a labyrinth, and numerous other devices to interrogate near every aspect of the codex as a form. Cortazaar’s Hopscotch challenges linearity and the order that the reader is “meant” to read a book. Smith’s How to Be Both has two sections with half of the copies printed with one section first, the other with the order reversed, and no indicator of which edition you’re picking up. Something that Kirschenbaum demonstrates throughout Mechanisms (2008) with images from electron microscopy showing the material reality of individual bits on hard-drive platters and detailed descriptions of the forensic realities of data and digital infrastructure. What the postphenomenologial philosopher Don Ihde calls our “alterity relationships” with technologies. Ihde also offers descriptions of “embodiment relationships” (the technology becomes a part of us), “hermeneutic relationships” (the technology allows for us to perceive something new and/or shapes our perceptions), and “background relationships” (the technology silently conditions the environment, like a thermostat set to maintain a temperature—these background relationships are what many readers may think of when they think of “ambience,” something we return to in the last section of this chapter on “Reading Place”). See Ihde (1990, 72–112). See Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis and the distinction between readiness-to- and presentness-at-hand (1962, 98). I.e. crystal-ball gazing or looking into some medium to see elsewhere. John Hunter spoke recently on the absence of mobile phones in popular film (2017). People drive cars and watch TV and listen to music in films, but they rarely use mobile phones in ways that are familiar to viewers. Hunter suggests that popular cinema, in trying to be as popular as possible, doesn’t give us our fears, it gives us our dreams: we spend too much time on our screens so here are superheroes and action and comedy stars who live their lives offline. Originally released in Japanese as リング (Ringu) in 1998 (Nakata 2005) and remade in English as The Ring (Verbinski 2002).

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20. This has had consequences for the makers of horror films and thrillers since 2000. See e.g. “Ghost in the System: Has Technology Ruined Horror Films?” (Tobias 2017). 21. Readers of Breathe, in follow-up interviews, expressed these feelings repeatedly: “They would mention the street I lived on, or the local middle school up the street, or the coffee shops. It’s like ‘oh, that’s right around the corner.’ It’s kind of interesting the data that they can pull. It might make some people really worried.” “It made me think about turning off my phone occasionally, or going in and actually shutting off the locator part.” “It…reinforced what I basically already knew: that you could be tracked by your phone. And it makes you think, ‘what do other people know about me as I go along through my life here?’” “I guess it’s also…a little unnerving that these things can appear on your phone.” “[I]t said ‘pause for a moment and listen.’ I wasn’t quite sure why, but it kind of gave me the feeling of ‘are they listening? Can they hear what’s outside?’” (all from interviews undertaken during the ambient literature research project). 22. Follow-up interviews showed that this was a common occurrence: “I actually thought that it was happening for real in the street…I could hear barking…I really jumped and looked around.” “The motorcycle and the drilling, there was some momentary confusion as to whether it was on the headphones or whether I was just about to walk into a construction [site] or just about to walk in front of a bike.” “[I]t’s really funny, but I thought I was listening to the city, and I suddenly became aware that I was listening to it on my headphones. It blended so naturally.” “It seemed that whenever the wind was blowing on the soundtrack, the wind was blowing in the physical world. That was quite unusual and I noticed it three or four times.” “There were times where I wasn’t sure if what I was hearing was my city or the story city. So, there were times when I was really unsure exactly who I was, which I found quite exciting” (all from interviews undertaken during the ambient literature research project). 23. “Anthropocene” has been suggested as the name for our current epoch where the Holocene gives way to a time where intensive human industry (pollution, radiation, waste, extinctions, etc.) is the force which will leave the most extensive and persistent marks at geological time scales. See e.g. Ellis (2018). 24. Follow-up interviews indicate that readers did perform this collapsing of space, and that it did produce some forms of empathetic effect: “It was very transporting…[I]n the Latvia [section], where you could hear the sounds of the snow…I thought that was actually really lovely because it was totally separate to…London in July. As well with the Louisiana one. Just the thought of the water rising, and the way that that was presented…really helped to transport you there.” “It’s real people, living

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real lives, in places that are more in extremis, and at the same time, you were watching real people living real lives.” “It made me compare the surroundings, actually. It made me think of what goes on. The places that were coming into my mind as I was listening, it just made me think about those places, the housing situations in those places, what the streets are like in those places, and what life’s like.” “I guess it had me thinking about what home is, and we choose where we live or where we go, and what happens to us when we don’t have that choice, and when we’re not free to choose our own direction or path” (all from interviews undertaken during the ambient literature research project). 25. Noting again that both texts rely on four-dimensional entanglements of horizontal and vertical, present and past relationships. 26. Mark Graham, for instance, notes that “[p]laces have always been palimpsests. The contemporary is constantly being constructed upon the foundations of the old” (2010), but we aim to move from this palimpsestic truism to recognise a more entangled palimpsestuousness. 27. It’s also important to recognise the significance of feminist theory for Massey’s re-thinking of place in this sense: the need for the security of boundaries, the requirement for such a defensive…definition of identity, is culturally masculine. Moreover, many feminists have argued against such ways of thinking…[W]e need to have the courage to abandon such defensive—yet designed for dominance—means of definition. Many feminists have argued for ‘thinking in terms of relations.’ It is the strategy adopted [in Space, Place, and Gender]. (1994, 7) We also note that this feminist heritage of “thinking in terms of relations,” as both a greater truth and a crucial rethinking of dominant masculine descriptions of the world, is hugely important to Barad’s work on entanglement and intra-action. 28. Or, as Barad puts it “entanglements bring us face to face with the fact that what seems far off in space and time may be as close or closer than the pulse of here and now that appears to bear from a center that lies beneath the skin. The past is never finished once and for all and out of sight may be out of reach, but not necessarily out of touch” (2007, 394).

Bibliography Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

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Bennet, Jane. 2009. Vibrant Matter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clark, Andy, and David J. Chalmers. 1998. “The Extended Mind.” Analysis 58: 10–23. Cortázar, Julio. 1963. Hopscotch. New York: Pantheon. Danielewski, Mark Z. 2000. House of Leaves. London: Anchor. Daughtry, J. Martin. 2013. “Acoustic Palimpsests and the Politics of Listening.” Music and Politics 7 (1) (Winter): http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447. 0007.101. Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge. Dillon, Sarah. 2005. “Reinscribing De Quincey’s Palimpsest: The Significance of the Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies.” Textual Practice 19 (3): 243–263. Drucker, Joanna. 2004. The Century of Artist’s Books. New York: Granary Books. Ellis, Erle. 2018. Anthropocene. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eno, Brian. 1978. Music for Airports/Ambient 1. Album liner notes. London: Polydor. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic. London: Verso. Graham, Mark. 2010. “Neogeography and the Palimpsests of Place: Web2.0 and the Construction of a Virtual Earth.” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie 101 (4): 422–436. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9663.2009. 00563.x. Griffin, Gabriele, and Matt Hayle. 2016. Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———, eds. 2018. “Collaboration in Digital Humanities Research—Persisting Silences.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 12 (1). http://www.digitalhuman ities.org/dhq/vol/12/1/000351/000351.html. Grusin, Richard, ed. 2015. The Nonhuman Turn. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York. Routledge. ———. 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto. New York: Prickly Paradigm Press. Hayler, Matt. 2015. Challenging the Phenomena of Technology. Basingstoke: Palgrave. ———. 2016. “Matter Matters: The Effects of Materiality and the Move from Page to Screen.” In Research Methods for Reading Data in the Digital Humanities, edited by Gabriele Griffin and Matt Hayler. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hayler, Matt, and Gabriele Griffin. 2016a. “Introduction.” In Research Methods for Creating and Curating Data in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matt Hayler and Gabriele Griffin. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

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———. 2016b. Research Methods for Creating and Curating Data in the Digital Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2008. Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Malden MA: Blackwell. Hooper, Tobe. 2007. Poltergeist. DVD. Burbank: Warner Bros. Hunter, John. 2017. “The Hollywood Guide to the Future-Past.” Filmed at TEDxBucknellUniversity, Lewisburg, PA. Video, 16:00. https://youtu.be/ libn5cCwAlI. Hutchins, Edwin. 1996. Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ihde, Don. 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. 2008. Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McLuhan, Marshall. 1967. The Medium Is the Massage. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Malafouris, Lambros. 2013. How Things Shape the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mangen, Anne. 2008. “Hypertext Fiction Reading: Haptics and Immersion.” Journal of Research in Reading 31 (4): 404–419. ———. 2009. The Impact of Digital Reading on Immersive Fiction Reading. Saarbrücken: VDM Verlag. Massey, Doreen. 1994. Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Nakata, Hideo. 2005. リング / Ringu. DVD. Glendale: Dreamworks. Pickering, Andy. 1995. The Mangle of Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pullinger, Kate. 2018. Breathe. London: Editions at Play/Visual Editions. https://www.breathe-story.com/. Smith, Ali. 2015. How to Be Both. New York: Anchor. Speakman, Duncan. 2017. It Must Have Been Dark by Then. Bristol: Taylor Brothers. Tobias, Scott. 2017. “Ghost in the System: Has Technology Ruined Horror Films?” The Guardian. February 3, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/ film/2017/feb/03/rings-the-ring-horror-films-technology. Trigg, Dylan. 2015. The Thing: A Phenomenology of Horror. Alresford: Zero Books. Verbinski, Gore. 2002. The Ring. DVD. Hollywood: Paramount.

It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman Kate Pullinger and Duncan Speakman

Duncan Speakman is a writer and composer. Originally trained as a sound engineer at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts, he moved to Bristol in 1999 where he began developing interactive documentary projects and installations. Since 2005 he has focused on audio and locative media, developing pieces where the line between audience and performer becomes continually blurred in uncontrolled environments. His work continues to explore the narrative of experience, mobile audio technology, and the politics of public space. He wraps his questions in melancholy and romance (Fig. 1). It Must Have Been Dark by Then is a hybrid book and audio experience, somewhere between a travel journal and a poetic reflection on connection, progress and memory. Created with frequent collaborator Tineke De Meyer, It Must Have Been Dark by Then demonstrates how layers of meaning can be created through an approach to locative media that is site-responsive as opposed to site-specific.

K. Pullinger (B) Bath Spa University, Corsham, UK e-mail: [email protected] D. Speakman Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_5

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Fig. 1 It Must Have Been Dark By Then by Duncan Speakman

This interview, with Kate Pullinger, took place in Bristol on 18 September 2017. Pullinger: Let’s start with the backstory. It Must Have Been Dark by Then has a relationship to an older work, doesn’t it? Speakman: Yes. In a structural way, yes. Pullinger: What’s the older work called? Speakman: Always Something Somewhere Else. It was commissioned by what was then Mobile Bristol, in 2007. It was commissioned by HP Labs as part of their Mobile Bristol research. It was built using Mscape1 and the invitation was to make a geo-located piece that would work anywhere, which fundamentally seemed insane when I started it. What I made was a piece that looked at the material qualities of the city. I asked the question: “What elements are consistent in every urban environment?” The answer was that it’s the materials that the cities are made out of. Pullinger: By materials do you mean roads, stations, lights? Speakman: No, I mean fabricated material, so water, stone, wood, glass and—in one instance—a corner. There is always a corner. The piece had the underlying notion that whatever you’re doing right now, there’s someone else doing something similar in a similar location but probably

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in a totally different social and political context. Some of the stories were sourced from real things we found online, some just made up. The idea was similar to It Must Have Been Dark by Then, in that you were asked to find these types of materials. Once you’d found it, you’d hear a story about someone else involving a similar material. And the piece would store the location. Then on the way back it would continue the stories. It wasn’t that well developed. It was 10 years ago! I hope I’ve got better in 10 years at writing these things. The fictional quality of the narratives was quite weak in that on the return journey there wasn’t anything in the content that really shifted it forward. It had been hanging round in my head for years because, at the time, we made it on such a bespoke system but I still felt it was important to try making work in a way, this non-site specific, geo-located stuff. Pullinger: Yes, site-specific, non-site specific. Speakman: Yes, site-responsive in a way, you could call it that, even though the content doesn’t change. The structure of the piece for each person changes in response to where they do it. When this commission came up there were a bunch of different ideas that were floating around. When I started developing some original ideas with Tineke De Meyer I was talking about the work of Tim Brennan, who makes a series of walks where he will guide an audience through a place. At various locations he will read an extract from a book. There is not really any framing for why he’s chosen those books or what the content is but it’s usually quite politicised or the choice is inherent in the content. What Tineke said, that was really interesting to me, was that there’s a tension because you know he’s chosen that book for a reason and he’s chosen that place for a reason. The fundamental question we started with in this piece is how do we maintain this tension of what is the reason you’re reading this in this place? How do we, as authors, create that tension rather than just letting someone wander round reading the book? Reading it, they might think, “Why am I reading this here?” or, “Why have I stopped here?” That was the connection from Always Something Somewhere Else. Pullinger: Did the first piece have the same kind of cinematic quality to it that this piece does? Speakman: It was when I started making work with rich, musical scores. It definitely had that feeling. Pullinger: The reader is inhabiting a film. Speakman: Exactly.

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Pullinger: That’s one of the many things that works very well in this piece. Speakman: That was definitely when I started using that method. I guess before that I probably made walks which had a lot more of that Janet Cardiff or Antenna Theatre type thing of hearing footsteps as you’re walking, where sound effects are blended in with the soundtrack, rather than this use of music as a way of silencing the world and making it this visual canvas. Pullinger: Tell me about the three border zones, the three territories that you visited while making the piece. Speakman: The process of that was a bit elongated. I knew I want to start working with the idea of marking places and creating tension and I needed to find out what the return journey can do. When you tie an image to a physical location it’s much easier to remember what it is. From that we got to this idea of what is worth remembering; what would we ask people to remember? And we started thinking about disappearance and about things that won’t be there any longer so will need to be remembered. Part of the original idea was that this was almost like a task, like you were being tasked to remember disappearing places. You are creating a museum, a mental museum, with the idea that one day where you are will disappear and someone else might be tasked with creating a mental museum of your environment. From there I began to think about this notion of disappearance, about what kinds of places are disappearing. I saw a trailer for a Werner Herzog documentary about people living on the edge of volcanoes. I was really interested in that notion of transience through things outside of your control. Not just things progressively disappearing over time but in an instant, being wiped out. At the same time, I’d read about Isle De Jean Charles in Louisiana which was one of the first places to create climate change refugees in that there was a state-funded programme to move residents due to rising water. Obviously, there are people all over the world who are having to move because of climate change but I understand that was the first government-backed initiative. That location cropped up and that led on to where other similar things are happening. There was something poetic in the opposite situation, somewhere that doesn’t have any water and is disappearing under sand, so we looked for areas that were desertified. That led to thinking about the environmental

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impact and economic change, what kind of human-led economic changes would happen. Pullinger: The Latvia story isn’t a climate change story in the way that the other two are. Speakman: Not directly, no. That’s an economic story. Pullinger: Why did you decide to do that, to add in an economic story? Speakman: Because the piece originally wasn’t about climate change, it was about disappearance and change. That was how the three places were identified. Pullinger: The Herzog documentary, the volcanoes, that’s not climate change either. Speakman: Exactly, yes. That was just rapid change. The initial, “Okay, let’s go to these three places,”—in my head, I think when I went it was, “Okay, we’re going to look for environmental and economic change.” Then once we were on the ground, the role of human impact became so much more visible to me than I’d imagined. Pullinger: So, three field trips—Latvia, Tunisia, Louisiana—and they were each about a week long? Speakman: Yes, about seven or eight days each. Pullinger: Did you do them close to each other? Speakman: Yes, so a week in one place, a week back, a week in another place, a week back. It was pretty much back to back. Pullinger: You never had a sense that you were going to go somewhere and not find any story? Speakman: Before I left I knew that I was not planning to come back with all the answers. I knew they would be short trips. I knew that whatever happened, it would be a travel journal because I didn’t want to come back and go, “Oh, I’ve seen desertification and this is all the reasons it’s happening.” Before going I read scientific and economic papers about why these things were happening, and I knew that I needed to make this a personal story because that’s actually all I can offer. Pullinger: Tell me about the title. Speakman: The title comes from when I’d finished the three trips. One of the first things we did was I described all of the trips to Tineke in one long narrative session. Pullinger: She wasn’t on the trips? Speakman: She wasn’t on the trips. I described the trips to her from memory, day by day, everything that happened. It took about four hours. Because this was going to be a piece that you do once as an event, we

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needed to find out which images, which ideas, which moments stuck out, which had a resonance on a first hearing. At some point I said, “It must have been dark by then,” and that stuck out for her. We went with it as the title because it does a couple of things. It emphasises the lack of authority in the storytelling. It’s not saying it was dark, it hints that these are constructed memories. It added this sense of uncertainty, memory and— Pullinger: Retelling as well. Speakman: Yes, exactly and also the lights going out, it must have been dark, that also added an echo of thematic of the piece. Pullinger: Tell me a bit more about Tineke’s role. Speakman: It was initially conceptual work. Tineke is a very good filter so I can throw out a thousand different possible ideas and she’ll go, “Well that one’s alright.” Once I had the material from the trips, it was a case of working out which images and which stories captured the things we wanted to talk about or which had some relationship to each other and then working out that sequence. Pullinger: That’s a role she’s taken in other projects of yours? Speakman: Yes. Originally in a project called Periphery Songs , she came on board more as a translator, but ended up working in a dramaturgical role. Since then the other pieces we’ve done together have been much more direct collaborations. Pullinger: One of the things that works so well with the piece is the movement between the book and the app. I’ve never seen that before. Speakman: Partly that came from the idea that reading is active. We made a decision that the words on the page would never talk about you, about where you are. That the voice in the ear, the audio, would always be the one that talks about you and where you are. One moment we really struggled with is at the beginning of the piece where the voice says something like, “Okay, have you read that? That’s not my voice.” It was hard to find the right tone to emphasise that the narrator in the headphones is not the voice on the page. I’m always interested in how we “hear” words on a page. There is moment in the spoken audio when there is a third person reference which I really like, where it says, “This is the last edge they reached on their journey across Latvia.” It shows that the book is about someone else’s journey and what you’re doing via the app is your own journey; Tineke’s voice is you and your journey in your own city. Pullinger: Is that why the audio portions are second person, addressing the “you”? Speakman: Yes, exactly.

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Pullinger: Whereas the book doesn’t use the second person and that’s part of what creates the atmosphere, isn’t it? Speakman: Yes. That separation between the music and the field recordings is reinforced because when you’re reading there’s never music. You’re always hearing another place. It doesn’t always work as successfully as we wanted it to but the idea was to have that transition between here and there and that when you put your head down to read, you’re hearing somewhere else and you’re reading somewhere else. Then when your head goes back up to walk through the city the music comes in, it is the soundtrack for where you are now. Sarah Anderson worked on the music with me. Originally, I made a guess that the piece would be about 40 minutes long, so I made a 40-minute track, essentially a metronome, a 40-minute time-keeping metronome that had slight textual changes in it and a slight harmonic basis. I gave that to Sarah and asked her to make a 40-minute improvisation on the viola over that. I was already conscious that I was going to be travelling to three different places and I was trying to find a way to pull all these things together into a single piece. I wanted something that would hang everything together in a way, something that, for me as a maker, had a conceptual underpinning. I thought, “Okay, well I’m going to start with one long formed piece of music that gradually progresses.” On all the trips I listened to that one piece. We played it in the car as we were travelling through locations. I sat in the desert listening to it. Maybe not fully consciously but subconsciously the decisions I was making in terms of what I was taking photos of, where I was making field recordings, I was doing in the same tonal mind-set as the soundtrack for the piece. Then when I came back Sarah, Sean McGhee and I spent a few days together. I would play them bits of interviews, of the field recordings and we would improvise new parts, alongside with the 40-minute track. I knew that if everything we did was following the same pattern through the whole thing, working in the same harmonic tonal range, that when I put together the whole piece, despite the work being non-linear, all the bits would work together. You could take a piece of the story from the very end and we’d know it would have same timing pulse, even if it felt really different it would have the same rhythmic and harmonic content. I could put it in any other part of the piece and it would musically work. It wouldn’t fight against something else. That was quite an important thing to do in that process. Pullinger: The design of the book and those aspects of it, how did that come about? Speakman: I worked with Krysztoff Dorion, a Ghent-based designer.

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Pullinger: Do you have any book design experience? Speakman: Not especially. I mean I’ve made our catalogues for “Circumstance” and print design for the “Conversation” stuff but definitely not on a technical level, an intuitive book design level. Krysztoff is a proper designer. What was really great was the first day we sat down together, we very quickly decided on a textual process that went with the theme of each chapter, including using transparent overlay pages—as the piece is all about layering. Once we’d decided that we could have overlays, we went through each of the main stories and said, “Okay, what’s the conceptual thematic that works, that makes sense with an overlay so each one is thematic?” With Latvia the people leave, so the text disappears and you’re left with a few bits of lines. Douz is a place that was created through Bedouin migratory nomadic tribes that were then all resettled elsewhere. The text starts scattered and slowly, condenses until it’s one block. The Louisiana rising water section is slightly more complex than people might realise; the overlay text is about the road that is causing the flooding. Pullinger: Did you always feel confident that the two things—the book and the app—would work together? Speakman: No. Pullinger: No? I’m glad to hear that! Speakman: It was funny, as soon as we had some stories Tineke and I made rough versions with the software that would let us go out and try to position the stories. Very quickly we realised it might actually work. There were so many things we were worried about, like does it feel weird to read a book on the street with headphones on? How long do you want to stand there reading? Does it make sense? Pullinger: What’s your expectation for people who are using it in an urban environment in terms of what are you asking of your participant? Speakman: I’m asking something which I ask in all my work, which is to increase their engagement with their immediate environment, the physical and social environment that they’re in. I guess this piece specifically tries to do that in two ways. It does it through forcing you to navigate physically and tactilely through the space because of the way the map works and because sometimes it creates locations. It doesn’t tell you how to get to them, it just shows you where they are. You have to really understand the city you’re in. Without looking at a map you have to think, “That wall goes up there. Maybe I can get round that street.” You’re forced into doing a very different kind of spatial awareness than we do when we use Google Maps. We have to actually find that out through doing. That’s one big

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part of it. Then the memory aspect of the work is quite important as well. When I interviewed people who were doing it in London, someone said, “When I got to the end of it and I was told to walk back, I was worried that I wouldn’t know the way but then when I started walking my body just told me.” That was really nice, that’s exactly what I want to happen: by engaging with where you are and really concentrating on it, because you’re constantly looking at these different things that you’ve been triggered to or are keen to look at, you do remember it better. Pullinger: What does that mean to you in terms of what you’re asking from people in terms of their attention? Speakman: I think it asks a lot. There are a bunch of bits where the piece actively forces you to engage with where you are. It doesn’t do that all the time but there are a couple of moments where if you don’t do it you can’t really carry on with the piece. I think, in a weird way, it demands more attention to your environment than it does to the piece itself. Pullinger: I see what you’re saying, yes, because of the way you’re looking for things. Speakman: You can drift off in bits of the text and the poetics and stuff but if you know you’re looking for a certain type of thing then you’re attentive to that. So even if you haven’t really listened to a reflective text about how we always live near water, you are actively looking for some in your locale. The attention that it demands is one of your immediate environment. That’s the funny thing about the piece. Although it uses all these other stories and it’s bringing these other images and sounds from other places, they’re all there to facilitate you engaging with where you physically are when you read, walk and listen. It’s trying to encourage you to start thinking about how those stories or how similar events might impact where you are. In the end the piece is always about you and the city you do it in. Pullinger: Why did you want people to return, to retrace their steps? Speakman: Because when you go out, the modes are split. On the journey out, you’ve got the head up mode, walking, listening, city of cinema, alternating with the head down reading mode, I’m in another place, the field recordings. On the way back, it layers these two modes into one, so you have this blurring between memories of your own experience and of the stories you read. Pullinger: It’s very compositional. Speakman: Yes. How can you talk about the interconnectedness of everything? How can you talk about the tangled, merged environmental and social web in this world if I’m not engaged with where I am now?

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Pullinger: Apart from the fact that it’s a re-visioning of a piece from 10 years ago, what do you think is the relationship between it and your other work? Does it feel like a step change? Speakman: Yes—the documentary approach. That’s a big change for me. Pullinger: Do you think that this documentary non-fiction angle will be something that you’ll return to? Speakman: Definitely. I’ve started making a new work where you have microphones on the outside of the headphones. This means that in addition to the visual aspect of what’s around you, you can also use the sonic environment of the city. I’m trying to make this piece that layers two spaces. At the moment I’m doing something that takes the sound around you, makes it sound like wind, so all the sounds of the cars and the people become like howling wind. Then the wind from Tunisia fades in so you have this real transition. The real goal for me is that you get to this moment when you’re sitting there and you can hear all the school kids actually walking past you on one side but you can also hear the motorbikes or the oil tankers in Louisiana on the other side, but it all feels like it’s in one space. It’s in a very early stage of development at the moment, but it’s working. It feels very exciting to think about ways of layering real stories—that’s always such a funny thing to say, real stories—laying non-fiction stories into the environment you’re in. Pullinger: Are you going to do anything with the photos from the field trips? Speakman: Oh no. Pullinger: No? They’re just a personal research record? Speakman: There was something about trying to recreate the images through text that was quite exciting. When designing the book, we considered putting the photos at the very end—once you’d finished the piece you would get to see the photos. But we decided that would defeat the idea of the multiple layers of memory and story created by the piece. Pullinger: Can you say anything about the work in relation to the larger Ambient Literature project? Speakman: For me ambient literature isn’t a type of work. It’s a lens or it’s a way of thinking about existing practices. What’s new for me here is the use of print and trying to work out how that might layer with the environment you are in. I’m especially interested in the temporal structure of this kind of work and feel that existing research has focused on the spatial. It’s important to remember that there’s already a lot of work out there,

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created by numerous artists over many years, that use the kind of techniques we’re talking about within the Ambient Literature research. Audio walks, sited text, experiences that use sensory or data input, these already exist but I think that we’ve been lacking shared critical thinking around them. You can find excellent work but it’s spread across research into theatre, ubiquitous computing, urban experience and so on. There’s definitely no new singular form that’s being created here, but there is maybe a combination of reflection, survey and practice that might at least help us understand better what’s already been done, and maybe even show us some new directions. Credits for It Must Have Been Dark by Then Concept development and dramaturgy Tineke De Meyer Music Sarah Anderson, Duncan Speakman, Sean McGhee and Djamila Skoglund-Voss Location research and production Katharina Smets, Sara Zaltash and Elina Ventere Book design Krysztoff Dorion Producer Tom Abba Application development Calvium Interface design Tom Metcalfe Printing Taylor Brothers Bristol

Note 1. Mscape was a mobile media gaming platform used to create location-based games, created in Bristol in 2002, phased out in 2010.

Developing Ambient Attention Michael Marcinkowski

“Everyone knows what attention is.”—William James

This chapter cuts a particular critical path through what the concept of attention can mean for ambient literature. Building on an empirical analysis of interviews with participants invited to engage with one of the pieces commissioned as part of the Ambient Literature project, an account of the nature of attention in works of ambient literature is put forward, one that is seen as a socially and culturally developed, deeply situated phenomena. In getting to grips with the wide span of reading and listening technologies at work in pieces of ambient literature, attention comes to be understood not as a strictly psychological phenomena or state, but instead as relying on a complex assemblage of social practices, historical traditions, and cultural norms which serve to direct a reader both into and out of the frame of the work. In their presentation of a complex assemblage of elements, ranging from the text of the work itself to the specific situated conditions of its reception to the technologies involved, works of ambient literature present readers with a diverse and open field along which their

M. Marcinkowski (B) Centre for English Language and Foundation Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_6

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attention and inattention interact to foster new ways of situating themselves in the world. In this, the structure of attention in these works is given a hermeneutical rendering, with attention having its effect in its movement between attention and distraction, leaving the participant, and not the work itself, to be the locus of meaningful action. As will be seen, central to this is a consideration of the difficulty of developing a specific account of attention in these works as they engage a range of media along a diverse terrain of situated contexts and experiences.

Reading the Subject of Attention Interviewing audiences after their experience of Duncan Speakman’s (2017) It Must Have Been Dark by Then on a couple of sweltering midsummer days at the British Library in London, we started to notice something interesting about the ways that audiences reported what the experience was like and what they came to attend to over the roughly hour or so that the piece takes to complete. Listening back to the recordings of those interviews, if you didn’t know that It Must Have Been Dark by Then was a piece that dealt topically with issues of climate change and migration, it’s hard to hear that in their responses. Not that it wasn’t present, just that the specific topical narrative of the piece was the least of all the aspects of the work that our participants attended to, at least in their recollections. Either by booking a place in advance or just happening across the table we had set up in the lobby of the library, people wanting to experience the piece would turn up and they’d be told to download the smartphone application and be given a pair of headphones and the printed book and then sent on their way, out of the library and onto the streets of London. (For a description of the work, refer to Chapter “Introduction” of this volume.) It’s a funny sight to see people engaged with a work like this. Along the busy rush of the streets, it’s strange to see someone with oversized headphones stop and gaze ponderously out to the horizon or stare down at a weed in the crack of the sidewalk or slowly run their hand along a door frame. Maybe even stranger is to see someone stopped, tucked into the nook of a doorway, reading. For readers, the experience of the work engaged a world different from that inhabited by outside observers. Interviewed about their time with the work, one participant summed up their experience by saying that “you are not in the place where you

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are right now, but you are in the place where your imagination will take you.” The participant went on to say that they connected “these things [in the work] with my life, with my journey” and that; after having [an] experience of this journey through the virtual map, I realized that [the] same thing happens in our life … we are not going by what we think, but we are taken by some force that is leading us somewhere … or reaches somewhere so there is no particular place so we can stay there. Everything is going to be changed.

These kinds of comments get to the heart of the experience of participants who try these kinds of works: they see them as personally directed artworks works which serve to engage them with the world both as it is immediately present to them and as it is not. They are works which place the subject into a field of experience which comes to them in flux, engaging their subjectivity in a way which offers to change those conditions of subjectivity. They themselves come to be the focus of the work as they carve a unique pattern out from the flux of the world as they encounter it. For some participants, they come to not only think about different things, but come to understand differently. As one participant put it; I guess it opens up ways of thinking that you’re not doing every day. I think this kind of experience, and especially an experience that brings you to a new place, or makes you look at a place differently; it’s really great for thinking new thoughts.

In this, there is a specifically literary quality to the work in that it enjoins the reader to approach the world differently, in a self-reflexive and meaningful way (literature being, as Ezra Pound (1991) put it, “language charged with meaning” [28]). For this particular audience in London, there was a strong current of discovery in their interactions with the work: for newcomers to the city this came as a form of an opening up of the possibilities offered by the urban landscape or for longtime residents this came as a rediscovery of things they had not seen for a long time or might have never seen before. As one participant noted, “being from London like myself, it was even more eye opening to me because I thought I knew the area pretty well, but was in completely different places I had never been.”

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Conversely, as other participants noted, as the different audio narratives directed participants’ thoughts in different ways, they came to have the feeling that “you’re not walking in London, you’re walking somewhere else.” They not only had an awareness that their attention was being taken elsewhere, but that that awareness was itself something to attend. That is, the attention that participants pay to this kind of situated work isn’t a simple or direct thing. It weaves across the thematic of the text of the work, entangling the attending subject to the world both as it is present and as it is not. This interplay of presence and non-presence, as seen in the reactions above, is one that can be charted across all three sites: first, in the dislocation and resonance between the narrative of the work and where it is experienced; second, in the experience of places across time; and, third, within the sensing subject themselves as they change how they relate to the work and the world around them. To put it quickly, it is through these dislocations that readers come to feel their way across the abstracted dimensional space that the work offers and it is through these aspects that we can start to understand attention in ambient literature.

The Experience of Attention The classical picture of what attention is and how it functions is like that which is given by William James (1890); Everyone knows what attention is. It is taking possession of the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seems several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration of consciousness are of its essence. It implies a withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others. (403–404)

In James’s definition, attention is laid out as a kind of specific focus directed toward something, whether immediately present or in the form of a mental image, with which a person becomes consciously engaged. Such attention occurs against a backdrop of James’s (1890) vision of the initial “blooming, buzzing confusion” (488) of the raw experience of the world. This experience is an ever-flowing field which, without the learned discipline of attention, remains ungraspable and incoherent. In this, attention comes to be set as a pointed mode of perception against a diffuse sense of distraction.

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In a functional sense, a work of ambient literature like Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then accords with this definition of attention. The audio of the piece serves as a guide to the movements of the reader’s mind as they physically move through the jumble of the city, focusing their attention on certain things and not others, whether it is to touch some bit of wood, follow the path of some water, or attend to the fauna of the city; Could you stop where you are for a moment? Look at what’s around you right now. What is the ground like under your feet? Is anything growing there? We shape the places we live in. We designate where plants and trees should grow. We create shelter from the weather and channels for water, but there are always things pushing through the cracks. (from the script of It Must Have Been Dark by Then)

With each of these directions, the reader is tasked with looking at their surroundings in a particular way. The work guides not only the reader’s engagement with the world around them, but with the way that they turn their attention toward the printed text of the book itself; Can you stop where you are again. Is there somewhere here you can rest for a moment? Somewhere to lean or sit, where you can read comfortably without feeling exposed?

The experience trains the reader in a certain mode of attention, with readers carving out a unique world of experience for themselves through the way that they engage this sense of attention. It opens up particular ways of readers addressing themselves to the world, allowing them to take part in the experience. As James (1890) put it, “[e]ach of us literally chooses, by his way of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit” (424). For It Must Have Been Dark by Then, at least, and the personal map of the city that participants lay out, this seems very much to be the case.

The Moralizing of Attention Writing in the late nineteenth century, James played a part in a popular revisitation of the idea of attention, one that, according to Jonathan

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Crary1 (1999), was linked to “new institutional constructions of a productive and manageable subjectivity” (2) As Crary details, more than just a kind of psychological concept, attention comes to be an ethical virtue as a faculty that needed to be exercised as a kind of habit of mind. While such moral ramifications of attention can be traced back (at least) to the writings Saint Paul (“Attend upon the Lord without distractions”), for Crary, the newfound concern for attention in the late nineteenth century was linked to new forms of media (particularly the rise of impressionist painting) and industrialization. In his account, the historical development of new understandings and functions of attention serves to highlight the fact that the idea of “attention” is not affixed to any particular configuration, but that it plays a shifting and reciprocal role in the production of the modern subject and vice versa. In this, “attention” takes its place alongside Michel Foucault’s (1994) conception of episteme or the rise of modern documentary and information systems (as in the analysis put forward by Ronald Day [2008, 2014]) for refiguring the human as subject. With the advent of smartphones and the rampant use of social media, there has been much to say about the nature and quality of attention today as it has an impact on human activity. With the appearance and widespread adoption of the personal computer in the 1990s and the ideas around multitasking that it offered, there has been an open question regarding the effect of various technologies on contemporary levels of distraction. Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen’s (2016) The Distracted Mind, for example, imparts lessons for how to manage our attention in an ever developing landscape of new technology, while Thomas Davenport and John Beck’s (2001) The Attention Economy offers managers and marketers strategies for leveraging attention in a world where not only technology but the realities of the economy places new demands on our attention. For popular audiences, these approaches reinforce the fact that attention can not only be lost to distraction, but it can also be manipulated. This question of contemporary distraction and attention in the modern networked world is also raised by Malcolm McCullough (2013) in his Ambient Commons: that the seemingly disembodied digital lives we lead removes us from an attention to the world as we share it. The grounding of common, shared spaces that are actually present in our lives is lost in a world where our interactions glide along in private, networked, and algorithmic worlds. For McCullough, the loss of a shared and publicly

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available space on which to build a sense of common belonging leaves us open to an unmoored and unmanageable space of disembodied information. As a professor of architecture, McCullough identifies the physical embodiment of information flows in urban infrastructures as one path toward the reclamation of contemporary attention. As he put it elsewhere: “Embodiment and orientation can be important components of attention. Not all attention involves thought” (McCullough 2013, 209). Just as a well exercised faculty of attention was seen to be a virtue in the late nineteenth century (Crary 1999), for McCullough (2013), contemporary attention “has become something to guard and to manage” (7) against an unmoored flood of distraction and misdirection. In calling for us to “take back our attention” in an age in which “much more in the sensory field comes from and refers to someplace else” (x), McCullough (2013) argues for the importance of an immediacy of attention that he sees as being available through an embodied and environmental form of perception; When you perceive the whole environment more and its individual signals less, when at least some of the information superabundance assumes embodied, inhabitable form, when your attention isn’t being stolen, when you feel renewed sensibility to your surroundings you might try calling this ambient . (3)

In this, McCullough puts forward a particular manifesto not only for how we should attempt to manage and shape our own attention, but also, by employing a common, shared environment toward this task, how we can manage and shape the attention of others. In arguing for a shared sensus communis of the function of attention grounded in the physical world in which we live, McCullough follows Crary’s notion that the concept and function of attention is a malleable thing and is able to be transformed depending on the context of its occurrence. However, taking a step beyond McCullough’s call for an attention that does not “come from and [refer] to someplace else,” Crary (1999) places a limit on the universal claim of a certain kind of immediate attention; Attention here is not reducible to attention to something. Thus, attention within modernity is constituted by these forms of exteriority, not the intentionality of an autonomous subject. Rather than a faculty of some already

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formed subject, it is a sign, not so much of the subject’s disappearance as of its precariousness, contingency, and insubstantiality. (45)

In this way, attention, both as a concept and as a human process, can be productively understood to exist as spread across a field of relations rather than being problematically linked to a subject-object model of immediate perception. “Attention” comes from the exteriority of an embodied situation of the human being in the world as they are historically present. Despite these differences, for both McCullough and Crary, this notion of attention as existing as part of a wider and socially present field of effect serves as a starting point for thinking about the stakes of this consideration of attention in ambient literature. For looking at works of ambient literature, the question of attention comes to be best regarded in a situated manner and not simply as a concept bounded by an account of psychological stimulus and effect. Instead, attention is more productively understood as functioning in a dynamic manner, following the trajectories of a work as it is embedded within wider networks of objects and relations, histories and experiences. This is important in that the phenomena of literature, of the literary nature of the works discussed here, is a deeply cultural thing. In both their form and implications, these works of ambient literature trace along the spaces within which we live, spaces that are both immediate (such as the streets along which participants might move) and distant (as in the information networks delivering content to readers). The situation of attention sets the scene for the function of works of ambient literature as they engage this sense of attention through cultural techniques of literature. The attention that they invoke is one which is deeply embedded in our shared modes of living and the affordances that this common frame of what it means to be attentive bring to us.

Both Present and Not Where the common definition of the concept of attention shared by Crary and McCullough begins to fray, however, is with this question of the immediacy of attention that is put forward by McCullough (2013) (as he laments that today “much more in the sensory field comes from and refers to someplace else” [x]). This sense of immediacy is complicated by Crary’s (1999) analysis as he says that;

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The roots of the word attention in fact resonate with a sense of “tension,” of being “stretched,” and also of “waiting.” It implies the possibility of a fixation, of holding something in wonder or contemplation, in which the attentive subject is both immobile and ungrounded. But at the same time a suspension is also a cancellation or an interruption, and I wanted here to indicate a disturbance, even a negation of perception itself. (10, our italics)

What is important here is that attention can be understood both something that can be fixed on something immediate (in the sense given by James and looked toward in McCullough), but also function as an unfixing of that which is immediate by something else. For the audience for It Must Have Been Dark by Then, this is something that we started to see in their reactions to the piece: they didn’t just look more closely at their surroundings, being more attentive to them or even to the book or the content of the piece itself, but their minds wandered inwardly, drifting in the same way that their bodies did in space. The piece remained present to them, but it also invited wider networks of their own histories and past experiences. Their concern with the work was less about the work itself than their own—more abstract—entanglement within a wider world, both as it might be immediately available (as in the case of the city around them) and as it is not (as in the case of thinking of something like the Anthropocene or their own personal histories). As one participant noted; The story made me think of how tiny we are as humans, and that our permanent structures are not so permanent.… It made me think about time, like, how flexible time is, and how, you know, we sort of move through most of our days with this really rich idea of how time moves, and that kind of like — yes, the sections about water, about the water rising, about what was here before any people were here, who claimed this place. Like that, yes, I felt very kind of conscious of the space, not just the buildings, but the actual land beneath the concrete, you know?

As with Crary’s account of the relationship between attention and subjectivity detailed above, this is not an entanglement of an already-formed subject, but an entanglement that produces the experiencing subject of the work in a particular form, previous to any sensory (or empirical) experience.2 In the words of another participant, these works provide a “kind of ring-fenced time and space, a mental kind of space to just pay attention.” Works of ambient literature become meaningful as they engage an attention that is at once immediate and not, with the most impactful

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meanings coming through the continual reconfiguration of the subject, as it is both present and not yet present with the conditions set forward in the work. This relationship between presence, non-presence, attention, and the possibility of distraction is something that is notably highlighted by Charles Darwin (1871) in his account of animalian attention which depends on an attention toward what is specifically not yet present (“as when a cat watches by a hole and prepares to spring on its prey” [43]). In this, attention is not linked to an immediacy of perception, but of anticipation for the becoming present of that which is not. In contrast to McCullough’s focus on immediacy, Crary’s (1999) conception of attention is “concerned with the idea of a perception that can be both an absorption and an absence or deferral” (10). As concepts, attention and distraction cannot be thought outside of a continuum in which the two ceaselessly flow into one another, as part of a social field in which the same imperatives and forces incite one and the other. (Crary 1999, 51)

Building on the commonalities shared between McCullough and Crary’s accounts of the social and moral nature of attention, to distinguish attention and distraction from within this continuum, to even consider their individuated existence,3 is to consider them within a social field which establishes their relation. In that to attend to some distraction is to make it the focus of attention and thus no longer opposed to attention, what might be identified as attention or distraction (what might need to be protected or protected against, thinking of McCullough’s enjoinder against the structure of modern information flows) is determined not by their ontological constitution, but by the relative moral and social setting in which they exist. What is distraction in one era is watchful attention in another. For us, this is important in that this relationship between attention and distraction is something that is specifically highlighted in the consideration of attention in ambient literature. As one participant who was interviewed about their experience of It Must Have Been Dark by Then put it, reflecting on their own attention away from the piece: “It made me think about a journey that my dad made in 1947 at Partition. And it was like I had that memory in my head and when I looked at things I kept thinking about that story.” As much as the work draws readers closely

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toward it, the impact of it comes as they drift away from it and look toward other concerns. It is within this field of attention and distraction that the individual experience and ultimate meaning of the work begins to come forward.

Literature, Distraction, and Immersion Considering the interplay of presence and absence as it implicates the nature of attention in literature, Matthew Bevis (2017) refers back to Roland Barthes’ (1975) saying that “[t]o be with the one I love and to think of something else: this is how I have my best ideas” (24). Bevis (2017) modifies this in saying that “being with someone we love while thinking of something else is our founding experience of reading itself” (190). That is, an attention to literature is an attention away from where we are at the moment and even away from the work of literature itself. At its best, literature, as it resists clear ideation, presents a productive tangle in the process of thinking, with clear ideation being “what you lapse into when you learn to resist the strange distraction, the perplexity, the wilderness of thought” (Bevis 2017, 189).4 What is important in this is the development of a literary form of attention, one which is less “clear ideation” than a “wilderness of thought” which points toward some as yet unknown authenticity of thinking. In some ways, literature is there to distract us from our learned (or taught) habits of attention so that we may think of other things. For the literary text and the kind of thought that it is meant to engender in the reader, distraction is the root of attention. As Bevis (Bevis 2017) puts it; [I]in an effort to concentrate on things, we suppress our distractibility, but the distractions are there nonetheless — not simply preying on our attentiveness, but permeating it. Attention could be conceived as the sublimation of distraction, not its opposite. (180)

In this consideration of the literary forms of attention, it is worth noting Gertrude Stein’s early career as a psychology researcher at Harvard under the tutelage of William James which was largely guided by “her desire to draw attention to productive forms of inattention” (Bevis 2017, 177).5 Of course, Stein herself went on to produce some of the most difficult and initially impenetrable literary works of the early twentieth century that seemed to deliberately resist the possibility of an attentive immersion.

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Following from a consideration based in part on Stein’s often-opaque approach to writing, the poet and scholar Charles Bernstein (1992) addresses this complexity of the possibility of absorption in a work, examining how the linguistic artifice of a piece of writing is “both continuous & discontinuous with the world of / experience” (10) He argues that what might be considered absorptive or immersive in a work is largely dictated by a sensus communis of how absorptive material is understood.6 That is, when reliant on a linguistic frame, the idea of what might contribute to an immersive experience of a text is socially and culturally constructed; Today’s antiabsorptive works are tomorrow’s most absorbing ones, & vice versa: the absorbable, accommodationist devices of today will in many cases fade into arcanity. The antiabsorptive, insofar as it is accurately understood as essentially transgressive, is historically & contextually specific. (Bernstein 1992, 85)

In this, Bernstein points toward a rejection of the universal and psychological firmness of the concepts of attention, absorption, or immersion as they might be used in some way to describe the form of a literary work. While there may exist some psychological state that can be considered attention or immersion, any literature which attempts to take on this idea as a formal conceit is subject to the historical conditions of its creation and the various possibilities of its construction. In positioning works in relation to the contexts of their experience, what comes to be highlighted is the “interrelation / of cultural distance & opacity as played out in language” (Bernstein 1992, 55). That is, the distance between the text and what it enacts is both crucial and fully on display. As it resists and invites a transparency of reading through the employment of poetic devices, the artificiality of the literary text invokes a thematic that is distinct from the representative content of the work itself. For Bernstein (1992) even “such elements as line breaks, acoustic / patterns, syntax, etc., are meaningful” in that they add to the experience of literature with there being “no fixed / threshold at which noise becomes phonically / significant.… meaning occurs / only in a context of conscious & nonconscious, / recuperable & unrecoverable, dynamics” (12–13).

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This is something that is particularly important for thinking about works of ambient literature as the meaning of such works extends beyond the graphical linguistic mark, including the non-textual of context immediately within the text itself. The work of ambient literature extends beyond the text, both into the world and (as we have seen) into the way in which the experiencing subject engages the work. It is also here that a classically psychological understanding of attention is put aside in favor of a more broadly set and situated understanding, considering attention both at the fore of consciousness as well as being more deeply set. This fundamental problem how to get to grips with the idea of a focused attention in a complex and literary setting is highlighted by the various forms that an immersed attention within creative works can take. This is highlighted by Jan-Noël Thon (2008) in the area of game studies, as he breaks down immersion into a multidimensional concept composed of different forms of immersion. In this, he sees these different forms— spatial, ludic (focused on the mechanics of the interaction), narrative, and social—interacting in different, sometimes complementary, sometimes antagonist, combinations. These different aspects can all, in various ways, be engaged in a supposedly “immersive” experience which might “[take] over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus” (Murray 1997, 98). In a 2011 study of participants interacting with a virtual environment, Bimal Balakrishanan and S. Shyam Sundar found that by introducing narrative elements into an otherwise immersive environment, they actually reduced a participants’ sense of spatial immersion. While it was possible to measurably increase reports of spatial immersion by introducing an element of navigation within an immersive environment, adding additional aspects to the system confounded the effect. Their conjecture from this was that; [a]s the media narrative unfolds, users are assumed to continuously keep track of the when (time), why (causation and motivation), who (protagonist), and where aspects of the narrative. Thus, a complex narrative requires a media user to constantly update these multiple situation models, which can be a big drain on cognitive resources. (Balakrishnan and Sundar 2011, 195)

For them, there is a trade-off between the possibilities for narrative as part of an immersive experience and the enjoyment that narrative can bring.

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This counter-effect of narrative on spatial immersion is particularly interesting given the equally demonstrable power of narrative transportation (M C Green and Brock 2000). All told, the dynamic and multi-layered space set up by works of ambient literature, a space which engages readers’ attention not only within a narrative or linguistic text, but within the socio-cultural architecture of the world around them calls for a particular consideration of how readers’ attention can be understood.7 What comes to be needed is an understanding of attention that allows all these various elements that might confound the idea of attention into how the concept is understood.

Attending to Ambience Moving toward a specific and unique consideration of attention in works of ambient literature which encourage an encounter between the literary text and the context of its reception, it is helpful to frame the concept of ambient literature in two additional ways beyond the considerations of attention and literature that have been charted here. The first comes, in a rather obvious way, from ambient music and its origins in the work of Brian Eno. As Eno (1978) put it, “Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.” In its ability to sustain a variation within the field of a listener’s attention, ambient music opens up the possibility for a hermeneutic model of attention for ambient literature, in which attention might go out to the surrounding world and back toward the work itself in order to create a more satisfying experience. As with Bevis’s consideration of attention in literature, it is the relationship between distraction and attention that comes to be important. Like McCullough, attention in ambient literature is not linked to any specificity of information, but rather a more general field. While this idea has proven to be important in building out the uses of ambience in music, art, and here with ambient literature, this is not to say that we should take these ideas onboard in an unproblematic fashion, particularly when considering the issue of attention in these works. As we will see in chapter seven the critical account or “ambience” by Seth Kim-Cohen (2016) has shown how, for instance, with “ambience” comes a host of concepts and properties to be questioned ranging “from ‘spherical,’ to ‘places you inside an event,’ to ‘brings us into the living world,’ to affective, temporal, and immersive” (6). In each of these realms, the

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invocation of the concept of ambience does not solve the question of the material involvement of literature in the question of attention, so much as it encourages further questioning. Like attention, any conception of ambience follows along a trajectory of “socially constructed rules and not transhistorical universals” (Kim-Cohen 2016, 14). For us here, any appeal to ambience does not foreclose an understanding of the attentional models of readers so much as it evokes a broader field of embedded cultural activity. The second model of attention that ambient literature starts with comes from the initial utopian vision for ubiquitous computing in which computing blends into the background of everyday life and the difficulties of interacting with new technological systems are eliminated by an “ambient intelligence” able to adapt to and accommodate users’ needs. This vision for ubiquitous computing was first laid out by Mark Weiser (1991) in his article “The Computer for the 21st Century” in which computing was able to slide along in the background of everyday experience, hidden from conscious attention. In this, a user is able keep their attention on important issues, while automated systems take care of mundane tasks: users are able to skillfully move through the world without distraction. Like the idea of ambient, this conception of a seamless world of calm computing has been critiqued, both by highlighting its impossibility (Chalmers and Galani 2004) and its relative fruitlessness (Rogers 2006). In each of these cases, the question of attention is given a binary or at least directional form: attention is there, or it is not. However, for Ulrik Schmidt (2013), following Eno’s account of ambience in his approach to the question of ambient intelligence, this ambient “intensification of the experience of being surrounded” (176) begins to break down traditional formulations of the division between subject and object as well as between figure and ground, with there being no central locatable space to the experience of ambience. Where Crary makes a case for the attentional grounding of modern subjectivity, Schmidt sees ambience as a means toward the reconciliation of a subject and their environment. Ambient literature illustrates this move toward the non-figurative sense of the conditions of ambient experience in the way that it both heightens and eradicates questions of contextual distance through the technological and networked conditions across which it operates. Very much like the

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continuum of attention and distraction described by Crary or the sublimation of distraction within attention described by Bevis, the specifics of a subjectivity of ambience is open to reconfiguration.

Hermeneutics of Ambient Attention This interconnectedness of subject and object within an ambient field of attention comes to resemble (for reasons both historical and theoretical) the classical picture of hermeneutics. As a foundational theory of textual interpretation, hermeneutics offers a model for the development of an interpreted meaning that relies on an interaction between the particulars of a text and general thematic presented therein. Applicable to either a single text or an entire corpus, in this mode of interpretation, the specific understanding of any particular element is considered against the general background of understanding as a whole, and vice versa. This results in a circular movement between the two, out of which a supposedly correct interpretation results. Originating out of first theological and then legal textual analysis (Grondin 1994), the idea of hermeneutics was expanded upon by Heidegger (2010) and Hans-Georg Gadamer (2011) in their consideration of hermeneutic phenomenology which gave a hermeneutic form to the basics of the experience of the world. That is, the particular standing of an individual within the world is constituted by their reaching outward toward the horizon of their experience and subsequent return. When faced with the possibility of a text which extends out along a wide horizon of networked possibilities and is laid across a field of experience and attention that extends beyond the written page, this basic sense of the interpretive matrices at work in hermeneutics is altered. When a ubiquitous literature comes to be defined according to Schmidt’s idea of an ambient which modulates the conditions of attention between distraction and immersion, there results an extra dimension to the hermeneutics of interpretation, one which takes an active role (as akin to the active role of hermeneutics in hermeneutic phenomenology) in the production of the literary experience. Instead of just engaging a circular movement between the particular and the whole of a specific text, or between a text and the background of experience of a reader, ambient literature calls for an understanding of the movement internal to the reader themself, between attention and distraction in their attending to the work and the systems of the world stage against which it is set. In going out and returning, the

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movement of the alternating impulses of attention and distraction is that which provides meaning to works of ambient literature. This both reinforces and augments a sense of the openness of a hermeneutics of interpretation as given by Gadamer (2011) which he says “always includes our situating the other meaning in relation to the whole of our own meaning or ourselves in relation to it” (271). Where hermeneutics would normally utilize the situation of a text in the process of interpretation, works of ambient literature take this context up as part of the work itself, resulting in an extra-dimensionality to a text which comes to envelop the sensing subject within it. This concern for the relationality of the interpreting subject to that which is to be interpreted is important as it establishes the situation of the subject as being a necessary component of interpretation. Where Crary might have seen the shifting formulation of the subject in its development of new attentional configurations in conjunction with new forms of painting in the nineteenth century, ambient literature begins to press a new subjectification forward, tracing the algorithmic and data heavy spaces of the experience of attention today. What ambient literature proposes is that the hermeneutic movement of textual interpretation occurs not only as a hermeneutics internal to the text itself, nor in just the hermeneutics of experience of the reader and the alterity of the proposition of the text, but as a movement within the ambient conditions of the attention of the reading or experiencing subject. For ambient literature, the situation of interpretation includes, and in some ways relies upon, the cognitive stance of the reader as they move between immersion and distraction. The expansion and contraction of attention across a ubiquitous field of literary possibilities becomes an active component of what is required in the hermeneutic process and is what forms the basis of the experience of ambient literature.

Kate Pullinger’s Breathe As a web-app based work for smartphones, Kate Pullinger’s (2018) Breathe looks, at first blush, like a straightforward ebook reading experience. Readers swipe their way through pages of text as the story progresses, with the work embracing the standard interactive paradigm for reading paginated text on a screen as it lays out a story of a supernatural encounter. In this, Breathe comes across as a very different kind of

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work from It Must Have Been Dark By Then. Instead of inviting participants to move about in urban environments, it encourages the work to be experienced wherever they might be, even in the confines of their own home or a single room. Instead of the expanse and multitude of the city, readers are given only the text on the screen on which to focus their attention. Despite these differences, it is nevertheless possible to consider both Breathe and It Must Have Been Dark by Then according to a similar account of reader’s attention to the work. As will be discussed, for Breathe, this attentional focus for the reader comes in the way in which it rises up to engage established modes of interaction, refocusing readers’ attention not only on their cognitive models of reading, but also their bodily interactions as well, doing so through a reader’s experience of the text itself. In Breathe, this manipulation of attentional focus starts in the text itself, with the use of dynamic text to alter details of the narrative interaction based on the really-existing context of the reader. Relying on several public APIs (“application programming interfaces” which provide developers access to certain streams of data), the text is changed (subtly at first) based on the reader’s location, time of day, weather, and so on. While readers might not initially notice the way that the text aligns with their context (chalking up such resonances to coincidence or not attending to them at all), the use of dynamic text is used to startling effect as the story begins to address the reader directly, demonstrating a knowledge of where they are and naming specific nearby landmarks. For a story that relies on a supernatural setting, Breathe’s use of dynamic text mimics an otherworldly knowledge of the reader. In this, Breathe invites readers to consider not only the narrative implications of these sections of dynamic text, but also to consider how they are managed in the piece, with this pointing toward an explicit consideration of the technological contexts within which this work takes place.8 With this dynamic text, the reader is led away from the text itself to consider the particularity of their own contextual relationship to the text itself. Like in It Must Have Been Dark by Then, the reader becomes the central agent of the work, but in a very different way. Whereas in It Must Have Been Dark by Then a reader’s attention is invited out from the work, in Breathe, the reader’s attention is pushed. Despite their differences, in each, there is an attention not only to the surrounding context of the work, but also the situated conditions that the experiencing subject brings to the work.

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This is particularly highlighted in another interactive feature of Breathe. Part way through the text, as readers have come accustomed to swiping from one page of the story to the next, they suddenly find their swipes to be ineffective: instead of moving on to the next page their touches leave a black mark along the screen. Like a detective rubbing a pencil over a hotel notepad to reveal the imprint of a hidden text, readers have to repeatedly run their finger along the screen to reveal the hidden message. This creates a jarring experience, one which removes readers from any sense of flow or immersion in the text, to suddenly be reminded of their own habits of interaction. In this, the work engages the cognitive model (Norman 2013) of the reader as part of the work, working ingrained habits of interaction against themselves toward aesthetic effect. This breakdown of readers’ preconceived notions of how interactions should be conducted serves to highlight the subjective conditions of attention, with the processes of readers reorienting themselves to the new interactive paradigms of the work causing not only a moment of cultural interactive reconsideration, but a physical one as well. This kind of embodied shifting of attention is illustrated by another aspect of Breathe in which the current text of the screen comes to be overlaid with an opaque, colored overlay. Obscuring the text of the page, this overlay presents an alternate text, one which shifts and flickers based on the physical orientation of the smartphone. In this, readers must physically move their phone to read either the original text of the page or the overlaid text. What at first appears to be a question of visual perception becomes a matter of physical embodiment, necessitating a feeling of the device and the interaction as readers shift the angle of their phone to read the text of the overlay. Here, again, there is a moment of breakdown in the traditional interactive paradigms of ebooks, with readers left on their own to come to recognize, and feel, that the overlay is linked to the orientation of the smartphone. Through these interactions, readers’ sensory focus and attention remains attuned to the screen and physical frame of the device, but these surprising interactive paradigms force an attention on the learned pathways of interaction, engaging not only these learned methods of interaction and the cognitive models of interaction that have been developed, but also a wider embodied sense of interaction. Importantly, this characterization of the role of the unexpected and of surprise in the workings of attention highlights a central aspect of the function of works of ambient literature that an attention to a form

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of experience relies not on the experience itself, but on other, nonimmediate experience. What these kinds of interactions point to is the way in which attention relies on not just the immediate sensory conditions as they are present, but previous experiences, habits, and expectations as well. The conditioning of the subject toward certain kinds of encounters and interactions through the development of literacies and systems of cultural competency lays down a responsive field in which an experiencing subject is able to capture certain kinds of experience. The development of this responsive field is similarly recursive, with the subject and the world of experience being entangled toward the enactment of the field of possible experience. For readers of Breathe, their attention is commanded and utilized in the work as it diverges from their ordinary experience. As their cognitive models of interaction are countermanded against by the novelty of the interaction, readers are left to consider and more fully inhabit the relationship that they have not only with the work, but with technology more generally. In having to alter their physical relationship to their smartphone to expose the hidden text, readers become physically engaged with the work, even as they remain focused only the screen of the device. Just as something like It Must Have Been Dark by Then directs a reader’s attention toward and away from the work itself in a hermeneutic movement, so does something like Breathe. Breathe does it in a more subtle way than It Must Have Been Dark by Then, but the ultimate grounding of the effect remains the same: to draw readers experience and physical presence together with the work and to incorporate the reader into the function of the work itself. In this kind of lived experience of them, these works exceed the possibility of any informational rendering of their content. What we see in Breathe is that the movement of a work of ambient literature comes to depend not on the work itself, but the attentional movements that surround the work as they trace out the experience of the work as it exists within wider contextual (cultural, locational, social) fields.

Messiness and Ubiquity Talking to participants about their experiences with these works, what comes to be clear is that works of ambient literature are complex, messy, and mysterious things. They are works that not only engage the literary text, the landscape of the city, and the experience of the reader, but also an

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algorithmic and computational foundation on which they rest. They do not just present one face to the reader. In their responsive and dynamic nature, works of ambient literature contain an element of surprise as they encounter readers in new ways according to mechanisms that might not be immediately knowable to readers. In their analysis of the real life conditions of the kinds of ubiquitous technologies that undergird works of ambient literature, Genevieve Bell and Paul Dourish (2007) highlight the messiness of really-existing ubiquitous interactions. More than just technological systems relying on logical and rule-based interactions, ubiquitous technologies have to engage the entirety of the messy and unpredictable world of people’s social interactions. As we look to integrate computer systems into urban environments and seek to achieve a deep integration of technologies into our lives, unexpected obstacles and complications arise. A programmatic account of human activity is always fraught with complexity. For every seamless and magical experience of digital technology, there is always a closet full of wires still waiting to be untangled. Given the multiple and sometimes contradictory parts of pieces like these (the text, the audio, the locations, the person’s personal history, habits of interactions, and on), it’s not hard to understand why any individual account of their experience is unique to themselves and the specific conditions of their engagement with the work. The multiplicity of the artifice of the works offers readers a corresponding multiplicity of responses to the work. Questions of attention for these works encounter and engage so many different facets of experience (sometimes simultaneously) that an easy and specific account of attention becomes impossible. These works are made possible through a wider network of sociotechnical occurrence—smartphones, wireless networks, GPS satellites, urban spaces, etc.—whose presence entangles the reader further with a broader set of cultural practices, norms, habits, and expectations. As a media form, these are not works that exist in a vacuum. As participants in our interviews have pointed out, these works remind them of audio tours, participatory theater, games, podcasts, and a host of other contemporary forms of cultural technology, not the least of which remains, for obvious reasons, books. All of these resemblances bring along a host of associations and expectations. The experience of these works relies on an expansive network of conditions which all come together to make the work what it is for each individual reader: the layout of the city, the buildings, the air, the temperature, the clothes people wear, the bags

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they might be carrying, the expectations of their environment, their past memories, their experiences, their expectations of the works, and the sum total of their knowledge of the world that helps them as they move about in it all contribute to the continuum of attention along which these works function. This isn’t all that different from other forms of media, except that these are works that revel in these interconnections. The attention that they ask of readers falls between the poles of hyper and deep attention as laid out by N. Katherine Hayles (2007): these are works that looks deeply at the shifting and myriad connections that exist between objects, spaces, stories, and our shared histories. In this way, the experience of these kinds of works is not like a clean laboratory study or even like a book where you can strictly delineate what is on every page. These are works that are meant to be read in the real world with all that attendant confusion, messiness, and disordered distraction that comes with it. In this anarchic form, readers’ attention is spread across a wide field of things both present and not present, both planned and serendipitous. The works come like James’s account of the wilds of experience, but instead of focusing attention, they let it roam across the expanse of confusion, feeling its way along that which is both present and not. As attention comes and goes, moving toward and away from phenomena, the space that it traces out remains as part of the work, even when it is no longer attended to. This space remains as an afterimage, present still in the reader even as the source of the image has gone. It is an imprinting of the specific cultural resonances of the objects and settings that make up these works of ambient literature, from the locative to the proprioceptive, the ways that memories of spaces and body come together to hum along to a common tune. As Hayles (2007) puts it; critical interpretation is not above or outside the generational shift of cognitive modes [seen in the shift from deep to hyper attention] but necessarily located within it, increasingly drawn into the matrix by engaging with works that instantiate the cognitive shift in their aesthetic strategies. (199)

In understanding these works, it becomes necessary to understand not only the works themselves, but the sum of the world against which they are read. What is evident in all of this is the difficulty of disentangling the work itself from the experience of the work. This includes the ability to analytically distinguish the works of ambient literature from the reading subject

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as well as from the context of its reception. The work of ambient literature comes to be more about the attentional movement and subjective interaction with the terrain laid out than any particular objective elements present in the constitution of the work itself. As pieces of literature, they engage a specific mode of self-reflection which counterpose the interiority of a work to the site of its reception, being the reader and the situations in which they are received. These are works which, as John Donne put it, are “a part both of the Quire [choir], and Song.”

Notes 1. The rough account of the status of attention here is partly derived from Crary’s (1999) path making Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture and a more recent account by Matthew Bevis (2017) which focuses specifically on attention in literature and poetry. 2. As one of our participants noted, the experience comes to reconfigure basic sense experience: “It made me listen and watch, and feel, and suddenly becoming very aware of my senses. I felt like I could smell things better. Your colours were a bit sharper, and a very sensory experience.” 3. Here we might make reference to the work of Karen Barad (2007, 50– 59) who, in her critique of Ian Hacking, highlighted the basic manner in which human knowledge was implicated by our own individuation of phenomena and concepts. For Hacking (1983), who argued for the realness of phenomena that could be put to use, Barad raised the question of whether such individuation of phenomena could take place without a kind of anti-realist relationality of perception. 4. That literature encourages a “wilderness of thought” as opposed to a “clear ideation” recalls Martin Heidegger’s (1968) assertion that to “really think” is to attend to that which withdraws and remains unknowable: We are still not in the reality of thought. The real nature of thought might show itself, however, at that very point where it once withdrew, if only we will pay heed to this withdrawal, if only we will not insist, confused by logic, that we already know perfectly well what thinking is. (45) For Heidegger, thinking is that which still remains unthought. 5. As Crary (1999) puts it, “the more one investigated, the more attention was shown to contain within itself the conditions for its own undoing — attentiveness was in fact continuous with states of distraction, reverie, dissociation, and trance” (45–46).

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6. In the area of narrative transportation, Melanie C. Green (2004) has demonstrated that prior knowledge or experience relevant to themes explored in the narrative increased narrative transportation, indicating that the source of an immersive phenomena lies as much within the individual reader as without. 7. A review of participants’ accounts of their experiences of It Must Have Been Dark by Then presents an often contradictory account of their experience and understanding of immersion in the work, particularly as it comes to engage with a work of literature. On the one hand, for some participants, there was a refutation of the very idea of an immersion in the work: “But, there isn’t a sense of immersion into the music or anything, because I’m already in the physical space.” For others, their experience of the soundscape connected to the work “made the experience richer, I think, in terms of removing the typical London soundscape. Soundscape, it could be anywhere, and yes, it was more immersive, I think.” For participants, the sense of immersion seemed to cut both ways, bringing them both toward and away from what is present in their actual surroundings. 8. Here, it is possible to invoke Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s (2012) discussion of the “Eliza effect,” in which the function of an algorithmic media invites a questioning of how it functions, ignorance of which is central to the effectiveness of the media.

References Balakrishnan, Bimal, and S Shyam Sundar. 2011. “Where Am I? How Can I Get There? Impact of Navigability and Narrative Transportation on Spatial Presence.” Human-Computer Interaction 26: 161–204. Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press. Barthes, Roland. 1975. Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Bell, Genevieve, and Paul Dourish. 2007. “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Notes on Ubiquitous Computing’s Dominant Vision.” Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 11 (2): 133–43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-006-0071-x. Bernstein, Charles. 1992. A Poetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bevis, Matthew. 2017. “In Search of Distraction.” Poetry 211 (2): 171–194. Chalmers, Matthew, and Areti Galani. 2004. “Seamful Interweaving: Heterogeneity in the Theory and Design of Interactive Systems.” In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Designing Interactive Systems: Processes, Practices, Methods, and Techniques, 243–252. Crary, Jonathan. 1999. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Darwin, Charles. 1871. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Vol. 1. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Davenport, Thomas H., and John C Beck. 2001. The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press. Day, Ronald E. 2008. The Modern Invention of Information. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. ———. 2014. Indexing It All: The [Subject] in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Eno, B., R. Wyatt, R. Davies, C. Fast, C. Gomez, and I. Zeininger. 1978. Ambient. 1. Music for Airports. Virgin Records. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things. New York, NY: Vintage Books. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 2011. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. 2., Rev. ed., Reprint. Continuum impacts. London: Continuum. Gazzaley, Adam, and Larry D. Rosen. 2016. The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Green, M. C., and T. C. Brock. 2000. “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79 (5): 701–721. Green, Melanie C. 2004. “Transportation Into Narrative Worlds: The Role of Prior Knowledge and Perceived Realism.” Discourse Process. 38 (2): 247–266. Grondin, Jean. 1994. Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Hacking, Ian. 1983. Representing and Intervening. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Hayles, N Katherine. 2007. “Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes.” Profession 1: 187–199. Heidegger, Martin. 1968. What Is Called Thinking? New York, NY: Harper & Row. ———. 2010. Being and Time. Revised tr. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. James, William. 1890. The Principles Of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Kim-Cohen, Seth. 2016. Against Ambience and Other Essays. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. McCullough, Malcolm. 2013. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Murray, Janet Horowitz. 1997. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Norman, Don. 2013. The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. Hachette UK.

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Pound, Ezra. 1991. ABC of Reading. London: Faber and Faber. Pullinger, Kate. 2018. Breathe. London: Visual Editions. Rogers, Yvonne. 2006. “Moving on from Weiser’s Vision of Calm Computing: Engaging Ubicomp Experiences.” In UbiComp 2006: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Paul Dourish and Adrian Friday, 4206:404–421. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer Berlin Heidelberg. Schmidt, Ulrik. 2013. “Ambience and Ubiquity.” In Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Ulrik Ekman, 176–87. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Speakman, Duncan. 2017. It Must Have Been Dark by Then. Ambient Literature Project. Thon, J. N. 2008. “Immersion Revisited: On the Value of a Contested Concept.” Extending Experiences-Structure, Analysis and Design. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah. 2012. Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Weiser, Mark. 1991. “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Scientific American 265: 94–104.

Critical Ambience Jonathan Dovey and Matt Hayler

Introduction In this chapter we will argue that ambient cultural practices can be reframed as critically focused experiences rather than either passive backgrounds or immersive entertainment. Critical ambient works can, as we have seen in chapter four, produce experiences that deliver a sense of how we are made by, and with, systems and agents that are invisible but affective influences in our daily lives. In this chapter we build on our investigations of contexts, attention, and entanglements in order to reframe ambient experiences; as we have seen in chapter five, we argue that ambient literature can leave the reader or listener with a heightened sense of our interconnection with, and responsibilities to, our shared worlds. A critical awareness of our situation is fundamental to advancing socially, environmentally, and politically engaged practices in XR (Extended Reality media encompassing emergent forms of VR, AR,

J. Dovey (B) Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Hayler Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_7

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and Mixed Reality practices). Moreover, we want to argue that practices of critical ambience can speak back to some of the current problems posed by the totalising discursive framings of ‘immersion’. Our primary interest in ambience is that it signals cultural products that have an attentiveness to atmosphere, place, and site at their heart; ambient work, by definition, is concerned with that which already surrounds us, with subtle additions to the environment and the elevation of attention, not with replacing our surroundings with a better, more malleable, more frictionless fantasy environment. Instead of the complete sensory takeover implied by immersion, we argue for a critical ambience that produces ways of attending to the world that allows us to move between scales and entities, to be addressed in your embodied condition at the same time as being invited to understand how that moment is produced as an event through our relationships with objects, others, environments, data, and stories. Here we develop some critical approaches to practices of ambient arts. In starting in this broad territory we are interested in those forms of cultural practice that surround us, where the physical environment co-constitutes the work itself. Critical ambient practices are part of the traditions of environmentally based arts, land art, walking arts, architecture, urban design, and public art, that is to say, forms of cultural experience that extend across, for example, forms of live performance, worship, architecture, dance, cinema and AR. We can, for instance, find a pre-history of immersive experience in the recent claims of sonic archaeology (e.g. Fazenda 2017) that prehistoric sites of cave art were also chosen for their resonant qualities, suggesting that the encounter with the bisons, deer and horses so artfully painted 15,000 years ago was accompanied by music, and, of course, illuminated by flaming torches, in a very confined space, deep in the earth. Such a scenario suggests that the desire to be enveloped, immersed, and surrounded runs deep in the human psyche and finds its expression in many different kinds of human ritual. This sense of environmental cultural forms was reiterated and reinterpreted for the twentieth century by Alan Kaprow in Assemblages, Environments, and Happenings (1966) and by the popular art practices of happenings that his book documents. Simultaneously, political, participatory, and performance art forms were being invented, many of which took sites and places as key constituent aspects. In his 1994 introduction to the 1973 classic Environmental Theater, the performance theorist

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Richard Schechner observed (p. xv) that theme parks, historical reconstructions, festivals, carnival, pride or reclaim the night marches, street games, mystery weekends and street entertainment have all become the mainstream of American popular theater without critics or the academy quite noticing. In a passage that is productive for what follows here he writes; In a word, environments ecological or theatrical can be imagined not only as spaces but as active players in complex systems of transformation. Neither ecological nor performance environments are passive. They are interactants in events organically taking place through vivified spaces. (p. x)

Our current understanding of the heightened status of immersive and ambient practices derives from what we referred to in the introduction to this book as the ‘everyday mixed realities’ of permanent digital communication flows, especially where they are tied to place and space. The development of the idea of the so called ‘smart city’ and the rise of the research field of ambient intelligence arising out of ubiquitous computing are reframing our understandings of ambience and immersion (e.g. Greenfield 2006; Gordon and de Souza e Silva 2011). Places, sites, and environments are now augmented by the instantiation of pervasive and ubiquitous computing systems affording them new communicative potentials. These emergent augmentations are producing new contexts for immersive or ambient practices, contexts in which the environment itself is sensored and sensing, situations in which our senses are being interactively engaged at a new level of environmentally based communications and systemic feedback. Creative ambient practices often, and may increasingly rely on the same infrastructure in order to make their meanings. Critical iterations of such work, then, need to be aware of the potentials for complicity or co-option, but also of revelation from the inside. By drawing attention to both how we always depend on (often silent or silenced) others in our lives and the ways in which new dependencies on technology might be being fostered and exploited, critical ambient works can help to constitute the discourse of the new, immersive, enhanced space.

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The Desire to Be Enveloped At the same time as the smart city and everyday informatic flows offer us new environmental distractions, we are experiencing a retread of the longstanding desire for audiences to be able to immerse themselves in the worlds behind their screens. Indeed, at the time of writing, the industrial strategy of the UK Government has a theme called ‘Audiences of the Future’, and one of its challenges is to spend £33m worth of state investment with companies and universities to meet the ‘challenge of immersion’; Immersive technologies such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality are changing how we experience the world around us, from entertainment and art, to shops and classrooms. The challenge is to bring creative businesses, researchers, and technologists together to create striking new experiences that are accessible to the general public. This can create the next generation of products, services, and experiences that will capture the world’s attention and position the UK as the global leader in immersive technologies’. (UK Gov 2018)

This rush to investment follows Mark Zuckerberg’s purchase of Palmer Luckey’s Oculus Rift VR system in 2014, a move that mobilized investors worldwide and persuaded them that VR was going to become a product category, despite its (home consumer) market failure in the 1990s. In our reading, this second coming of VR (following the first consumer headsets in the early 1990s) can be understood as a near inevitable outcome of the proliferation of screens. The desire to be immersed in the image rather than just observing is a longstanding feature of art history; we argue here, however, that moving screen images have produced their own distinct desire to transcend the screen. The playful representation of being able to transcend the 2D image is present as a kind of footnote in the history of cinema present in one of its originary myths: that spectators fled the cinema on seeing the Lumière brothers’ L’arrivée d’un Train en Gare de La Ciotat (The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station) because they thought that the train was going to come through the screen. This is an apocryphal story (Uricchio 2008, 295–296), but its production and frequent repetition nevertheless draws attention to the uncanny discomfort of being an embodied person in a cinema, watching a flat screen that presents itself as reality, an effect that has seemingly been there since the birth of the medium.

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Early cinema produced the trope of ‘Uncle Josh at the Moving Picture Show’, figured in an Edwin S. Porter Edison film of 1902 and becoming a trope in many popular newspaper and popular periodicals of the period (Hansen 1991, 25–28). Uncle Josh is the unsophisticated family embarrassment who mistakes all the film clips as reality, fleeing from a train, flirting with the lead actress, and challenging the villain to a punch up (the erotic of charge of this trope is explored more explicitly in Godard’s Les Carabiniers [1963] when the ingénue cinema goer tears down the screen in his attempt to caress the bathing woman in the movie). This ontological play with the flat screen continues throughout cinema history in, for instance, Sherlock Jr (1924) when Buster Keaton, as the projectionist, finishes up in the film itself. Later, Cocteau’s Orphée (1950) offered a surrealist take on the myth of Echo and Narcissus where the surface of a mirror becomes a liquid screen to be passed through into another realm. The 1980s, however, were peppered with examples of this cinematic desire produced as screens proliferated and as the idea of virtual reality was first coined at Jaron Lanier’s VPL labs. In Tron (Lisberger 1982) the characters have to enter the mainframe to save the day; in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), the lead character Max Renn is sucked into the TV frame in his search for visual stimulation; and in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo’ (1985), the lead character Tom Baxter steps out of the screen into the movie theater to challenge the whole cultural edifice of cinema. A dissatisfaction with the flat image and a desire to be in the image can therefore be understood as a long-foreshadowed unconscious drive that, as we will see, is not about engaging with the world but rather escaping from it into a transcendent fantasy. 1 We argue that this desire to be in the image is the product of a very powerful ‘technological imaginary’, i.e. the (frequently gendered) dissatisfactions with social reality and desires for a better way of being (or for a better society) that are projected onto technologies, which are then made, in turn, into sites seemingly capable of delivering a potential realm of completeness (Lister et al. 2009, 68–73). Such imaginaries are used, therefore, as a characteristic of many of the arguments for certain kinds of contemporary digital media that, it is assumed, will resolve all kinds of issues that go far beyond their material technological affordances. The first coming of VR at the end of the 1980s prompted a significant quantity of popular comment and critical exegesis, much of which resonates in contemporary debate (see, e.g., Michael Benedikt’s ‘Cyberspace: First Steps’, MIT 1991; Benjamin Woolley’s ‘Virtual Worlds’

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1992; Michael Heim ‘The Metaphysics of Virtual Reality’ 1993). This first critical conversation about the virtual reaches its apogee in Janet Murray’s (1997) classic definition of immersion; The experience of being transported to an elaborately simulated place is pleasurable in itself, regardless of the fantasy content. We refer to this experience as ‘immersion’. ‘Immersion’ is a metaphorical term derived from the physical experience of being submerged in water. We seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience that we do from a plunge in the ocean or swimming pool: the sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air, the takes over all of our attention, our whole perceptual apparatus. (Murray 1997, 98–99)

This seems to us like a good, typical vision of immersion, and one worth thinking about a bit more. It focuses on the physical experience of being submerged in water, and Murray alleges that we seek the same feeling from a psychologically immersive experience as we do from a plunge: ‘The sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality, as different as water is from air’. In our moving from one state into another, immersion, at least as imagined above, takes over all of our attention and our whole perceptual apparatus. This is an old idea, and its appeal to total transformation, a kind of transcendent escapism, is compelling. It goes back to the idea of being immersed in a novel, lost in a book, lost in a crowd, somehow losing oneself, having one’s whole being transplanted from its immediate surroundings (as if this was phenomenologically possible). Oliver Grau, writing in 2003 in his book about virtual art, develops this notion, discussing the way in which, in a truly immersive experience, the apparatus of the cultural form or of the artwork itself somehow disappears: ‘As a general rule, one can say that the principle of immersion is used to withdraw the apparatus of the medium of illusion from the perception of the observers, to maximize the intensity of the message being transported. The medium becomes invisible’ (Grau 2003, 348). This vision of technological invisibility is, as we have seen, most purely (and fantastically) possible in the wishful act of entering the technology itself . Perversely, a more realistic vision of total technological invisibility therefore appears in The Matrix (1999): in his pod of pink goo, gently being fed the liquefied bodies of the dead users that surround him, his muscles, spine, and brain

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hardwired to the computers where his consciousness resides, Neo/Mr Anderson is nothing if not immersed. This image shows why Grau’s assertion about medium invisibility is a, if not the problem for critical practice. From Brecht onward (Willett 1964, 91), critical cultural practices have been understood as those which make visible the formal structures of the work in order to enact or demonstrate their ideological significance. Assuming that the medium can, or should be invisible has been tantamount to a form of ideological complicity within the experimental critical traditions of Marxism, feminism, or postcolonialism. An urgent need to understand the nature and the technologies of the media which constitute us seems even more important now that mediation itself has become the central process for the exploitation of experience as described by, inter alia, Zuboff’s Surveillance Capitalism (2019). This reflexive awareness, we argue, forms the basis for a critical ambient practice underpinned by digital infrastructure.

Critical Practices Dominant forms of critical practice have looked for more experimental work that understands and demonstrates the relationships between ideology and form. Here, readers or audiences are offered an experience that aims to work as art or culture and at the same time exposes its own formal structures in the hope that this supports audiences in understanding their own political situations in relation to, for instance, class, race, gender, and sexuality. In critical creative practice, this tendency towards formal experimentation also overlaps (and is sometimes in tension with) more straightforwardly political media or art that fundamentally attempts to communicate, embody, or enact an alternative, critical account of the world. This could be straightforward counter propaganda, agitational material, or the development of content that platforms suppressed voices and stories excluded by dominant power relations. Again, this type of critical practice also overlaps with the participatory, i.e. that which seeks to include people routinely excluded in the material processes of cultural production. These three modes of critical practice, the participatory, the counter propagandist, and the experimental, frequently cross fertilize, hybridize, or, sometimes disagree. These forms of critical practice can all be discerned in the histories of situated media. Participatory practices have had a significant voice in locative media histories. For instance, in their chapter entitled ‘Space

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Narrative and Digital Media’, Ryan et al. (2016, 101–138) use the Canadian work [murmur] as their primary example. [murmur] 2003—9 is an oral history project that provides a platform for local, ‘bottom up’ histories to be tagged to specific places; it thus promises a space for marginalized voices, for the accounts of the officially unacknowledged. Similarly, the London-based Social Tapestries (Proboscis 2008) grew out of the Urban Tapestries research project of 2002. This body of work had public authoring and tagging of information to sites as its aim; using audio story collection, co-design, and mapping, Proboscis worked with a range of community and design partners to produce networked content that offered citizens the opportunity to shape the emergent data spaces of the city. At a more formal level, a project like Mark Shepherd and V2’s Serendipitor (2010) offers a critique from the tradition of urbanism that has the work of de Certeau (1988) and Lefebvre (1991) at its heart. Serendipitor offers users the opportunity to map and walk a city route using the Google maps API and then to ‘introduce small slippages and minor displacements within an otherwise optimized and efficient route’ (http://www.andinc.org/v4/serendipitor/). Inspired by Fluxus, Acconci, and Yoko Ono, Serendipitor is an instruction-based art experience delivered through an app and globally available wherever Google street maps has been deployed. Instructions for a Philadelphia walk published in April 2014, for instance, required the walker to; 1. Head north on S 12th St towards Walnut St and then head towards the next circle you see. Photograph it. 2. Head west on Walnut St towards S 12th St and then follow someone on a bike until s/he is out of sight. 3. Head west on Walnut St towards S 13th St and then flip a coin. Heads? walk forward 100 steps. Tails? walk back 100 steps. The criticality here derives from the highly influential tradition of the derive, a disruptive pattern of walking celebrated by the Situationists (Debord 1958) and designed to challenge the rationalism of urban design and by implication its role in enacting capitalism’s modes of repression, spectacle, and control. A work like Serendipitor is participatory in so far as it is interactive, but critical in so far as it enjoins the user to subvert the rationality of urban navigation, thereby producing insight and experience

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that reframe the city itself. These effects are achieved through its form and its interface, by the way that it stages an encounter between the user and the usual rational top down mode of vision and navigation offered by Google Maps. Las Calles Habladas (Boj and Dias 2013) is a more directly challenging work in the same vein; again the user is invited to a mapped walk but here all the internet-accessible and geo-tagged information on that place is available to the walker as spoken word. The digital overlays and striations of the city are made available in all their unfiltered and chaotic form, thus staging an encounter with the un-designed and random organism of the so called ‘smart city’.

Ambience The thing that, maybe, makes it ambient storytelling is that it utilised your universe, what’s surrounding you, differently than stories that absolutely ignore who you are and where you’re going…it didn’t impose an identity on you which sometimes happens in games. So that’s kind of an interesting thought. It didnt tell you who you were. I think that it was immersive, but its strange to be immersive but also be in the place where you are. (Reader response to Breathe)

The works described above demonstrate how participatory and experimental critical practices of situated and locative media arts experiences might offer us a way into understanding the way that the ambient could begin to become actively critical. At first sight, ambience seems unpromising ground for a critical practice; a mode which Eno famously described as necessarily being ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’ (1978) hardly suggests itself as the place to produce heightened forms of critical awareness.2 The idea that the ambient is necessarily passive has been present in much writing about ambience, at its most trenchant in Seth Kim-Cohen’s essay ‘Against Ambience’ (2013). For Kim-Cohen, ‘The appeal of ambient phenomena is attributed to their evanescence, ineffability, and immersiveness’; ‘they appeal through their effacement of the important histories of critical art practices like feminism, postcolonialism, relational art, or social aesthetics’, and they offer us instead what he calls the ‘inchoate space of wombessence’. In this critique, the immersive and

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the ambient are closely related, an all around passive enclosure of undifferentiated ‘inchoate space’. Although a sonic arts critic and maker, he is particularly exercised by ‘immersive’ art installations, such as those by Olafur Oliasson, James Turrel or Yoyoi Yasuma. He objects precisely to what he understands as the inability of the ambient to ever become more ‘interesting’ than it is ‘ignorable’, with art works reduced to the backdrop for a range of trivial ways to relax, the gallery equivalent of a mindfulness app. However, another strain of writing about the idea of ambience develops a more radical understanding based on its potential to reconfigure our subjectivity towards a more usefully posthumanistic position. In picking up this strain we want to correct the popular notion of ambience as necessarily inert background to argue that environmentally situated works are critically important at this moment and that environmental situatedness and ambience are closely related. This emerges in Timothy Morton’s often challenging and contradictory Ecology Without Nature (2007): ‘I choose the word ambience to make strange the idea of environment, which all too often is associated with a particular view of nature’ (34). This making strange, for Morton and for us, has to do with articulating a sense of how subjects and environments are coconstituted and in particular with a reaching towards new subjectivities that escape the Cartesian self that commands a world passively awaiting discovery and colonization. Morton’s ambient poetics, whilst ambiguous, looks for experiences that produce a heightened awareness of all the entities (human, technological, animal, and architectural) that constitute our environments. This ambient poetics decentres the human subject in order to produce the conceptual conditions for a more genuine ecological awareness and action. Morton’s ambient poetics is often at odds with itself, a property to be valorised but one that may be impossible to achieve. ‘Ambience’, he asserts, ‘is what environmental writing is after, and ambience is its ultimate nemesis’ (2007, 81). Ambience, from Morton’s (2007) perspective, is thus ‘an untenable concept but pervasive’ (89). He sets up an ‘ambient rhetoric’ (2007,142) in which ambience is understood as unstable and restless, a janus like dialectical image that looks towards both oppression and liberation but may lapse at any point into a ‘resting place’ that has ‘abandoned its liberating potential’. Where ambience becomes a kind of landscaped ‘ecomimetic’ evocation of environment or landscape it loses its generative and critical power.

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But Morton repeatedly suggests the potential for a particular kind of ambience to offer a more fruitful ecocritical practice: Ecological writing wants to undo habitual distinctions between nature and ourselves. It is supposed not just to describe, but also to provide a working model for a dissolving of the difference between subject and object, a dualism seen as the fundamental philosophical reason for human beings’ destruction of the environment. If we could not merely figure out but actually experience the fact that we were embedded in our world, then we would be less likely to destroy it. (Morton 2007, 63–64, our italics)

We argue that we will not find the experience of ‘actually being embedded in the world’ in front of a page of text. Experiential artworks that place subjects in the world are a more interesting starting position. Whilst our research project produced three art works reliant on the screen they do anything but insulate us from our shared worlds. They are each designed with the purpose of using the device in our hand to focus our attention to our surroundings. Our version of ambient literature does not seek the dissolution of inside and outside, figure and ground, or page and margin that underpins Morton’s critique of the ambient. It precisely requires the audience to shift between and through those positions, and it is this movement of attention between scales of time and place that produces a new, potentially critical awareness of one’s own time and place. In doing so, we argue that these works usefully suggest a way of framing events that produce particular modes of attention constituted by a situated awareness of the complex entanglements of subjects in global technological, social, and environmental systems. This argument for a robust form of ambience that does the active work of connecting us to our environments is also at play in more recent writing on the topic. Both, Thomas Rickert’s (2013) book on Ambient Rhetoric and Paul Roquet’s (2016) study of Japanese culture in Ambient Media take up the challenge of Morton’s argument for an ambient poetics in different ways. Rickert begins his book with an account of how computer and communications technologies are ‘permeating the carpentry of the world’ before seeking to reframe rhetoric as an environmentally situated practice in which; ambience refers to the active role that the material and informational environment takes in human development, dwelling and culture, or to put it

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differently it dissolves the assumed separation between what is (privileged) human doing and what is passively material. (2013, 3)

Like Rickert, Roquet’s study of ambient media practices in Japan draws on Heidegger’s ‘stimmung’ as an originary point for considerations of ambience. Elaborated in Being and Time Heidegger’s (1927) ‘stimmung’ is usally translated as attunement to atmosphere or mood (but also, interestingly for our argument, having overtones of climate or listening). Its importance for us is that it establishes how mood can be a foundational experience; our experiences are subjected to mood or atmosphere before they are determined through cognition (Roquet 2016, 133). Moreover when ‘attuning’ we are being co-constituted by our environments, our being moulding to its surroundings. Of course the environment is no longer just building, or landscape, or climate, it is ‘the material and informational environment’, the transnational space of global informatic flows imbricated into the semiotically super-abundant textures and tools of everyday life. Roquet argues that our characteristic, pre-linguistic structuring through mood finds its contemporary equivalent and intensification in processes of ambient subjection that have become key aspects of the regimes of self care under neoliberalism; portable media and all manner of audio/visual product, including music, games, and literature, each have the potential to assist in the work of healthy mood regulation that survival under neoliberalism demands. Roquet here builds on Michael Bull’s (2013) observation that the use of portable playlists ‘make life easier’ by matching ‘the energetic demands of working life’ (154–157). The neoliberal subject, then, can cultivate an individualized ambient environment for themselves. In this light, and like Morton, Roquet describes ambience as a dynamically contradictory state, The fantasy of a totally autonomous self and the fantasy of merging with the atmosphere are both essential to neoliberal biopolitics, working to obscure the everyday back and forth of ambient subjectivation. (2016, 344–345)

Later in the book, in his own chapter on ‘ambient literature’, Roquet (2016) argues that such a phenomenon can be found in particular tropes and narrative styles of the Japanese novel. However, here he begins to resolve the contradictions he sees as inhering in ambience: ambient literature can, he writes, ‘enable readers to dissolve discrete identities into

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moods of open ended affective exploration free from the usual demands of their social and discursive selves’ (2016, 3094ff); the ‘calm uncertainty’ that it generates ‘can take a critical rather than a comforting route’ (3160). In the end Roquet develops a position not far from Malcolm McCullough’s (2013) in so far as he suggests that the critical ambience that he hints at might produce a greater sense of responsibility for the ‘affective attunement of shared space’ (2016, 3347). More pertinently for our argument here, he also wants to understand ambience as productive of a mode of subjectivity that decentres the human through its reconnection with wider energies and forces; An ambient media understanding of self necessarily situates the person in an intimate relationship with larger ecologies, affirming our interdependency not only with other people but with the affordances of the objects and environments we live with and through. (2016, 3347)

These accounts of ambience suggest, in differing ways, that it is a more interesting and useful term than ‘immersion’; ambience has long been about more than art’s settling into a placid background, or the reader or viewer being absorbed into a storyworld. However the positions outlined above are based on an analysis of traditional media cultural practices; none of them look at the forms of ambient literature that this book centres on. What happens when we take some of these ideas and apply them not to words on a page (or other forms of media textuality) and instead consider the experiential works that we argue constitute the proper ground of ambient practices? As we have seen, the traditional immersive aim of being, for instance, ‘lost in a book’ effaces the materiality of the embodied reader or viewer. This changes with the advent of so called ‘interactive’ forms of digitally mediated culture (see Lister et al. 2009, 21–25) such as games, net art, social media, apps and so on (see, e.g., Aarseth 1997; Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan 2004). Content producers working for audiences across a number of platforms, all of which have different interactive affordances, have begun to understand themselves as experience designers. One way of conceptualizing the task of the authors (or design teams) for such media is that they are designing for a range of user behaviours. In the case of the ambient literature projects, we were designing for users who were variously listening, reading from screens and from books, tapping and swiping screens, walking, sitting, or lying down. Far from assisting in a silencing

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of the body tied to a world to be left behind, the authors are producing texts that choreograph the user in and alongside their environments. Whereas a traditional (i.e. non-interactive) narrative assumes a reader outside of the text apprehending its meaning through an immersive attention to its detail, the ambient literature narrative addresses the reader directly, very frequently in the second person. We become an explicit function of the text. Where the literary text (usually) understands its reader by appearing to ignore her/him, the ambient literary experience actively recruits the reader into itself; by choreographing us, it addresses our agency as more than page turning cognition units. The abstracted object of the narrative address (Dear Reader) becomes an agent who is situated within (and as a part of) the environment that the text seeks to discover. So the difficult, but seemingly inevitable, construction of the ‘user’ challenges the role of the reader by assuming a range of configurative actions beyond page turning, a range of actions that have to do with the immediate surroundings of the reading or listening moment. In this way, the ‘user’ of an ambient text may feel herself to be part of a wider flow of energies and forces that constitute her encounter with the work. In our proposition for the critical potential of ambient literature, this encounter with the wider flow of energies present in the reading is characterized by particular forms of attention, shifting between the foregrounded content of the work itself and the background setting for the experience. This movement back and forth is, as we have seen above, a feature of ambient artworks; here, however, our ambient literature projects hail the user on the digital ground of the contemporary attention economy. They call attention not only to the particularities or generalities of the environment but also to the global data networks of control and surveillance that co-constitute them. Our argument for critical ambience tries to shift the ground of the debate from an argument about how content (music, text, VR, games) could ‘do’ environmental work to one of how the encounter with the work can ‘be’ environmental. This state of being is one in which our attention is not only called to the content but also to the immediate context for that delivery of that content; the critical potential of the ambient arises in the movement of attention between the present moment, the constituting context, and back again.

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Praxis We have seen these oscillating modes of attention operating in the commissions produced as part our research inquiry with their demands for moving between, for instance: embodied navigational wayfinding; listening to music, narration, and characterization; reading from screens or books in the hand; and attending to live context-dependent information (weather, news etc.). These modes of attention have delivered experiences that concern climate change, diasporic histories, and the refugee crisis; they are stories that engage the audience participant with the systemic nature of their worlds, systemic at both the level of the technological delivery system and in the sense that they deal with the complexity of a globalized world. The local audience participant has an encounter, through story, with the globalized systems that produce him or her as a subject and enabling responses that we can identify as ‘critical’ by the terms outlined above, i.e. a responsive engagement with politics as something active in the moment of engagement, the effects of which might last beyond the bounds of the story encounter. It Must Have Been Dark by Then has the most obvious claim to criticality in so far as it sets out to explore climate change and depopulation, shifting and shaping our frames of attention between the local and the global. It begins by asking the audience participant to be present in his or her moment, to attend closely to the banal surroundings of the everyday, to look afresh. It then requires the discovery of particular sites, which in turn produces a kind of loosely framed agency. Each participant transposes the material into their own very particular experience, taking stories from the climate crisis and introducing and layering them into the participant’s present. These elements are framed and contained by a musical score that provides a further aesthetic framing of the experience in terms of rhythm and atmosphere. In all this walking, reading, attending, listening, marking, and locating, the audience participant is shifting through different frames of attention, from right here and now (the smoothness of the bark of this tree that I now touch with my hand) to a forest in Latvia or a bitter plant in Tunisia. The walking, discovery, and agency of the interaction design of the piece produces a powerful sense of the present, of being present. Yet at the same time, the layering and compositional techniques produce a constantly shifting frame of attention between the scales of the hyper-local to the global, from the instant of the present moment to the time of the

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sands’ encroachment on a Tunisian village. At one point in the journey the narration asks us to imagine the place we are in without people, in a future where there are only plants, animals and broken-windowed emptiness on islands surrounded by rising waters. The scales of time and space that so often make it difficult to understand climate change are bought into sudden and startling focus. Donna Haraway (2016, 40) discusses both Ursula La Guin and Bruno Latour as exemplars of the need to tell new kinds of ‘geostories’ through which the forces of climate change and mass extinction can articulate themselves. Whilst not seeking to claim ambient literature as an exclusively ecocritical form, it does seem to us that in a broader sense It Must Have Been Dark by Then fulfils the conditions for environmentally aware modes of attention and ‘ecological subjects’. If Haraway’s ‘geostories’ are to find a place in the world surely they will be characterized by the ways in which they produce awarenesses and experiences of interconnectedness, of the ways in which all entities, human, geological, technological, animal, or architectural, constitute our environments and our experiences. The modes of attention produced by ambient literary works encourage us to move between right here and right now: the present moment, and the immanent historical forces that produced this present, and our current place, and the simultaneous other places that are active agents at the edges of our permanently connected global consciousness, united by infrastructure, culture, and code. Kate Pullinger’s Breathe produces some similar ways of thinking critically. To experience this text is also to experience the way that the cloud knows us through our devices. In observing readers at the moment where the text started to weave their local landmarks or streetnames into the location of the ghosts in the story there were visible reactions of shock, intrigue, disturbance, or amusement. Readers were physically ‘taken aback’. These effects continue, in various ways, throughout the story producing the effect of a narrative that knows as much about you as you do about it. These technical and design effects are, of course, complemented by the subject matter which eventually addresses the migrant crisis; criticality again works at both a formal and content level. One of the things that it did well was it dealt with relationships that we all share. You know what I mean? We’re all really alert to the Syrian business. We’re all really alert to our families, without being too specific. If you think of a fortune teller running a scam, what they do is they imply things. If

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you’re gullible, you say, “Oh wow.” In a way, it’s utilising your ability to make connections. So there was a currency to it that you don’t get in a lot of short stories that are written on paper, because it has no consciousness of you at all. (Breathe Reader)

Breathe sets its story on and into the phone, utilising its connectivity, and therefore it unfolds on the ground of the informational. To draw out the comment above, it is as if this is a book that knows something about you and where you are, and is therefore able to alert you to the networks that are usually working invisibly in the background. The way the story makes use of the APIs for weather or location, the UX design that deploys the phone’s camera to bring the immediate environment into the text, all entangle the act of reading in the every day flow of the attention economy. The Cartographer’s Confession is probably the work that has least claim to being critically ambient in the way we have been defining it above; it falls more into the tradition of audio walk or heritage experience where a narrative unfolds in successive locations. However, even here, experiencing the story of post-war migration in the internationalized sites of London alongside people from all over the world produces resonances that set up a critical response to contemporary conditions of migration and hospitality. The story is set in part in a post WWII London of migrants from all over Europe welcomed into the action of reconstruction after the defeat of fascism. Users experience the piece in popular tourist sites in one of the most international and cosmopolitan cities in Europe. Additionally, the piece works to confront the walking listener with the cultural archaeology of the fabric of the city, the layers of human experience and trauma that lie hidden in the texture of the pavement and the brickwork of the tenements, many of which would have been present in the timeframe of the story, whilst others are cut through by the sleek celebrations of contemporary capital like London’s Shard. This sense of the city as memory or dream is also supported here by the use of photography, an original departure in the field that points the way to emergent forms of AR. The critically interesting point about the use of photography is the slippage between its indexicality and its suggestibility. Some of the photographs are viewed on the phone more or less from the position in which they were shot half a century or more ago. Others merely suggest that this could have been here, or a place just like here, through

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their compositions and textures. Here one is returned to the critical tradition of the derive, or the Serendipitor app, in so far as The Cartographer’s Confession evokes a dream of another London that seems to be secreted in its present day streets; its locations are forever changed for us.

Conclusion Part of the wider Ambient Literature project here has been to reposition the work emerging in this field as literary, as authored, and to champion the role of writers in its execution and design. We have also been committed to exploring what ordinary, non-specialist reading and listening audiences make of the work. In our view this should not rule out criticality. We have argued above that the formal elements of ambient practices have the potential to reframe subjects in ways that have critically profound implications. The world of information overload and attention scarcity produces distraction as social malaise and attention as its answer; ‘In an era of changing planetary circumstances, personal attention to immediate surroundings seems like a manageable first step towards some huge cultural shift’ (McCullough 2013,13). In his consideration of this manageable first step, McCullough turns to the category of the ambient as a way to start to think about the modality of information in the urban environment. Our aim in proposing the field of ambient literature has been to address McCullough’s key question ‘…do increasingly situated information technologies illuminate the world, or do they just eclipse it?’ (McCullough 2013, 20). We want to argue for a poetics alert to embodiment, textuality, place, sonics, and technology that enhances awareness, connectivity, and understanding of the intrinsic qualities of phenomena of the world that we share.

Notes 1. We are indebted to Dr. Norman Taylor, Professor William Urrichio, Shafeeq Vellani and others for a sharing examples of ‘through the screen’ moments in cinema. 2. It is worth noting that in the rest of that passage Eno argues that Ambient music should have active agency in making places. The use of his ‘as ignorable as it is interesting’ tag actually misrepresents the nuance of what he argued, ‘Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these.

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Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to ‘brighten’ the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think’ (Eno 1978).

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Wachowski, Andy, Larry Wachowski, Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-Anne Moss. 1999. The Matrix. Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video. Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, and Pat Harrigan, eds. 2004. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance and Game. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press. Willett, John. 1964. Brecht on Theatre. New York: Hill & Wang. Woolley, Benjamin. 1992. Virtual Worlds: A Journey in Hype and Hyperreality. Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. New York: Public Affairs.

The Politics of Ambient Literature Matt Hayler, Jonathan Dovey, and Tom Abba

This book was written between late 2016 and early 2019. With a Trump government; the threat of an imminent no-deal Brexit; the rise of the right in Europe and North and South America; #MeToo’s making public of the volume of violence and harassment against women; vanished artists, journalists, and tourists in the surveillance states in China, the Middle East, and Russia; and an IPCC report on climate change so damning that governments are actually thinking that they might have to do something, now is not the time to avoid thinking about the implications of our research and creative practice. Throughout the chapters presented here, we’ve talked about entanglement, interconnection, identity, society, and

M. Hayler (B) Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Dovey Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] T. Abba Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_8

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community, about the ways in which ambient literature can respond to and be influenced by our being bound up with one another. And the works commissioned for this project reach out; they wish to be involved; they aim to provoke difficult and important moments of reflection and conversations during and after the reading that they produce. Any critical response must do the same. We have tried to emphasise the potential politics of an ambient literature throughout the various case studies here, but we also wanted to make these issues as explicit as possible: to give them their dedicated space, to mark what we know we’ve missed (and remember that we’ve missed even more), and to look to the future. If ambient literature is to become a mature form, beyond the mapping of work and explorations of potential outlined here, critical writing and reading of ambient literary forms has to be alive to its implications: where it might be useful, what it’s capable of, where and with what it might be made complicit, who it might silence, and how. In this chapter we pay explicit attention to several crucial axes of contemporary progressive politics: gender, sexuality, disability, race, and class. These features of potential readers’ and writers’ identities cannot be neatly unpicked from one another, nor can they be fully addressed here; instead we aim to suggest some of the ways in which ambient literature will have different implications for differently privileged members of different groups at different times and in different places, while also paying particular attention to the ways in which these issues interact with the technologies on which ambient works depend. Readers and writers need to be aware of the variety of ways in which critique and practice might already be political, or might help to ask interesting political questions from a new perspective, while also growing more alive to their complicities and complacencies. This chapter, then, is a start to directly thinking through the politics of ambient literature, its future potential and the issues that it already raises, but our hope is that in exploring these ideas and giving them some focus we might help our readers, and ourselves, to pay better attention to the on-going realities of contemporary creative and critical work that relies on digital technologies and new kinds of interactions.

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Foundations of Digital Power: Being Literary and Being Smart Our project’s relationship to storytelling is complicated, at a foundational level, by the adoption of the term “literature” in that the term itself signals an implicit hierarchy with regard to the landscape of writing and reading. Within the UK fiction market, sales of literary fiction stand significantly below where they stood fifteen years ago (Bhaskar et al. 2017), the impact of which underscores the difficult relationship between commercial publishing and the wider creative sector. For commercial fiction, the role of the physical, bricks-and-mortar bookshop has been challenged for some time, from without (by the dominance of Amazon’s digital marketplace, algorithmically accurate recommendations, and emphasis on next day delivery) and from within (with over 500 independent bookshops ceasing trading following the demise of the Net Book Agreement in 1997 and the sector largely ossifying around a small number of chain organisations). The result of this, in 2019, is that for all the books available, and so quickly, a sophisticated software algorithm is likely to guide us to our next purchase, and our personal preferences are accordingly shaped by an increasing reliance on machine learning over individual curation. In this context, and operating outside of the new norms of book selling, our emphasis on literature risks signalling to readers that ambient works are to be seen as an exclusive zone of practice, with accordant traditional gatekeepers whose role is to ensure an artificial definition of quality while simultaneously privileging an historical, insular understanding of the constituency of practice within its walls. This is far from our aim, but we’ve heard this concern more than once and it raises an important question: if it’s written into the name, how can we best ensure that challenging work feels contemporary and isn’t seen as artificially difficult, that the challenge is to be found in negotiating what it makes you feel, not in opaque prose or expected knowledge? Perhaps the genre needs to become something like “ambient stories.” Or, perhaps consistently exciting, rewarding, and accessible work denoted as “literary” is powerful in itself, encouraging exploration, and is worth sticking with. For now, we’ve thrown in our chips, but we’re aware that this fundamental aspect may change through the work of future artists and critics as the genre develops. On the writers’ side, in that a work of ambient literature is necessarily delivered by smartphone or tablet, it is also dependent on a new set of

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skills and expertise; a conventional text, arguably, needs nothing more than an inscription tool and a surface upon which to inscribe to provide the foundation for the creative act. Ambient works, however, demand an understanding and manipulation of complex coding languages as a constituent and necessary part of the design and writing process, further highlighting the extent to which writing and reading these works is inherently exclusional. More user-friendly methods for writing and distributing digital works may well become available. WYSIWYG1 production tools for websites, powerful editing platforms for image, film, and music, and home user design and modification tools for videogames each show how professional and expressive digital creation can be made more accessible (at least with regard to initial training and financial outlay). The barriers to entry for the writing of interactive, responsive, and locative storytelling, however, look set to remain high for some time yet, not least because of the current comparative lack of money in the sector. The creation, distribution, and leveraging of easier to use technologies (from hardware to software to retail) for digital writing tied to place is therefore going to be an important concern for anyone interested in ambient literature’s viability going forward, and particularly with regards to its inclusion of a greater diversity of creative voices (as we’ve seen so powerfully, if inconsistently, come about with the indie games scene2 ). Indeed, the stabilisation of platform tools for this kind of work has been a consistent, but so far unachieved theme of our conversations with publishing industry partners. Ambient literature’s requirement of digital devices also necessarily raises the question of who is assumed to have access to these means of interaction. If ambient texts are always only to be read on expensive, privately owned equipment then are they ambient for everyone? If the term is to retain its relationship to being “encircled,” stories can only be considered as ambient if they’re a known potential, or have the potential to emerge, to break through into public spaces. If you encounter, or know, or if you can be made to know that stories are out there waiting to be found then they are ambient for you. But if there is a world from which you’re intrinsically barred, no matter how available it might be to others, no matter how much it invisibly impacts upon your experiences, you don’t encounter it as ambient. Think of the monsters in the augmented reality mobile game Pokémon Go, cartoon creatures waiting to be discovered by anyone who walks around their environment to find them: they’re weakly ambient, existing only as potentials, to someone who doesn’t play, but who knows that they could exist if they just downloaded the app; they’re

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truly ambient to the player for whom they hide around every corner and whoes practice is conditioned by the possibility of finding them; and for the person with no phone, and no knowledge of the game, who wonders at the sudden clusters of children and adults near the fountain taking photos of an object that can’t be seen, they’re not ambient at all—there seems to be a story out there, but it’s something unknowable. The task, then, is to ensure that the inequalities of ambience are less consistently written across race, age, class, gender, and sexuality lines and without their typical coordination with other kinds of disinvestment. An inclusive notion of “our” stories in the environment all around “us” isn’t guaranteed, it will have to be consistently worked for and reimagined by writers and critics of ambient literature. In the second half of this chapter, in the sections on “Voices of Wildness” and “Reading Bodies,” we therefore think about current forms of exclusion in creative and critical practice and try to learn from how they are starting to be redressed by powerful voices advocating for the representation of the realities of marginalised groups to be seen as part of common human experience. That ambient literature is predicated on a technological apparatus which is part of a wider, spatialised digital culture also alerts us to its relationship to the so-called “Smart City” and its many critiques. As we have demonstrated, the potentials of ambient writing emerge out of rich conceptions of place, including our ecological entanglements and relationships with one another and our creative responses to and reflections on the informational infrastructure and networks of everyday life. We argue, therefore, that proposing the means for a new manifestation of human creativity that redeploys the mechanisms of surveillance, advertising, and control itself constitutes a political response to the big data-fuelled Smart City. As such, our account of the political challenges and potentials for ambient works are partly framed by this broader notion of emerging architectural intelligence (and its converts and discontents). The idea of the Smart City came to prominence in the first ten years of the century on a wave of digital optimism, later characterised by Evgeny Morozov as “technological solutionism” (Morozov 2013). The worldwide movement sought to harness the effects of ubiquitous computing, namely the sensing and instrument-laden city and its smart device-carrying citizens, to make urban living “better.” The promise was that smart cities would be more liveable, safer, more energy efficient, and sustainable. The seamless monitoring and integration of different

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information flows (e.g. traffic, air quality, weather, public transportation, etc.) would enable cities to be managed in a more rational and coherent way, and citizens would be able to understand, and therefore engage with their own energy consumption more effectively. Cities, as networks of people, authority, architecture, and objects, would be able to manage waste or crime in newly efficient ways using the streams of data produced by smart phones, smart grids, and the “Internet of Things.” Recent, real world examples of this kind of management have included free parking spaces in Barcelona showing up on your dashboard navigation screen; the lighting in an Oslo street dimming when no one is there to use it (Astana Expo 2017); and Ericsson/MIT’s collaboration, ManyCities, “an intuitive and robust tool for exploring mobile phone traffic and patterns, mapped onto urban space” which examines “data from communication networks” in order to allow users “to better understand human behaviour” (SENSEable City Lab 2014). In practice, such developments have also been widely criticised as the ground on which enormous corporate interests such as Cisco, Microsoft, IBM, and Telefonica enclose our cities’ and citizens’ data for profit. As urban informatics theorist Adam Greenfield commented at the 2015 Bristol Future Cities conference, [t]he core notion of the Smart City is to embed networked informatics in every object, surface, and relation of urban space, so everything that happens in the city can be captured…If you’re not offering that information back to people, and you’re aggregating it and collecting it for yourself…any rhetoric you hear about empowerment or decentralisation is very hollow indeed. (Kelly and Kelly 2015, 98)

Greenfield’s comments also point to the particular kind of idealised neoliberal subject at the heart of the Smart City discourse, the citizen as technologically enabled worker or consumer moving seamlessly through virtual and physical data environments in the pursuit of their earning and spending, being kept safe from those unlike them by predictive crime prevention and risk management systems, and with each action and interaction providing increasingly profitable and powerful information for the arbiters of those systems. Critiques have pointed out both how sterile this vision is and how it excludes the majority of the population, from the precariously employed or non-working to the vulnerable and those acting in the informal economies that co-constitute many of the fastest growing

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cities of the world, as well as the resolutely off-grid (see e.g. McCullough 2015; Greenfield 2018; Green 2019). Most of this debate has taken place on the grounds of citizenship rather than aesthetics, focusing on user potential and peril. The free and open source software movements, for example, have made inroads in thinking about more palatable and citizen-led data environments (see e.g. de Lange and de Waal 2019). From this perspective, the Smart City represents the possibility of a patchwork of localised or neighbourhood interventions with citizens developing their own systems for information exchange, democratic engagement, and community activism. But, in considering what happens when our shared world is semiotically enriched by the new data streams that users are enabled to produce and consume, we also return to an established opposition between the top-down, rational, and Corbusier-inspired vision of the city and the messy informality favoured by e.g. Jane Jacobs and Richard Sennet (see e.g. Anderson and Pold 2018, 118–119). In Sennet’s account of open urban design, the key concepts of the porous border, the unfinished form, and the exploratory narrative each aim towards the design of places that are open systems, by which he means those in which “growth admits conflict and dissonance” (Sennett 2006). Here we begin to glimpse a creative city in which citizens might really form and shape their own experiences. And it is here that we can also start to locate the possibilities for new creative practices, ambient literature included, within the wider debates about smart cities and digital citizenship. Counter arguments to the dystopic Smart City have been based, as seen above, on a model of citizenship which doesn’t fall prey to corporate excess and control: the civically engaged citizen mobilising her democratic, legal, educational, and welfare rights in new ways. But what about this citizen’s right to creativity? To play? To pleasure? Where is the practice of culture in the hackable city? How might we ensure a space for it? Our vision for a truly political practice of ambient literature is as inclusive, and as messy, as Sennett’s border zones, unresolved forms, and open systems: more available, more accessible, and more intersectionally fruitful, capable of amplifying the existing and new tactics of daily practice (de Certeau 1984) in the face of the neoliberal Smart City’s coordinated strategies. We find ourselves looking back to some of the earlier iterations of locative media, such as Social Tapestries (Lane et al. 2006) or [murmur] (Roussel et al. 2002), projects which actively imagined

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how urban digital systems might produce what Malcolm McCullough has described as “urban mark-up languages” (McCullough 2013, 448), systems that make it possible to upload experiences, stories, poems, dramas, and memories so that the digital infrastructure of the city not only concerns itself with traffic, crime, or waste, but also with the cities’ own cultures. Just as the great urbanists of the nineteenth century built museums and libraries alongside the sewers and street lights, we should be making cultural production publically available and baked-into our urban informatic systems so that they might always be questioned and reenergised and stay true to their users. Ambient literature offers an example of how the same data which might make us safer, more efficient, or more easy to sell to can also be put to work in the service of story and experience, and of alertness, of a greater attention paid to the systems which make it function. If a city is to be smart with our information, it should also make space for this kind of practice. Such a future would, of course, involve questions of curation: who gets to speak, and to whom? Whose voices are to be “published”? Our argument is not, need not be, that everyone is a writer, or that all stories have equal merit, but we do want to query the usual gatekeepers and the amplification of the usual tales. If ambient literature is well suited to the data flows and new concerns of the Smart City then it needs to be a part of the messy tactics of its genuinely civically minded incarnation. To do so, we have to ask from the outset: how might it better capture the real voices and experiences on the ground?

Voices of Wildness Our writing, reading, and critiquing of ambient literature have already excluded people. Every work of art necessarily does this, whether it’s painting excluding the blind or music excluding the deaf, or through any work’s barriers of language or experience, but they always do so to differing extents, and to differing ends. The question can’t be “how do we always include everybody?”, but there is profound value in asking “what is lost in repeatedly excluding readers with a particular experience?” Artworks must always leave people out, in either their production or reception or influence, but if it’s always the same people on the sidelines then what is always lost is dignity and a more accurate representation of reality while further incubating an actively hostile culture. A potential reader who is blind, deaf, can’t walk, or can’t deal with crowds can’t read

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this work of ambient literature: are there 20 other works that they can access, which have protagonists which look or act like them, which have them in mind and don’t assume that all readers are the same? A reader who is a person of colour, female, queer, do they have access to work by people who they would recognise as familiar? This matters. It’s why the canon of literature has needed to be so dramatically rewritten to include a greater diversity of voices, and for the same reasons that we need to reshape who appears in our governments: a greater plurality of voices is simply more powerful, more accurate, more useful, and does less damage. So, we need to think about how ambient literature might expand the range of people that it is relevant to. Ambient literature is not nature writing, nor exclusively urban writing, but, as we’ve seen in earlier chapters, it bears a relationship to both in its interest in wondering at places and navigating through them. In the remainder of this chapter we’ll come back to figures from both nature writing’s Romantic history and modernist reflections on the city, the lone wanderer on the moors and the flâneur in the arcades, and use the failures of representation that these enduring totems often represent as a way of thinking through how ambient literature might escape the same traps. Nature writing has a diversity problem that’s becoming increasingly visible thanks to the work of critics invested in the potentials of the genre, those who acknowledge that writing which pays attention to our environments in a moment of anthropocene wastage, extinction, and anthropogenic climate change might be of vital importance, but who also note that its most popular articulations have a disappointing tendency to rely on a heroic Romanticism which is both inaccurate and unsustainable.3 This imagery can’t be dismissed as harmless nostalgia as it too easily and too frequently becomes allied with a particularly vicious and patriarchal nationalism. Describing its worst extremes, Richard Smyth opens his article on “The Dark Side of Nature Writing” by noting that “[t]he landscape of modern writing on nature is haunted by the ghosts of fascism” (Smyth 2018). For Smyth, the protectiveness surrounding the myth of a pristine wilderness, recently ruined and perhaps possible to recapture, has a lot in common with contemporary populist politics: [c]onsider, for instance, the Twitter account @Sherwode_Forest (“the true spirit of England”), whose 1000-plus followers are hosed daily with a venomous stream of neo-Nazism, anti-Semitism, and alt-right memes, intercut with tweets about climate change and the loss of hedgerows. It’s

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important to note that the juxtaposition is not incidental: the emotive vision here is of a green England concreted over to build homes for immigrants, and of an English “race” under existential threat from non-whites. (Smyth 2018)

There is a form of conservatism, intensified in the above, which yearns for an imagined past, where life was simple and people knew their “rightful” place, and there’s little room for those who don’t appear to belong to that vision (a point that we’ll return to shortly). In a far more minor variation, a related sentiment has manifested with regard to our exploring the literary aspect of ambient literature: at conferences, and in informal discussions with colleagues, and with readers at public events, we’ve often been asked about the wisdom of making people look at their phones “even more,” of cutting them off further from the “real world” (as if one used a screen more during the reading and walking and listening of The Cartographer’s Confession or It Must Have Been Dark by Then than during an average couple of hours spent at home; as if the “real world” wasn’t filled with devices and infrastructure worth thinking about). This isn’t to say that we are unaware of the ways in which ambient literature could become complicit in some of the worst aspects of our increasing reliance on mobile devices through relationships with tech companies, surveillance networks, targeted advertising, social media dependency, etc. But it is also worth noting that “literature” is expected, by some, to look a very particular way if it is to deserve that title, and this shutting down of variety is worth interrogating. The impulse to return to the (imagined) smooth sameness of the recent past is rarely as well thought through or beneficent as it proclaims to be, and the call for a simpler, more real, more pure history to be manifested in the present is too often allied to a call to silence some section of the population’s new-found chances to act or speak. Though the stakes can’t be compared, we believe that just as literature has a chance to look and be productively different, so might the world. Kathleen Jamie’s “A Lone Enraptured Male,” a review of Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, reveals what can become left out by a particular kind of romanticising in nature writing. She first establishes that “Macfarlane is delightful literary company, polite, earnest, erudite and wide-ranging in his interests. It’s rather wonderful – like an enchantment on the land. In place after place, the length and breadth of the country, there is ‘wildness’” (Jamie 2008). This is literature as it’s “meant

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to be,” smart and thoughtful and beautiful, laden with a kind of ancient magic. But Macfarlane’s descriptions of wildness are strange lies—captivating, and attentive to the land (and to Macfarlane himself), but missing something important: [t]here are no meetings, no encounters with intrusive folk. It is all truly empty, secret and luscious. From Sutherland to the Burren, even to Dorset and Essex, the book reveals a sense of beguiling solitude. There are no other voices, no Welsh or Irish or differently accented English. It has to be thus, of course, because if we start blethering to the locals the conceit of empty “wild” will be lost. So there has to be silence, an avoidance of voices other than the author’s, just wind in the trees, or waves, the cry of the curlew…There are lots of people, many of them women, who live in, or spend long seasons in places like Cape Wrath, St Kilda, Mingulay, thinking about the wild, studying its ways. Interesting people, with new ideas. It’s a pity we meet none of them. (Jamie 2008)

A diverse community of nature writers has become more visible in recent years. It’s not just that it’s grown (though it has), but also that callings out by writers like Jamie, and the wider cultural influences of feminist, postcolonial, and critical race theorists, have been beautifully answered with new collections and new editions. These works increasingly come from writers who, it had previously been assumed, weren’t quite right for nature writing, though they were there all along doing the difficult work of navigating the landscape with as much (if not more) rigour as the Romantic men of the British wilderness.4 In their introduction to The Colors of Nature, for example, a collection of nature writing by people from a wide diversity of backgrounds, Lauret E. Savoy and Alison H. Deming say that the book emerged from a question: “why is there so little recognized ‘nature writing’ by people of color?” (Savoy and Deming 2011, 6). And they respond with a further question: [w]hat if one’s primary experience of land and place is not a place apart [as in the Romantic imagination,] but rather indigenous? What if it is urban or indentured or exiled or (im)migrant or toxic? To define “nature writing” as anything that excludes these experiences does not reveal a “lack” of writing, but reflects, instead, a societal structure of inclusion and exclusion based on othered difference – whether by “race,” culture, class, or gender. (Savoy and Deming 2011, 6)

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Ambient literature needs to learn this lesson early. Any definition of the genre, ours or any which appear after the publication of this book, cannot risk marginalising exclusion being intentionally or accidentally fundamental, and it is nostalgic, Romantic sentiment which often underpins such normalising and homogenising limits (accidentally and intentionally). Again, nature writing and ambient literature are both made better through their inclusion of a greater variety of legitimised voices and formal appearances, not least because such variety can demonstrate new, hidden, or silenced ways of being and offer more enlivening ways of expressing the otherwise unsayable. We must also note that it will only be through an expansion of the works designated as “ambient literature,” either through using the term retroactively to describe prior art or from new authors writing into the form, that diverse voices will become associated with the genre. It’s true that ambient literature is currently a white creative space. But it is also a form that has, from its inception in the few works of this project, always looked outwards to the world, to a diverse cast of people acting and voices heard. It has always seen readers, city occupants, and international citizens as non-homogenous, and this should remain inherent in a genre that is trying to accurately capture the nature of contemporary environments riven through and surveilled by the workings of communications technologies.

Reading Bodies The one thing I would say is, that, there is a bit of a mobility access issue, because the point at which I had to take my stick out, I was like, “the book has to go in the bag; I can’t look at the phone anymore,” like, “I need that hand to be able to move”. (from project interview with reader of It Must Have Been Dark by Then)

I mentioned a couple of times this word “anxiety”; when you’re out in public, doing an experience that makes you behave in a way that isn’t the normal way of behaving, you want to justify yourself to people. (from project interview with reader of It Must Have Been Dark by Then)

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We bring up the relationship between nature writing and ambient literature here for another reason: their shared interest in the particularities of navigating space, an interest which also links them to urban writing and the figure of the flâneur. It would be all too easy, comfortable, for studies of ambient literature, and particularly our emphases on embodiment throughout this book, to devolve, as writing on nature and flânerie has tended to, into meditations on the sensuous pleasures of reading and walking, on the activation of our minds being tied to our fingertips, our breathing, our visceral acts of living in our familiar places as if “our” was a simple term. But bodies and embodiment aren’t neutral things; they’re read, received, and privileged according to a whole host of silently malleable, but outwardly normative social rules. The politics of this, the politics of bodies and entanglements, must be front and centre if ambient literature and its criticism are to have any chance of being truthful. If we’re going to talk about the complexities of reading, of cognising in entanglements with devices and environments and other humans, then some of that complexity comes with recognising the diversity of experiences of differently embodied readers. Academic discourse is still catching up to its own best insights about the effects of silencing the voices of different races, classes, gender identities, sexualities, and disabilities. As such, unless it is questioned, the default reader of a work like It Must Have Been Dark by Then, the presumed normal of who might encounter a text that requires you to move through a city, the person who it’s assumed is being written for and who’s experience it is that we are trying to analyse here, that person will be assumed to be someone safe. Someone safe to walk the streets of a city with headphones on, a smartphone in one hand, a book in the other; someone safe even if distracted; someone safe even if doing something unusual. This presumption of urban safety means that this ideal(ised) reader is implicitly: cis-male presenting (and therefore unlikely to be interrupted or assaulted); white (and therefore less likely to be seen as doing something wrong); straight-presenting (and therefore unlikely to be harassed or attacked); able-bodied (and therefore able to walk freely, carry, and read from two reading devices, hear audio); and neurotypical (and therefore able to maintain attention, process simultaneous data, deal with new sounds and crowds). This subject is able to move relatively frictionlessly through the world, and, particularly in the case of a work like It Must Have Been Dark by Then, they will read a very specific text. Unless we

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draw attention to the fact that different readers are differently entangled and will, for all ambient literary works, necessarily produce different texts, we ignore huge swathes of readers and the works that they co-determine. Put another way, unless we start to more explicitly engage with the politics of entangled reading experience, we risk repeatedly describing the pleasant experience of a non-existent Vitruvian man who has been expected to represent us all for far too long (and, again, we note a link here to Jamie’s “lone enraptured male” and the leisured wandering of the flâneur, figures for whom safety is largely assumed if they keep their wits about them). Bodies, and their reception in places, aren’t homogenous or neutral for any subject. And yet, when cognitive scientists, sociologists, and philosophers discuss our being embedded in a situation, we don’t tend to hear about the ways in which power plays out within that situation and the day-to-day effects on cognition that that might have for many members of the population. Similarly, though we’re writing here into long traditions of locative media which have discussed humans in the city, humans walking, humans in their habitats and unfamiliar territories, in these traditions’ invocations of the flâneur, of the pleasures of exploring architecture and the other trappings of modernity, or of the moor-wanderer’s reexaminations of landscape and history, there’s little talk of people in wheelchairs, or on crutches; little talk about how safe you might feel as a woman, or someone who’s openly queer, in an unfamiliar place, or late at night; little talk about the experience of being a person of colour attempting to navigate a space historically coded as being for white people. The writer Teju Cole recently posted a response to a news item, a story of two black men, Rashon Nelson and Donte Robinson, arrested for trespass after sitting in Starbucks. Nelson had asked to use the bathroom, but was denied—it was for paying customers only. The two men sat at a table to wait 10 minutes for the arrival of their friend to discuss a business proposal. The manager came over and asked them to leave if they weren’t buying anything, but they declined, their friend was coming, and there were plenty of other people who had worked and waited without drinks, it wasn’t an unusual thing. A call to the police was made within three minutes of Nelson and Robinson’s arrival at the café; the arrest video shows the two men, who were reading until police arrived, taken away in cuffs, never read their rights nor told of their crime, led in silence by five police officers through a nearly empty coffee shop while their recently arrived friend and other (white) customers stand and protest that they

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had done nothing wrong, that the men had acted just as these others had countless times. Cole wrote, [w]e are not safe even in the most banal place. We are not equal even in the most common circumstances. We are always five minutes away from having our lives upended. Racism is not about actively doing stuff to you all the time – it’s also about passively keeping you on tenterhooks. We are always one sour white away from having the cops arrive. And the cops! The cops are like a machine that can’t stop once set in motion, what Fela called “zombie.” When the cops arrive, the human aspect of the encounter is over…This is why I always say you can’t be a black flâneur. Flânerie is for whites. For blacks in white terrain, all spaces are charged. Cafes, restaurants, museums, shops. Your own front door. This is why we are compelled, instead, to practice psychogeography. We wander alert, and pay a heavy psychic toll for that vigilance. (Cole 2018)

For Cole, black experience is conditioned by a heightened awareness of the role that the norms of places and the perceptions of bodies have in daily thought and practice; the situations in which black people are embedded play a distinctive role in how they must think, how they are forced to think. This is inherently a part of the phenomenon that we call cognition, but how often is it spoken of? As the editors of The Colors of Nature call for a redefinition of nature writing to include the less Romantic, or less-typically-coded-as-Romantic, voices and experiences of people of colour, so Cole’s words should become part of a new canon of the un-Romantic urban landscape. Images of the modernist city dweller are already there after all: the coffee shop; men reading and discussing business in public; psychogeographic practice; the figure of the flâneur. But racism is the funhouse mirror which distorts each aspect and makes being public take on a crushing weight. Again, writers and critics of ambient literature have lessons to learn here, questions to ask to ensure that they pay attention: what does a work expect of its readers? Is it fair to expect it? How might writers of colour write ambient works differently? Will they try to make white readers feel their lived spaces in a more threatening way, to teach them through affect? Will they try to make their minority readers feel empowered, at peace, or haunted by the familiar? As we’ve noted, the safe and leisured urban wanderer is a close relative of the Romantic man of the wild, brothers from an affluent family with

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few worries and an empire to maintain. Chino Amobi reminds us that their cousin, flying in from out of town, is listening to ambient music. Airport Music for Black Folk (Amobi 2016), an album with tracks named after European cities, explicitly invokes Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978) and offers an example of what a creator from a minority background might do differently when approaching ambience. The moors, the arcades, and the airports each have their respective lonesome travellers, and Eno famously soundtracked the wandering of the latter with music “intended to induce calm and a space to think” (Eno 1978). Amobi aims at something quite different, an album of kinetic, mechanical sounds, streaked with stray sirens and vocals delivered in a deadpan, PA-announcement style and rent within acres of emulated reverb to imply a stark sense of being surveilled and passive-aggressively commanded in wide open, angular and bright white spaces. (Boomkat 2016)

The privilege of seeing the airport as a space for calm clearly baffles the musician; as Jordan Darville put it in his Fader review, “[w]hereas Brian Eno once gifted that particular ambience with something serene and beatific, 38 years later Amobi’s brutal tracks cut to the post-9/11 realities of these locations” (Darville 2016). Amobi sees airports “as an international space and yet a totally Eurocentric & Western manicured experience” (Remi 2016), an encounter that we can’t help but see as echoing the fictitious wildness Jamie finds in Macfarlane’s UK: you can experience the wild, so long as you ignore the people already there, and airports represent the freedom to go anywhere in the world, so long as you ignore the interrogation rooms by passport control. Amobi says that with this album he wanted to explore “black experience…, how it feels to walk through the airport with confidence and not feel like Western culture has superiority over you…[, how] people…encompass the whole world in them and that they have the power and agency to be an airplane in their own mind” (Remi 2016). His subversions of the placid ambience expected by safe, white travellers are kin to the diverse nature writers of The Colors of Nature and the newly launched Willowherb Review (Lee 2018),5 the voices that have always been there and needed only to be listened to, those which hold real stories which are not often heard as being part of the real world. This kind of work

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enhances the discourse of travel and space, contesting and enriching it with frequently painful truths. As the relatability of the figure of the flâneur, for Cole, is brought into question by the realities of black experience in the city,6 so flânerie has also been supplemented by the experiences of the female flâneuse (Richards 2003) and the disabled flâneur (Serlin 2006). Serlin’s work particularly resonates with Cole’s scepticism toward who gets to stroll at leisure through urban spaces, of who gets to enjoy “[t]he vaunted promises of French republican values” (Serlin 2006, 196). In an essay which discusses both an image of Helen Keller and her companion and assistant Polly Thomson window shopping in Paris and the segregation of France’s war-wounded and otherwise disabled citizens, he notes that there is a constant and, arguably, almost tacit commitment to the normative elements of the flâneur’s physical experience…that is not factored into discussions of flânerie nor, for that matter, the codes of urban modernity that are assumed to crystallize around certain kinds of acts (observing, shopping, collecting) or sensorial experiences (listening, moving, gazing)…[S]cholars continue to preserve the notion of the flâneur as a paradigmatic example of the modern subject who takes the functions of his or her body for granted…[;] making claims for the flâneur or the flâneuse as an agent of modern experience [therefore] already presumes that the codes of urban modernity – what really counts as urban and/or modern – are organized around narratives of normative ablebodiedness…If we define modernity only through a recognizable set of compulsory able-bodied acts such as walking, looking, and hearing, then we exclude a sizeable proportion of the population, both in historical perspective as well as in contemporary experience. (Serlin 2006, 198–199)

The question here, again, is who gets left out, how regularly, and to what effects? Ambient literature could, all too readily, become associated with a normative flânerie which encourages “everyone” to explore their cities and spaces in new ways. The demands of the technologies that we’ve deployed, and the requirements of the stories that we’ve told during this project simply can’t be met by all readers, though Breathe shows that not all ambient literature requires the user to walk, and The Cartographer’s Confession’s “armchair mode” demonstrates how a work can grow similar stories off of the same seeds, expanding the number of users who can engage with it. Not all readers can access all texts, but ambient literature,

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for all of the reasons described above, cannot become a form dependent on free walking to progress its stories. There’s also the matter of accuracy. Cole and Serlin, and Amobi by extension, each also remind us that the flâneur cannot be a universal symbol of freedom and urban pleasure if the expectation is that everyone can equally, and equally safely, wander the city or the airport, any more than the moor wanderer can represent communing with the wild spaces of the world if he ignores what and who is already there and squints hopefully backwards. A disabled flâneur, someone wheeling themselves, someone guided, or able to take only short walks, someone who often finds beauty and connection, but who also has their way blocked, with some sights inaccessible, is in fact a far more accurate figure of human experience than the wholly free roamer. Autonomy is a very rare commodity; the vast majority of us must act with and for other members of our society in order to live, and we can very rarely change the shape of that society so that it might best fit our own needs and desires (though acting with others can produce changes that benefit groups oriented around common experiences). But, beyond that, the state of humanness is also always a state of radical dependence. The Vitruvian illusion that there is a normal, ideal way to be needs shattering, and we should recognise that in comparison to that elevated perfection everyone is always incomplete. To fall short of this is to live with the same “wounded” identity as everyone else, what Lennard Davis calls a state of “dismodernism” (Davis 2002). As Heather Sykes argues, disability studies has long “interrogated what gets counted as a ‘normal’ body, challenging taken-for-granted ideas about mobility, productivity, and even that any body is able across different circumstances and times of life” (Sykes 2009). But the dismodernist ethic calls for us all, regardless of our various experiences of embodiment, to further recognise how much benefit we each get from societal systems, legitimates our various uses of those systems, and demands an increase in our empathy for those who require different uses, or whole new systems, for their own self-actualisation. In short, disabled or ill people aren’t unique in their requirement of support, they simply have distinctive requirements. Where the wheelchair user needs the train or the bus to be wheelchair accessible, the person who can walk still needs to have doors and paths that fit their own needs; they need the stairs up to their office precisely as much as the wheelchair user needs a ramp or lift. The difference is that the needs of the person who can walk are continuously met and therefore rendered

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invisible, and this can lead them to assume, in a society which continually tells tales of particular kinds of freedom, that they are the full humans (in some normative sense), rather than a subject who would be standing naked in a forest if it weren’t for the millions of people whose labour has enabled them to feign autonomy. If ambient literature is engaged, as we argue throughout this book, with readers entangled with one another, their environments, and their technical systems, then two facts necessarily emerge in its production and consumption: (i) bodies don’t have equal freedoms in the situations that co-condition their practices and (ii) any accurate vision of entangled action and cognition necessarily positions us all as deficient in comparison to the fetishised autonomous individualism (that poses as the default state of human being) which underpins much contemporary political discourse. Ambient literature is already in a unique position to reveal some of the nature of our entanglements by telling new kinds of stories that articulate what we’re dependent upon, from our phones to our societies to the increasingly fragile ecosystems of the planet. That those dependencies differ for each of us, however, needs to be further brought out without reinforcing existing hierarchies of who gets to act and be safe in the spaces we’re encouraged to explore. Expanding the possibility of who gets to tell ambient tales and who gets to read them is now the work of taking the genre to a mature form. New platforms for distribution (maybe baked into the infrastructure of the Smart City), new accessible tools for creation, and new texts with diverse authors and characters and adjustable requirements for interaction (such that a greater number of readers can experience comparable stories) are the primary ways in which this might occur. And ambient literature, if it is alert to the issues that it inherently raises, could be a model for other digital media which might, at first, seem less directly concerned with the effects raised by the range of human embodiment.

Conclusion There is a deep connection between ambient literature and the idealised figures from traditions of wandering, the walkers of the arcades and the moors. These romantic men, for all that we challenge their authority here, have held their appeal for a reason: they have always asked vicarious readers and fellow wanderers to pay more attention to what is present and what might be lost. To lose these impulses would be a tragedy;

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they remain much needed in our technological, ecological, and political moment and they underpin the writing of ambient works. But these figures have also always had myopia, calling for Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité while ignoring the people missing from their treasured landscapes. We need a new set of heroic figures: the black flâneur; the disabled flâneuse; the indigenous nature writer; the queer moor walker; the urban botanist; the wilderness anthropologist. A truly ambient literature, as a body of work, as a genre, must be open to all of the stories going on. We recognise, also, that there is no end to the political questions that we might raise here, and so we’ve been guided by the comments and discussions that we’ve had most often with readers of the works produced during the project; they have our sincere gratitude for their generosity and canniness, only some of which can be captured by the quotations from formal interviews scattered throughout this book. As the academic arts, humanities, and sciences continue to reflect on the ways in which we are all interconnected, we also recognise how the public are increasingly calling for a better understanding of how power runs through those connections asymmetrically. There is a demand for bringing out the stories of people’s real experiences of the situations in which they find themselves, for bringing decolonised, anti-classist, antiableist, anti-patriarchal, and queered tales into the long history and rich present of entangled experiences that would better and more accurately describe those experiences and also unlock more of the liberatory potential inherent within their description. Ambient literature might well be able to contribute to this drive like no other medium, layering voices, highlighting actions, and revealing presences and absences, but only if its producers and readers are consciously attentive. As some of us have started to teach ambient literature in class, to our undergrads and postgrads, we’ve also learned from their experiences and felt again the sincere need to diversify the canon of exploring space, text, technology, and embodiment that we pass on to our students.7 It is from all of these interactions and lessons that this chapter has emerged and to all of these people, readers, students, academics, and an increasingly engaged public, that it is dedicated.

Notes 1. “What-you-see-is-what-you-get,” i.e. drag-and-drop or otherwise intuitive graphic interfaces, rather than raw code.

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2. “It’s rare for AAA games to take a risk…[, but] the surge of budget indie titles has blown diversity wide open, with developers able to tell stories outside of the straight white mainstream” (Nightingale 2018). Passmore et al. take a more cautious view in their “Racial Diversity in Indie Games: Patterns, Challenges, and Opportunities” (2017). 3. Hence Timothy Morton’s demands for an Ecology Without Nature (Morton 2007), i.e. a confronting of the webs of beings which make up our environments without giving into a Romantic conception of Nature as a vast, inhuman, isolated, and pristine Other. 4. Outside of nature writing, but to similar ends, Nikesh Shukla’s recent edited collections of non-fiction (The Good Immigrant: 21 Writers Explore What It Means to Be Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic in Britain Today and, edited with Chimene Suleyman, The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America, both 2016) capture some of the realities of immigrant and BAME experiences on both sides of the Atlantic, producing recognisable slices of life for members of those communities while also ensuring that it is impossible for stories of suburbia, aspiration, struggle, nostalgia, and home-making in the US and UK to be seen as exclusively white literary subjects. Nisi Shawl’s New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color similarly reclaims science fiction as a genre for everyone, collecting work by both established and up-and-coming writers of colour. 5. Jessica J. Lee’s Willowherb Review “aims to provide an initial platform to celebrate and bolster nature writing by emerging and established writers of colour” (Lee 2018). 6. Amobi also notes his complex relationship with the Modernist urban landscape, citing the situationists as an influence (alongside Malcom X and Amiri Baraka), “people who interrupted spaces and their critical reflection on contemporary popular culture” (Remi 2016). 7. Mackenzie Wark offers an example of what this might look like in another arena, that of psychogeography and speculative design, in her sharing of a possible reading list for a future class. Her bibliography is divided into: classic readings in the field; practical psychogeography; the alternate ability city; the amusement city; the animal city; the city of women; the cognitive city; the driverless city; the drowned city; the dumpster dive city; the edible city; the hip hop city; the infrastructure city; the micro city; the minor city; the negated city; the queer city; the sanctuary city; the sensory city; the thief’s city; and the waste city—“the idea is that through wandering in the city, outside of the organized time of work and leisure, one can glimpse ambiences that might suggest a whole other kind of city for a better way of life” (Wark 2016). If ambient literature couldn’t be at home on such a course then it really has fallen at the first hurdle.

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Bibliography Amobi, Chino. 2016. Airport Music for Black Folk. NON-Worldwide. Anderson, Christian, and Soren Pold. 2018. The Metainterface: the Art of Platforms, Cities and Clouds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Astana Expo 2017. 2017. “What’s a Smart City?” Video, 1:57. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=AF4jiEd6HnM. Bhaskar, Michael, Iain Millar, Nick Barreto, et al. 2017. Literature in the 21st Century: Understanding Models of Support for Literary Fiction. Arts Council England. https://www.artscouncil.org.uk/sites/default/files/download-file/ Literature%20in%20the%2021st%20Century%20report.pdf. Boomkat. 2016. “Chino Amobi: Airport Music for Black Folk.” Boomkat. Accessed April 21, 2019. https://boomkat.com/products/airport-music-forblack-folk. Cole, Teju. 2018. “The Starbucks Thing Hit Me Harder Than I Expected.” Facebook, 18 April. https://www.facebook.com/200401352198/posts/thestarbucks-thing-hit-me-harder-than-i-expected-ive-been-brooding-for-dayson-/10155943676667199. Darville, Jordan. 2016. “Listen to Chino Amobi’s New Album Airport Music for Black Folk.” Review of Airport Music for Black Folk, by Chino Amobi. The Fader. Accessed April 21, 2019. https://www.thefader.com/2016/03/ 15/listen-to-chino-amobis-new-album-iairport-music-for-black-folki. Davis, Lennard. 2002. “The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category.” In Bending over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, and Other Difficult Positions, 9–32. New York: NYU Press. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Lange, Michiel, and Martijn de Waal (eds.). 2019. The Hackable City: Digital Media and Collaborative City-Making in the Network Society. Singapore: Springer. Deming, Alison H., and Lauret E. Savoy (eds.). 2011. The Colors of Nature. Minneapolis: Milkweed. Eno, Brian. 1978. Music for Airports/Ambient 1. Album liner notes. London: Polydor. Glas, René, Sybille Lammes, Michiel de Lange, Joost Raessens, and Imar O. De Vries. 2019. The Playful Citizen: Civic Engagement in a Mediatized Culture. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Green, Ben. 2019. The Smart Enough City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Greenfield, Adam. 2018. Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. New York: Verso.

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Jamie, Kathleen. 2008. “A Lone Enraptured Male.” London Review of Books. Accessed April 21, 2019. https://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n05/kathleen-jamie/ a-lone-enraptured-male. Kelly, Andrew, and Melanie Kelly. 2015. Festival of the Future City. Abbots Leigh: Bristol Cultural Development Partnership. Lane, Giles, Alice Angus, and Orlagh Woods. 2006. “Social Tapestries.” Social Tapestries. Accessed April 21, 2019. http://socialtapestries.net. Lee, Jessica J. 2018. “The Willowherb Review.” The Willowherb Review. Accessed April 21, 2019. https://www.thewillowherbreview.com. McCullough, Malcolm. 2013. “Inscribing the Ambient Commons.” In Throughout, edited by Ekman Ulrik. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2015. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Morozov, Evgeny. 2013. To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism. New York: Public Affairs. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology Without Nature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Nightingale, Ed. 2018. “Challenging The Mainstream: 5 of the Most Influential LGBT+ Games.” The Indie Game Website. Accessed April 21, 2019. https:// www.indiegamewebsite.com/2018/06/06/five-influential-lgbt-indie-games. Passmore, Cale, Rowan Yates, Max Birk, and Regan L. Mandryk. 2017. “Racial Diversity in Indie Games: Patterns, Challenges, and Opportunities.” CHI PLAY’17 Extended Abstracts, October 15–18, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 137–151. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320312321_Rac ial_Diversity_in_Indie_Games_Patterns_Challenges_and_Opportunties. Remi. 2016. “NON Is a Worldwide Resistance Movement for African Artists.” OkayAfrica. Accessed April 21, 2019. https://www.okayafrica.com/nonchino-amobi-interview. Richards, H. 2003. “Sex and the City: A Visible Flaneuse for the Postmodern Era?” Continuum 17: 147–157. Roussel, James, Shawn Micallef, and Gabe Sawhney. 2002. [murmur]. Toronto: CFC Media Lab. http://murmurtoronto.ca. Savoy, Lauret E., and Alison H. Deming. 2011. “Introduction.” In The Colors of Nature, edited by Alison H. Deming and Lauret E. Savoy. Minneapolis: Milkweed. SENSEable City Lab. 2014. “A Tale of Many Cities.” SENSEable City Lab. Accessed April 21, 2019. http://senseable.mit.edu/manycities. Sennett, Richard. 2006. The Open City. Berlin: Urban Age. Serlin, David. 2006. “Disabling the Flâneur.” Journal of Visual Culture 5: 193– 208. Shawl, Nisi (ed.). 2019. New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color. Oxford: Solaris.

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Shukla, Nikesh (ed.). 2017. The Good Immigrant: 21 Writers Explore What It Means to Be Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic in Britain Today. London: Unbound. Shukla, Nikesh, and Chimene Suleyman (eds.). 2019. The Good Immigrant: 26 Writers Reflect on America. London: Dialogue. Smyth, Richard. 2018. “The Dark Side of Nature Writing.” New Humanist. Accessed April 21, 2019. https://newhumanist.org.uk/articles/5331/thedark-side-of-nature-writing. Sykes, Heather. 2009. “The qBody Project: From Lesbians in Physical Education to Queer Bodies In/Out of School.” Journal of Lesbian Studies 13 (3): 238–254. https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/32752/ 3/Sykes%20%282009%29%20The%20qBody%20Project%20post%20print.pdf. Wark, Mackenzie. 2016. “Psychogeography and Speculative Design.” Public Seminar. Accessed April 21, 2019. http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/ 10/uu.

The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee Kate Pullinger and James Attlee

James Attlee is the author of Guernica: Painting the End of the World (Head of Zeus, 2017), Station to Station: Searching for Stories on the Great Western Line (Guardian Books, 2015), shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award in 2017, Nocturne: A Journey in Search of Moonlight (Penguin, 2011), Isolarion: A Different Oxford Journey (Black Swan, 2007), and Gordon Matta-Clark: The Space Between (Nazraeli Press, 2003) as well as numerous essays, chapters and articles, mainly concerning art and books. Attlee’s publishing jobs have included being sales and rights director at Tate Publishing in London and editor at large for the University of Chicago Press. In addition, he has worked as a session guitarist, a map salesman, a book reviewer, and as manager of a travel bookshop (Fig. 1). This conversation between James Attlee and Kate Pullinger took place on the 17th of November, 2017, in Bristol.

K. Pullinger (B) Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Attlee Oxford, UK © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_9

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Fig. 1 The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee

Pullinger: What can you tell us about the writing process, and how it differed for you given this is one of the first forays that you’ve made into fiction. Attlee: I began with certain ideas about what I wanted the app to do. I wanted to locate it in London: to explore London through it in some way. My initial ideas were in non-fiction mode; right from the beginning they had a cartographical theme. Pullinger: Was that driven by the technology, do you think, by the locational potential of the technology? Attlee: Yes, I think it was partly driven by the technology, but there are also two strands in my previous writing that fed into this. I’ve written three books that could be assigned loosely to the genre of travel writing or psycho-geography. The method I found of generating material for them was moving through the world; moving through space in various ways. Isolarion was a journey down one multicultural street in my neighbourhood. Nocturne took me to a lot of different places including Japan, Arizona and the Welsh mountains, places where moonlight was unaffected by public illumination or where the moon still had a significant place in culture. Station to Station was a journey from London to Bristol using a modern technology, the railway, finding stories and places and people along the line. This method of making work relies quite a lot on chance elements. It’s about putting yourself in a place and seeing what

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happens. It’s a very old structure — the pilgrimage or quest narrative — that pre-dates the novel. You know you’re setting out on a journey and you’re going to return changed by it, in some way; hopefully, having discovered something about the nature of the quest, but also probably something about yourself. The ‘travel-writing’ element within the app project involved putting myself in specific locations and seeing what happened. The second consistent strand in my writing has been about art, about looking for a long time, again and again, at images until they unfold for you. Pullinger: The way that that manifests in ‘The Cartographer’s Confession’ is through the photographs. Attlee: Exactly. London is a big, organic mess of a city. You’ve got to make a selection from it. I’ve always been quite influenced by conceptual art in my writing, the use of chance operations, the setting up of systems, as in the work of John Cage or British artists Boyle Family. As a writer, I need a way to help me arrive somewhere before I can begin. Fortuitously I had found a set of photographs on the death of a relative; they’re pictures of people in the streets and markets of London, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as well as views of the river. The photographs really fulfil two roles. Firstly, they gave me locations of where major incidents in the story would happen. Secondly, the people in the photographs became characters, or inspired characters. There’s one particular photograph of a man in a greasy, double-breasted suit, with a monkey on his arm. As soon as I saw him I thought, “Hey, I’ve got to tell your story; you’re a character, you speak to me.” The more I looked at these photographs the more they felt like portals back into a different time. What I discovered was that when I went to the locations in the photographs, just as happened when I was doing my travel writing, the locations would then suggest further plot developments through things I found there. I noticed details that I imagined my characters would also have seen— particular settings that suggested certain actions taking place. So, it was interesting for me to find that fiction could be generated through place, as well as non-fiction. Pullinger: Yes, and in quite a similar way. Attlee: In quite a similar way. That was a discovery for me. Also, I found it useful that the technology required me to physically pace out the story, as it were; to ask myself what is it going to be like for the person who’s experiencing this, to be in this place? It turned out that

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some of the locations that the photographs initially suggested were not suitable for someone to stand and listen or read a piece. Others were simply too far from each other, making moving them between them too time-consuming. I travelled around the locations testing early versions of the piece with the producer of the app, Emma Whittaker; it was down to her to explain to me the technical potential of the medium - what we could and couldn’t do, making suggestions as to what I might try. It was a very collaborative process in that way, in contrast to the experience of working on your own, as a writer does normally. When a particular plot element or location didn’t work for technical reasons I just had to let it go. I found this an interesting process. Pullinger: I felt that one of the locations that worked best was the Norwegian church; seeing the Norwegian church. Attlee: It’s such an extraordinary thing, a little-known location for many Londoners. Pullinger: Yes, a beautiful building; a very interesting location, but it also frames a profound moment in the story. Attlee: It was very interesting for me going to the Norwegian church and meeting the people there and discussing things with them. Pullinger: In terms of the collaboration with Emma Whittaker, one of the things that I really enjoyed about the work is how well it functions: the triggers for the audio, the triggers for the text, the nuts and bolts of experiencing the story through the app. Attlee: I’ve come to realise I was very lucky in the team I had to work with; Emma’s a leader in this field. It took a lot of rigorous testing on the ground. For instance, we would plan for a story to trigger on the corner of a particular street in Borough Market. When we got there, we found that the buildings were too tall or the GPS just didn’t hit, or the atmospheric conditions meant that GPS didn’t work - if it was thundery, things didn’t trigger. What Emma has done is to build in a sort of override function. So, if for any reason something doesn’t trigger you can just hold your finger on it, and it will trigger. Generally, I think, through endless walking around, we have refined the positions so it functions very well. Pullinger: My understanding is that in your writing career, you’ve done one other work that was tech-mediated. Is that correct? Attlee: Yes, I worked on one app. Pullinger: That was another piece where the reader moving through location matches the writer moving through location.

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Attlee: It was called ‘Writer on the Train’. It’s not available as an app to download, because it got to prototype stage but wasn’t released, partly because of technical difficulties we encountered getting GPS to trigger at speed, partly because the developer moved to America. Pullinger: What year was that, James? Attlee: I think it was 2013, 2014. I got a gig as writer-in-residence for Great Western Railways. For the previous 12 years, I’d been commuting into London every day from Oxford. During that time, I’d written three books on the train. When I stopped commuting I realised I wanted to write about that experience of travelling on the train, moving through space at 100mph and all of those things that happen to your eyes with blurring through velocity and your mind and body through vibration. That modernist experience - the lie that modernism tells you, that it’s fine to work in one place and live somewhere else and you’ll just zip effortlessly between them; whereas, in fact, you get completely raddled and exhausted and the trains break down. I quickly realised the only way to deal with that for me, was to treat that time I was on the train as the writer’s room that I’d never had. Pullinger: Stolen time. Attlee: Yes. I would get my cup of coffee, sit down, and that was my office for writing. Pullinger: While you were doing your day job. Attlee: While I was travelling to and from full-time day jobs in publishing, yes. When I stopped commuting, I got in touch with GWR and initiated a conversation and they made me their Writer on the Train. I started off writing a blog. I’d just jump on a train and go off and explore; I also started blogging about songs that related to trains, from the very early days of popular music through to now. An academic called Fabrizio Nevola who is interested in digital writing spotted the blog. He suggested we apply together to do a project through REACT, a Knowledge Exchange Hub that was based at the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol and funded by the AHRC. The app was based on the London to Bristol train route. As people travelled, bits of text were triggered either by the time of day or by location, sometimes by what they might be looking at out the window. It was a challenge at that time getting GPS to trigger accurately at high speeds. In prototype, Writer on the Train kind of worked but we didn’t get to the stage of releasing it unfortunately. Instead, things worked out rather differently. I got approached

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by a publisher and wrote a book based on the idea instead – it became Station to Station. Pullinger: Did the experience of working on that previous app project feed directly into the writing process for The Cartographer’s Confession? Attlee: Yes, I glimpsed a potential in the medium while feeling that we hadn’t reached it, in that particular outcome. Again, the earlier project was conceptually ambitious, even if it was technically far less sophisticated than this one: I wanted people to stick with the app over a two-week period, so I could intervene into their commuting lives on a regular basis. Pullinger: Last time we spoke you mentioned the idea of developing The Cartographer’s Confession into a book, perhaps a novel. Have you had any thoughts about that since completing the work? You’ve also just published your book Guernica: Painting the End of the World. Attlee: While waiting for Guernica to come out, and having completed the app, I found that I was still very much under the spell of my characters and felt they had more to say. I have begun to explore whether the story might be worked up into a novella; whether the photographs will remain part of it or whether they are particular to the medium of the app is one of the first questions to deal with. I like moving between different media, exploring their different potentials, bringing home what you learn in one into another while at the same time learning to leave behind what only works on a specific platform. At this moment I don’t know whether the app will be the only outcome of the project or whether there will be another, in a different medium. Pullinger: How do you feel about the idea of pursuing these steps into fiction? Attlee: It’s been exciting to move into a new field. The two projects writing the Guernica book and doing the app - were running concurrently. What I discovered was if I was engaged in writing fiction, I couldn’t drop in and out of it very easily; I had to concentrate on that. Pullinger: That’s interesting. Attlee: I don’t know; it’s probably just me. Pullinger: No, I think that’s quite a common experience. It’s to do with the business of creating a story world, which is anchored in your own imagination, as opposed to non-fiction, where you’re trying to be truthful to a set of facts. I mean, that’s a crude differentiation. Attlee: As a non-fiction practitioner, of course, I would say the boundaries between the two things are blurred. As soon as you put life on a page and edit it, it is no longer ‘real’. I tried to concentrate on Guernica

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for three days a week and on the app for two days a week, but I found it took me a day to switch from one to other and be productive. So, it wasn’t working. At a certain point I decided to concentrate on delivering my book in time for its deadline and then to work on the app full time for a couple of months once the book was handed in. It gave the app project an urgency and compression. A lot of my non-fiction, my travelbased stuff, is digressive and episodic, whereas to me at least, the app feels quite plot-driven, moving towards a dénouement. It was also a tremendous release to escape into this fictional world having spent a lot of time in research for Guernica. Key elements that make up what you call the story world of the app were things that had been on my mind for a while but that I had never found a home for. The story of how Norwegian women who had relations with German soldiers during the German occupation of Norway in the Second World War were put into a camp in 1945, and how their children were ostracised and marked by it for the rest of their lives is well known in Norway, but it’s not so well-known here. I have Norwegian family so I was familiar with it. Then there’s the non-fictional strand… Pullinger: The swallows. Attlee:… in the story, which is about bird migration but also relates to human migration. This was based on some newspaper cuttings that I came across in the back of an old book. That, again, had been on my mind: as a writer you sit up and pay attention when something falls into your lap. I had previously tried to write about these subjects both as fiction and as non-fiction and had not really been satisfied with either of them. Then there were the photographs that had been sitting in a drawer, which spoke to me in some way but which I didn’t really know what to do with. In the app these three strands suddenly came together. By using the non-fictional strand of the swallows as a kind of layer, that causes us to step back from the action of the story but somehow casts light on it, I found there was a place for all of them. Pullinger: There’s a way in which the swallow story… I don’t quite know how to express it. It takes you up out of this fictional space into other territory. As you say, it’s an additional layer; it casts a different light on what’s going on in the more plot-driven, fictional story. Attlee: There are three levels. There’s a kind of birds’ eye view. There are people on the ground. Then there’s below the surface of the water, which is like the unconscious. It’s almost like different layers in the brain, or in the consciousness of the city.

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Pullinger: There’s also the story and the map of the story, and the way that they fit together. That’s quite literal, obviously, in the app; you reach the pin in the map, and then you get more of the story. That’s a satisfying thing. Attlee: Yes. There’s also an illustrative map by Grace Attlee and James Brocklehurst that builds up as you progress through the story. There is an autobiographical element to all of this in the fact that I worked in a map shop myself, at a formative time in my life. Pullinger: Yes, the moment when the reader ends up in front of the map shop is a very nice moment in the piece. Attlee: There’s a line in the story, where the proprietor of the map shop says that people see themselves now as a blue dot on a screen. They’re never lost but they don’t know where they are. When you see that blue dot on the screen and you’re zoomed in, you see your immediate surroundings and the name of the street that’s immediately on the left without a sense of where you are in the larger city. I think people used to using maps, paper maps, have a slightly better sense of where they are. It’s not that I’m saying that maps were better, but they provided a different perception of the world. This shift— and I have to say I can’t remember when I last used a paper map— is part of what I wanted to explore. Pullinger: I could easily equally imagine these different layers working on the page in the novella you’re planning. Attlee: I think what we’d lose is the immediacy of actually being present in the location. And we’d lose the framing device, the short film at the beginning of the app, of a woman who tells the story of why she is collecting these materials. Pullinger: One of the questions I had is about the end of The Cartographer’s Confession. I think the structure of a video followed by the three chapters works well. But I wondered why you didn’t return to the film at the end of the work overall. It’s kind of not a framing device, because it’s a… Attlee: Yes, the other side of the frame is missing. That’s interesting. At the very end there’s a kind of shift in the story from the narrator talking about what happened, to you actually being in the story. The story busts out of the frame. Maybe that’s why the other side of the frame has fallen off, because it’s exploded out of the constraint of that device. I’m not sure I would use a framing structure in a book.

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Pullinger: You were writing in the voice of a character, and that is not something one does in non-fiction explicitly. How did you find that? Attlee: I enjoyed it. I found it particularly interesting working with the actors Saul Jaffe and Emily Woof; during the process of recording it became clear that some things that work on the page don’t work so well when spoken. Actors are very used to that; they just say, “Oh, can I say it this way, or that way?” I was re-writing while we were in the studio, in response to the actor’s voice. I really enjoyed working with Jay Auborn at DBS Studios in Bristol, who created the 3-D soundscapes and the sound effects for the app. Pullinger: There was one stage when I was sure that there was a horse there beside me. That was in Waterloo Place, wasn’t it? I kept turning… Attlee: Yes, that would have been the 3D sound recordings, binaural recordings, an area Jay is very expert in. Pullinger: Did he mix the sound as well? Mix the music into the sound effects? Attlee: Yes. Pullinger: That also works really well. Attlee: Exactly. There’s one track that is an extended mix. As you’re moving from one location to another there’s a constantly evolving backing track; and it incorporates sounds and individual elements from the music. Pullinger: Walking music. Attlee: Of course, it was a particular joy for me to be able to work on the soundtrack to the app, using music I’ve created with friends under the name ‘The Night Sky’. Delays in my schedule because of the publication deadline of my book meant the sound artist I had intended to collaborate with had to move on to another project. Emma asked whether I might have any of my own music that we could use. I sent her four songs that we’d been working on and Emma suggested we could use instrumental versions of them. I realised, of course, when we took out the vocal line we would need an instrument to carry the melody. The trumpet is an instrument I particularly like. Jay knew a session trumpet and flugelhorn player in Bristol called Jonny Bruce. He came in for a day, with his horns and all his mutes. He listened to the tracks and got it straight away and said, “OK, I can do this one like Dizzy, or I can do it like Miles.” It happened that the atmosphere of the music that I already had anyway was this kind of “noir-ish” sort of ’40s, ’50s feel, which fitted with the atmosphere of the writing very well.

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Pullinger: That’s fantastic serendipity, isn’t it? Attlee: It is. There was a lot of serendipity going on, and a lot of Emma being very quick on her feet to adapt to what was going down. Pullinger: To experience The Cartographer’s Confession properly takes between three and four hours. Attlee: Yes, if you do it in one hit. It’s like reading a short book. Pullinger: That’s a large undertaking. Attlee: It’s a commitment. Pullinger: I think that it is a real achievement to have pulled together such a large-scale piece – the music, the tech, the photographs, the writing, the film – within the scope of the commission. Attlee: Thank you. This is where the role of the producer is also key, managing all these disparate elements and making them work together. If there’s any innovation in the work, it’s not so much to do with technology as with the story’s multi-layered complexity. I want to see if it works, if people are prepared to think, “Well, I’ll do one chapter at a time, on different days”, much as you would when reading a book or following long-form drama on TV. The app keeps your place; you don’t lose anything if you decide to put it down for a few hours or days. Everything that you’ve seen already is stored on the chronology page, so that you can go back to it if you need to check, “Well, who was that character? How did that photo look again?” Pullinger: When you were testing the app, did you do a paper version first? Attlee: I sent texts to Emma and at a certain point she had to draw up the plans of the design for the developer, Calvium. But the very earliest testing we did was with sound files. I recorded myself on my phone reading the parts, then shared the files with Emma. We went out and tried them on the ground. Pullinger: You had sound files in your phone and you wandered around with Emma, listening? Attlee: Yes, checking out the location and asking, “Will this work?” I don’t know how many expeditions we went on into London. Some of them were to locations that didn’t make it into the final app. Pullinger: The river locations work very well, partly because the Thames in London is such an extraordinary space in its own right. When you’re there you feel these layers and layers of history below, above and beneath the mud.

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Attlee: I’ve always loved that — walking beside the river or on the foreshore at low tide. Despite all the continual redevelopment along its banks the Thames has a timeless quality. All the action in the story happens within walking distance of the water. Despite a few false starts and technical challenges, the process of making the app has been very enjoyable — probably because I’ve wanted to write a sustained piece about London for a long time. Author: James Attlee Producer, experience design: Emma Whittaker Graphic design, visual interface design: James Brocklehurst Illustrations: Grace Attlee and James Brocklehurst App development: Calvium Actor, playing Catriona Schilling: Emily Woof Actor, playing Thomas Andersen, Hans, Benny and Ellen: Saul Jaffe Video production, editor: Screenology, Joe Auborn Assistant editor: Spencer Ellis Camera operator: Screenology, Joe Auborn Camera assistant: Hayden Brown Wildlife recording: Joe Auborn, Jay Auborn Sound design, audio production: Jay Auborn, dBs Music Bristol Sound production team: dBs Music Bristol, Tobias Crane, Leonardo Santos, Charlotte Hughes, Suvi-Eeva Aeikaes, Joseph Yorke-Onions, Tugkan Mutlu Music: The Night Sky, all tunes, Attlee/Nixon, featuring James Attlee, electric guitars, synthesiser, Ian Nixon, upright bass, acoustic and electric guitar, Josefin Meijer, whistling. With special guests, Jonny Bruce, trumpet and flugelhorn and Temitope Edwards, drums. Recorded at DBs Music Bristol, Robin Christensen-Marriott Productions and 101 Studio, Oxford. The soundtrack plus additional music from The Night Sky is available here: https://thenightsky1.bandcamp.com.

Where I’m Coming from: Studying the Novelty of Immersive Algorithms Michael Marcinkowski

Studying works of ambient literature presents a unique challenge. These are works which, by their nature, offer unique experiences to each reader. While the “text” of something like a traditional book or a movie is relatively bounded—it is easy to point to the “thing” itself of the work, be it the pages of the book or film of a movie—these are works which extend beyond any central locus of the application or text, reaching outward to include the particular world within which the reader is situated as part of the work itself. These are works which are different with each reading, with each new situation within which they are encountered offering its own interpretive matrix. The immediacy of the works, and the novelty that each situation brings for readers, is the central thematic for the research presented in this chapter: how do these works come to be integrated with and be implicated by the situated experience of readers in world? How is it possible to speak about works which are always changing, always shifting, and are always dependent on the particular conditions brought to them by diverse groups of readers? Part user study, part literary analysis, the methodological perspective described here seeks to give a

M. Marcinkowski (B) Centre for English Language and Foundation Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_10

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common voice to the various and multiple implications of what ambient literature can be. As has already been introduced in earlier chapters, the Ambient Literature project was structured around three commissioned works of ambient literature developed specifically for the project. These three works, Breathe by Kate Pullinger, It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman, and The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee, provide the setting for our analysis. Observing and interviewing readers of these three works, it became possible to begin to sketch out a rough outline of what the experience of these novel pieces of electronic literature looks like and how common themes can be located within these three radically different works. What this chapter will do is introduce the research challenges posed by these works of ambient literature, particularly as they offer experiences to readers that are largely unique to each individual reader and reading. Taking a closer look at this problem not only offers some hints toward a way forward for the study of situated literature, but also elucidates some key aspects that are characteristic of these works. Following this, we introduce the theoretical and analytic approach that has been used to guide our work. Drawing from the uses of ethnomethodology in human– computer interaction and adjacent uses of actor–network theory in literary studies, our hybrid approach is discussed and our specific methodology for this work is detailed. While the results of this research are incorporated throughout this book, this chapter provides an opportunity to look more closely at the methods used and provide an in-depth account of the insights drawn from this research in one particular theme—the immersive nature of algorithms—that cuts across all three of these very different works. From this, several concrete observations about the function of these works will be presented.

The Problem of the Unreadable Text Let’s start with an example. As detailed in Chapter One, Kate Pullinger’s Breathe is a short story length piece of writing which generates a narrative text that is adapted to the current situation of the reader. In addition to the APIs queried, it also makes use of the time reported by the device and phone’s camera to insert images of the reader’s surroundings into the experience. The book haunts readers with references to the shops, cafes, transit stations, schools, and streets that are around them. The

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time of day, the season, and the weather resonate between the reader and text. Even beyond this, the text of the book is not just read, but interacted with. Text erases itself; readers’ swipes leave dark smudges on the screen instead of flipping pages, uncovering hidden text; disembodied voices thunder across the virtual page, interrupting the reader and text overlays are revealed as readers tilt the phone. In this, the book ebbs and flows against the readers situated experience, working against the learned practice of reading while also linking the reading of the text to their wider world. The book is personal in that it addresses individual habits of reading, speaking to the locations and ambience of where it is read. What this comes to mean, of course, is that for each reader, Breathe constructs a personalized version of an ultimately unreadable text: there is no single experience that is shared among readers. It is a literary work which, in its totality, exists only in a virtual space bounded by databases and the algorithms that are used to query them. The text as presented to the reader is constructed by the web application to fit their own particular circumstances and exists only there in that viewing. Outside of the default placeholders inserted for readers who are unwilling to give the web app access to their phone’s location or camera, there is no generic text. To fully experience the text, a reader would have to read it in every location on the globe, at every time of day, in all kinds of weather, and across seasons. Even this absurd level of commitment to the work would not be enough to gain access to the totality of the materials of the work. Drawing from the constantly updating databases used by Google to help users find local shops and restaurants, the locational content of Breathe is drawn from an ever-changing array of locations and place names. If the pizza shop around the corner goes out of business, a reader’s experience of Breathe, even if read in the same location, in the same weather, in the same season, and at the exact same time of day, changes. It is a text that is itself embedded within the living world, subject to its changing conditions. As a singular thing, it remains unreadable. As a piece of technology, the web app that makes Breathe possible relies on a number of algorithmic processes in order to take input from a smartphone’s various sensors (here, mainly GPS, time, and physical orientation) and refactor them toward creating the situated narrative presented. In this, the function of Breathe can be understood by the way that the algorithms of the web app mediate between the situation of the user and the information contained in databases accessed through API queries. The personalization and variability of the text relies on these algorithms being

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able to link the situation of the reader with the locational data available in remote databases. The web app itself is positioned as the link between the reader and the world. The other two commissions present a similar paradigm, substituting physical locations for databases in this regard. Instead of the app mediating between the reader and the world as it is represented in a database, the apps in these cases mediate between the reader and the world as it is physically present. For Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then, the app directs readers through urban environments, encouraging them to make decisions at certain points about where to go or what to look at, and guiding readers along a series of invisible waypoints. The places that the reader chooses as part of the work and thus what they see and experience is dependent on the “database” of the world that is around them. Similarly, Attlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession opens the direct indexicality between the text and the locations visited by readers to the variances of the city: crowds, buskers, and weather conditions all swirl around the reader in a unique confluence, coloring the atmosphere of the story. Where one reader encounters the peaceful contemplation of the Thames on a quiet, grey Monday morning, another has to fight their way through throngs of tourists on a bright Saturday afternoon. For these two, as the smartphone applications direct readers around cities, they welcome in the happenstance of serendipitous encounters, offering readers the opportunity to engage with and see the urban landscape as it unfolds for them personally.1 Where Breathe uses algorithms to focus on information about the world around a reader, It Must Have Been Dark by Then and The Cartographer’s Confession make use of algorithmic processes to take the reader out into the wilds of the world. In each work, there is a sense that each reader has access to only one version of the work as it might exist. Placing the lived environment within which they are experienced at the center, rather than the periphery of these works, there is no single text to subject to a close reading. Instead there are what can be considered multiple canonical experiences of each of these works, each generated by the specific experience of each reader. As Chapter One details, these are not the first works to confront these issues, but, for us, they provide unique examples of works that embrace this difficulty as a matter of the function of the work itself. If there is a formal claim to be made about a genre of ambient literature, it is this: that there is a systematic openness of these works to the situation of the reader that is leveraged as part of the thematic of the work itself.

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This fundamental variability present in the works raises questions about how these works are experienced by audiences, and methodological questions about how we, as researchers, should read these works and the settings within which they are embedded. In looking to understand works which rely so much on the particular individual experience and individual subjective position of each reader, how should these works, both in their individual thematic and as a formal genre as a whole, be understood? Within this variability of experience, how can we understand how audiences receive and understand these works? Our work here aims toward a diagnosis of the various and sometime surprising elements that come into these works and how they are gathered together by readers over the course of their experience of the works. In this, we want to trace the sociotechnical networks that make (and are made by) these works, while at the same time analyzing the particularly meaningful moments that come to be enmeshed in these networks as works of literature. That is, while there is a firm eye toward the material and really existing elements of these works (the conditions of use, user experience, and practical lessons for future development), there is a nevertheless present the question brought by the humanities sui generis: that of how these materials are given value, and in what way.

There Is a Way Out! While these works present a particular challenge to any systematic account, there is a long history of research which tries to understand readers and reading. This ranges from approaches like reader response theory (Tompkins 1980), reception theory (Holub 2013), and the sociological analysis of reading (Radway 1984) to contemporary work in the area of the digital humanities (Underwood 2017) or cognitive approaches to study of literature (Kuzmicová 2013; Bell et al. 2018). Beyond this question of readers, there is an even longer tradition examining the question of textual interpretation, as exemplified with approaches such as hermeneutics (Gadamer 2004), close reading (Culler 2010; Gallop 2007), or literary deconstruction (Culler 2008), to name a few examples. Particularly for works which come to be entangled in wider cultural forms, thematics from new historicism (Veeser 2013; Greenblatt 1988) and cultural studies (Johnson 1986) can be seen as casting a long shadow into how a text comes to be understood. Performance studies have for years been developing methods for understanding the kind of one off

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experience of live works (Conquergood 2002). For works of ambient literature, beyond just this question of reading, what it means for readers to not just be reading but to be interacting with mobile systems of computing in the wild raises a whole other set of challenges that have been at play in human–computer interaction studies for over 25 years (Hollan et al. 2000; Kaptelinin et al. 2003; Dourish 2004). Particularly, it is in the connection between ambient literature and ubiquitous computing (Dovey 2016)—each engaging a user/reader as they are situated within the world—that a firm methodological direction begins to be developed. The idea and study of ubiquitous computing was historically born out of concerns for the ways in which computing was slowly coming to be integrated into a wider variety of human activities, expanding an initially limited sphere of concern in the workplace to come to include a wider range of human interactions.2 In particular, in its efforts to seamlessly integrate computing in the lives of users (Weiser 1991), the field of ubiquitous computing came to rely on an expanding set of techniques to understand how computer systems could work as part of everyday human activities rather than just as something that sat on a desktop, away from the rest of our lives. Central to the various approaches developed to study the possibility of the integration of ubiquitous systems into users lives came to be methods which relied on participatory, ethnographic, and more generally sociological and anthropological perspectives in order to gain insight into the settings into which these systems would be integrated, in both a formative and summative manner. The study of systems of ubiquitous computing came to be less about the simple fact of the function of the technology itself and more about the broader social conditions within which the technologies exist. This turn toward a sociological perspective is not limited to studies of human–computer interaction, with a different mode of sociological research coming to be central to the development of the digital humanities as well. There, the application of digital methods to questions posed by various fields within the humanities developed out of traditions of predigital sociologically founded humanities research (Underwood 2017), such as Radway’s (1984) study of audiences for romance novels. For the digital humanities, literary questions come to be answered through an analysis of data derived from individual works, corpuses of texts, or other available data surrounding literary production and consumption. While the digital humanities find their basis (unsurprisingly) in a more quantitative and top-down thread of sociology, human–computer

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interaction looked toward a more qualitative and bottom up version of sociological practice. For HCI and its focus on the question of how to design technologies, the central thematic focused on how social structures are produced and maintained, while for literary analysis there was (not surprisingly) a focus on the identification of existing social patterns. No matter the difference, in each, there is a recognition that digital systems have the potential to engage with social systems in novel ways, either as a matter of impact or analysis. For thinking about ambient literature and questions of meaning and impact, there needs to be particular attention to the ways that these works are activated within a wider context of social, material, and informational interactions. These are works which are not simply received by readers, but are made through their engagement with the contexts within which readers are entangled. In this, the works themselves reflect a particular sociological perspective shared with approaches such as ethnomethodology (Garfinkel 1967) and actor–network theory (Law and Hassard 1999). Contrasting with other veins of sociological theory which posit some kind of top-down social force or pressures, these approaches put forward a view of social interaction which considers the particular production of society as occurring at the site of each individual interaction (Latour 2005). Like the social assemblages of Manuel Delanda (2006), there is no essence which guides a particular social or material formulation, only a sense of becoming.3 Works of ambient literature function in just such a way: they are activated by the aggregation of the various contexts and components that make up the work. So, instead of being concerned with the analysis of the literary object itself (as in the case of a book or application) or the state of the reader (as in the case of cognitive or psychological accounts of reading), the study of ambient literature is open to a wider and more diverse scope and scale of analysis. What might be included or not in the analysis of works of ambient literature remains undetermined. While this chapter might offer some insight into one possible direction for analysis, the nature of these works leaves open the possibility for more to be included. The question for ambient literature is how these works are, both thematically and technologically, embedded within larger contextual networks. This consideration includes both what is immediately present in the works (the locations, technical networks, and the situation of the reader writ large) and what is not immediately present in the works

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(the cultural milieu, wider literary and media landscapes, and so on). Of course, these two poles (the immediate and the deferred) are not analytically distinguishable here due to the simple fact that works of ambient literature actively work to collapse the distances separating the work, the reader, and the world at large from a number of perspectives.4 In the field of human–computer interaction research, this confluence of form, function, and setting has been the focus of attention for some time now. Driven by the increasing pervasiveness of computing (largely starting with the integration of computer into work processes and personal computing of the 1980s [Carroll 1997; Grudin 1990]), HCI developed methods for studying the ways in which computer interactions were embedded within larger social fields. In particular, through the use of design probes (Boehner et al. 2007; Gaver et al. 2004), participatory design methods (Kensing and Blomberg 1998), and ethnographic inquiry (Suchman 2006; Dourish 2006; Crabtree et al. 2009), HCI was able examine the meaningful implications of computing as it intersects with human and social practices. More than simply opening up the analysis of computing to quantitative benchmarks, the field of HCI began to include a qualitative analysis of the more uniquely human and cultural aspects of computing.5 For us, with our attention toward understanding the emergent meanings that are developed through readers’ experiences of these works and developing a sense of what materials are brought into the works, ethnomethodology offers a powerful perspective. Within HCI (Dourish and Button 1998; Button and Dourish 1996), the purpose of ethnomethodology has been to develop an understanding how the ways in which users create technological interactions through use, focusing on the work required for interactions to be intelligible; [E]thnomethodology turned its analytic attention to the ways in which everyday social action was achieved, looking directly within the circumstances of action for evidence of the methods by which individuals achieved precisely the stable social order that traditional sociology had defined by theoretical fiat. (Dourish and Button 1998, 400)

Following ethnomethodology’s bottom up approach to social understanding (as above), in HCI, ethnomethodologically derived perspectives sought to understand how computer artefacts played a role in the instantiation of social interactions.6

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In doing this, ethnomethodology works against a traditional socialtheoretical framing of action, relocating “practical decision making to a realm of relevantly invoked situated actions in local circumstances” (Dourish and Button 1998, 406). In this a-theoretical perspective, ethnomethodology finds much in common with grounded theory (Glaser and Strauss 2009), analytic induction (Robinson 1951; Hammersley 2010), and other methods of analysis which look to examine the phenomena in question without the interference (or help) of an explicit theoretical framing. Either because no existing theoretical frame is available or there is a wish to turn away from previous approaches, such a-theoretical accounts offer a chance to approach the phenomena on its own terms and to follow the arteries of influence present in any situation. For ambient literature, this open account of what might be included under the purview of analysis highlights the similarity of our approach with that of actor–network theory and the work of Bruno Latour more specifically. The overall thematic of all these various approaches is summarized by Latour (2005) when he discusses the role of individual actors within a situation, saying that; it is no longer enough to limit actors to the role of informers offering cases of some well-known types. You have to grant them back the ability to make up their own theories of what the social is made of. Your task is no longer to impose some order, to limit the range of acceptable entities, to teach actors what they are, or to add some reflexivity to their blind practice. Using a slogan from [actor-network theory], you have ‘to follow the actors themselves’, that is try to catch up with their often wild innovations in order to learn from them what the collective existence has become in their hands, which methods they have elaborated to make it fit together, which accounts could best define the new associations that they have been forced to establish. (11–12)

For us, this research is structured so as to follow the experience of readers and to trace the ways in which they come to understand the works, make sense of their function, and engage with the novel forms that they offer. In its emphasis on the ground-up analysis and attention to the ways in which meaning comes to be constructed by individuals, the kind of hybrid ethnomethodological perspective taken here offers an opportunity for a close examination of the experience of ambient literature. After all, as ambient literature is itself predicated on this kind of openness to the environment in which any number of materials might be brought into

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the experience, it becomes necessary to be able to trace out the variety of materials and situations that contribute to its function. As earlier chapters point out, what might come to be included in the experience of a work of ambient literature is not limited by the intentions or designs of the author, but is open to the influence of the reader and the wider unpredictability of the world at large. By attending to works of ambient literature through this kind of ethnomethodological perspective borrowed from HCI, it becomes possible to begin to establish some common basis for understanding the variety of experiences reported by individual readers and across various works. What comes to be the foundational question for understanding these works is how the various and unique aspects of these works are brought together through the experience of the reader and how the reader is able to play a part in enacting these literary works. By tracing the networks that constitute individual reader’s experiences, it becomes possible to lay out a perspective on the works and ambient literature in general that is able to provide a coherent reading of these uniquely structured and challenging works.

The Specificity of Our Method As a program of practice-led research, we worked closely with the three authors commissioned to create these works of ambient literature, supporting their work with the development teams from Calvium Ltd. and Editions at Play.7 Starting from project briefs and discussions about the aims of the project, the authors developed works which utilised the affordances of contemporary smartphones in order to create situated literary experiences. Throughout the process of writing and development, the research team followed the process of progress of each of the commissioned pieces and responded to early versions and prototypes. Starting with early versions meant to test and debug systems, our readings of the works took place over a period of months, reading each work multiple times, in multiple locations. In this, we were able to experience at first-hand the multiplicities engaged by the texts. These readings provided the basis for beginning to understand these works while developing ideas of how others might as well. Once completed, the works were made publicly available and readers were interviewed about their experiences. Interviews with participants were conducted either immediately after their experience of the work (as in the case with It Must Have Been

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Dark by Then, which was made available through a series of events) or up to several days after participants experienced the work. Starting from a basic set of questions around the experience of situated literature, interview guides were developed for each of the commissions and the semi-structured interviews were conducted either in person, on the telephone, or over Skype. A self-selecting group, about half of the participants interviewed had a personal interest and previous experience with some forms of new media, while the other half were simply curious about trying out these novel literary works. The three commissions differed dramatically in how they function and our approach to interviewing participants about their experience had to be modified accordingly. It Must Have Been Dark by Then was run as an event and made available to readers at specific times, with readers coming to a predetermined location in order to experience the work. In this, the paratext of the work came to include a kind of “front of the house” as readers were given headphones, the book, instructions, and sent out to do the reading. As a stand alone smartphone app, The Cartographer’s Confession was a much more self contained experience, allowing readers to download the app and visit the necessary locations around London at their leisure. Similarly, designed to be read at home, Breathe allowed readers to access the work at any time. Given the diversity of the works, different methods for audience investigation were necessary for each. For It Must Have Been Dark by Then, it was possible to not only interview participants, but also to observe them as they explored the work. Readers of Breathe, encouraged to read the work in the comfort of their own home, were given several prompts to answer following their reading as a form of a diary exercise to spur immediate reflection. Their answers to these prompts formed part of later interviews, conducted on the telephone or over Skype. The Cartographer’s Confession, a work which led readers across London over several hours, allowed readers to experience the work over an extended period, and readers were interviewed remotely either while still in the process of reading the work or having finished it. In each case, interviews with participants focused on a kind of retrospective account of their experience, as they remembered it. Relying on audience’s recollections allowed for an analysis of their account of the settings and situations of the experience of the work, but avoided any kind of armchair psychologizing about the cognitive implications of the works, even as the interviews addressed questions of immersion, attention,

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and sensory experience. The intention behind this kind of methodology, which focused on a retrospective account of readers’ experience of the works, was to gain insight into the broader cultural effect of these works, as they are integrated into the lives of readers and in their memory, not an exact account of participants’ experiences. Focusing on eliciting specific recollections about their time with the works, the interviews asked participants to reflect on their own experience of the work rather than the work in general or any kind of critical appraisal. The multiplicity of the works came to be addressed through an attention to the moments in which the works, whatever they come to include, are made intelligible to readers. Like the kind of memory reconstruction present in the title of Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then, this research was based on a reconstructed retrospective of the impact of these works and traced out how participants specific engagements with the works led to the development of some thematic experience. The intentions of the authors and programmers were discarded in favor of impact left by the works themselves as they are out in the world. Interviews with participants were audio recorded and transcribed. In total, we conducted interviews with 48 readers, generating over 12 hours of recorded conversations (Marcinkowski and Spencer 2018). Interviews were coded according to an open coding scheme, out of which several themes were developed. Guided by an ethnomethodological attention to the development of the experience of the works, this coding generated and responded to several of the thematics developed throughout this book, including clusters focusing on ideas of attention, immersion, and the transformative and political potential of these kinds of works. Key to the analysis of readers’ experience was that these were not wholly naturalistic conditions. These works were made, distributed and largely read as part of an academic project. As such, participants experiences needed to be read in this fashion, with many participants recruited through the use of materials which identified the research implications of these three works. With all this in mind, the primary method used as part of the ambient literature project might best be simply characterized as a kind of reading. Through our own reading of the works themselves to our “reading” of the experiences of participants recruited to take part in our research, there was, in the classical model of a hermeneutics of textual interpretation, a

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movement back and forth between what one particular passage, experience, or reading might offer and the larger message being developed. As has been detailed elsewhere (Marcinkowski 2018), the empirical work of the ambient literature research project is a kind of distant reading of readers.

What They Saw Our interviews with participants provided a wealth of details about their experiences of the works. Each reader had their own story to tell about the works: what they saw, where they read them, the ways that the works connected with their lives or what was going on around. Each reader brought their own experience to the work, their own understanding of new media forms, and their own particular familiarity with interactive paradigms and technological platforms. The uniqueness and specificity of these experiences stemmed not just from the variety of situations in which the works could be experienced, but the variety of previous experiences that readers brought with them to the works. For some readers, these works followed along trajectories with which they were familiar, likening them to previous works of interactive fiction or locative narratives that they already knew. For others, these works were linked to more traditional media forms: books, audio books, ebooks. What is telling about our participants, either in their self-selection for participating in these kinds of experiences, was a familiarity with mobile computing of some form. The contemporary ubiquity of smartphones provided a backdrop and starting point for participants in locating these works. For our readers, the smartphone and the overarching paradigm of computing remained a touchstone for how they understood the works and what they expected out of them. Either cued by knowing that these works were part of a research project or by the works themselves, readers drew connections between the new media forms being experienced and the wider scale forward push of technology in general. In this, what came to be evident for the participants that we interviewed was the link between the particulars of their experiences of these works, and a broader conception of the possibilities of technology. The immediacy of their lives and its connection to a global network came to be highlighted in their experience in a particular and telling way. This idea, that these works engage an experience of the world at both a particular and more general level, will guide this present discussion.

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Building out the methodological perspective developed in this chapter, we want to explore how a study of a variety of participants’ experiences, grounded within particular and personal situations, can point toward a wider consideration of this form of novel digital media. By tracing out a specific network of these various experiences, it becomes possible to illustrate how this methodological approach of focusing on the particulars of participants’ experiences can serve to ground not only sociotechnical insight into the uses of digital media, but also the development of a literary thematic.

The Occurrence of the Thing An analysis of the observations and interviews recorded with participants after their experience of the works reinforces the premise that began this chapter: that the works encourage an idiosyncratic reading and that readers’ experience of the works is dependent on the personal and situational conditions under which they are received. For readers, the works came to be reflected by the settings and moments within which they were read. While the texts that thread through these experiences remained the same, the unique settings under which the works were read came to be the focal point of readers’ experiences. Of the three works, it was Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then that illustrates this most directly. In encouraging readers to chart their own course through urban environments, it is a piece during which the most can happen. While following along a guided narration, readers are given the freedom—and even encouraged—to consider the diversity of the world that surrounds them. The text of the work is opened up by the objects and ideas encountered as they progress through the work. For readers, the experience extends outwardly from the initial moment of being given the app, book, and headphones that make up the explicitly authored part of the experience. By following the thread of the narrative, readers are offered a momentary glimpse into the shifting backdrop of the city. Reading the work through the eyes of the participants’ interviews, what was immediately apparent is the variety of things encountered in the work, most of which have only a tangential, if any, connection to the work itself. In describing their experience of the work, these are a few of the places, names, objects, and ideas mentioned by participants;

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ammonite, anthropocene, apps, aquifers, ash, audio books, audio guides, automatic doors, bags, barbed wire fences, barriers, belongings, benchs, bikes, bins, binaural microphones, Camden Palais, Camley Street, canals, car parks, cars, cemeteries, chapters, Charing Cross Road, chords, churches, Dahara, “danger of death” signs, dead ends, desolate wastelands, directions, documentaries, dogs, doors, dots, ebooks, earphones, electrical installations, environments, estates, Euston Station, evacuations, experimental theatre, Facebook, feathers, fences, five dusters hanging from a washing line, floods, flowers, flying ants, gadgets, gangs of youths, gardens, gated estates, gay boutiques, Google Maps, graffiti, Grenfell Tower, half-hearted smiles, Harry Potter, heads, headphones, headset, heavy bags, homes, hospital cemeteries, indigenous peoples, institutions, instructions, iPhones, Israel, Japanese restaurant, JK Rowling, journals, journeys, junctions, kamikaze cyclists, kids, King’s Cross, Korea, ladies, lady’s calves, land, landmarks, landscapes, late modernism, Latvia, levies, libraries, Mabledon Place, mangroves, manholes, maps, Mary Wollstonecraft, materials, mental games, mental landscapes, narrative, narrow strips along the road, natural disasters, nature, noise, notebooks, offices, pages, parks, The Partition of India, paths, paving stones, pedestrians, people, performances, psychogeography, recovery centers, red buildings, refugees, residential areas, Riga, rising waters, rivers, roads, roadwork, rubble, Russia, sahara, sailing ship tattoos, sand, sand dunes, scarfs, schools, screens, security guards, Shanghai, Sherlock Holmes, shoulders, St Pancras Station, stats, steps, sticks, stories, structures, Sudan, tech performances, technology, The British Library, theaters, time, tones, tourists, tracing paper, trackes, trails, trains, travellers, treasure hunts, trees, trucks, Tunisia, upstream, vehicles, vents, video games, virtual reality, voices, walking areas, walking tours, walls, Warrington Crescent, watches, water, water fountains, water towers, wheelchairs, William Godwin, wind, window cleaners, windows, wood, wooden structures, YMCA.

The experience of the work becomes a catalogue of current events, personal histories, and literary connections. Passerbys, buildings, genres of art, and the ordinary objects of the urban environment come to play a part in readers’ recollections. Some items mentioned, like Sudan or water or wooden structures, have some direct connection to the work, while most others do not outside of the individual experience of the work. By encountering a smattering of these objects, readers worked their way through the piece, drawing meaning from the objects that surround them

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as much as the work itself. It Must Have Been Dark by Then can be seen to gather up objects into purview as readers move the work across the city and as it is reflected in their experiences and the knowledge that individual readers bring to it. As a work that is sited, but not specifically located, it opens itself up to a wide span of possible influences. As readers moved through the city, the narrative thread of the work (the narration, the text of the work, the soundtrack) organizes these various possibilities along a singular tableau. It builds the experience of the work with the materials of individual experience, ordering them into a cohesive form. This contrasts with the experience of something like The Cartographer’s Confession, which is similar to It Must Have Been Dark by Then in that it takes readers across the city, but it does so in a much more site specific way, leading them to pre-selected locations corresponding to the historical narrative that it delivers. In this, it does not draw together a vast panoply of objects, but works the situation of the present experience of locations against the narrative taking place 60 or so years earlier. It links the experience of the work to a kind of located cultural history, something that is evident in the piece’s frequent use of monuments to the past as an orienting mechanism. The objects of the landscape of the piece took on a different sense of import, with the possibilities of the variety of experience arriving differently than in It Must Have Been Dark by Then. Another amazing moment that I had was walking around the corner into Borough Market, looking at the photograph of the market place in the, I guess the early ‘50s or late 1940s, whenever the picture was taken. There is a church spire in the back of the photograph in the piece on the phone and I saw something that looked exactly like the same view, but instead of the church spire, The Shard was there instead, in exactly the same place in the frame. You suddenly had this really amazing moment of historical change, where the church spire had gone, and The Shard had replaced it. That made you think a lot about passing time and the way the city changes, the way the city develops, the way the city is always changing. The way those textures and details of the city from history are still present in our lives and seeing them through the eyes of the narrator made them suddenly more present to you.

The contemporary cultural moment characterized by the Shard came to be contrasted with previous climates such as those represented by the spire of a church.

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This sense of the story taking place within a living city which swirls around the reader both added to and distracted from the narrative at hand; I was immersed in the story, even though, in general, I find the whole process of being out in the city itself very absorbing, because in London, well, like most big cities, there’s so much going on, and so much to look at, that sometimes, the balance between actually listening to the story and experiencing the story, and looking at that very strange person who’s across the street, or that altercation that’s happening 50m in front of you, pulls you out of the story, distracts you from the story, but I did think that it managed to keep my attention for the most part.

For readers of these works, the ways that the works come to be ingrained within their daily lives became a central concern for how to understand their experience of them. They are works which ask something different from readers than do traditional media. Unlike books or movies or theatre, these works of ambient literature are not passive pieces set out to be attended to. On the other end of the spectrum, however, they are not really interactive in the sense of a video game or participatory theatre piece. The engagement they require is different from traditional literature, with the works requiring that they be let into the lives of readers in unique ways, but they are not wholly interactive. The experience of the works comes to be coupled with a wider span of social and cultural practices as they respond to the conditions within which they are embedded. Readers’ experiences of the works come to rely on much more than the work itself. The Cartographer’s Confession, for instance, as a sprawling piece that has readers spending hours traversing London, readers not only had to rely on the infrastructure of the city—the sidewalks, the traffic lights, the movements of crowds, the telephony data networks, systems of public transit (a fuller account can be found in Chapter One)—but they also needed to be able to mark out the time and ability to undertake such a piece. They needed to be in the city of London; they needed to the able to move not insignificant distances; they needed the time to be able to focus on a work which can take more than five hours; they needed a phone battery to sustain the operation of the app; and so on. They contended with weather, crowds, fatigue, family obligations, work schedules, protest marches, and other factors in order to complete the work. Readers’ reports of how their experience of The Cartographer’s Confession

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came to be as much about the social infrastructures supporting the work as they were about the work itself. The experience of “reading” the work was bound up with a “reading” of social and technological forms more generally. Similarly, with It Must Have Been Dark by Then, even as it was set within a quasi-theatre structure in which participants booked a place and arrived at a given time for what they knew would be a roughly hour long experience, various other social and cultural networks were activated in the course of the work. Like The Cartographer’s Confession, questions of the physical requirements of moving around the city, weather, phone batteries, and so on all played a part in the experience. Even the social conventions surrounding performances or theatre came into play, with many of our participants turning up It Must Have Been Dark by Then in pairs or groups, only to be told that it is an experience to be done independently, with each person needing to be free to make their own choices. Breathe, as a work that was designed to be read at home, also illustrated this connection between the works and a broader social field. This came not just in the way that, as a piece, it drew on a reader’s surroundings, but more importantly, the ways that the performance of the work relied on and disrupted regular reading practices. Setting the task to the reader to sit and read the work at home, many readers read the work where they would normally read, in their favorite reading chair, etc. Reading on their phone, however, some participants reported being interrupted by receiving notifications and messages. For some readers, responding to concerns regarding privacy and surveillance, the experience was dramatically altered by their decision to not allow the piece access to their phone’s location. That is, the broader contemporary concern over the role of technology in our lives and the influence that large companies have comes to implicate the experience. For some readers, this kind of caution extended to the implications of the work itself, with the haunting aspects of the narrative coming to be tied into concerns over surveillance and privacy. At all turns, these works are entangled with networks of objects which implicate and shape the experience of the work. The meanings of the works are not created in a vacuum, but are embedded within wider social and cultural structures which play a role in making the works possible and meaningful. The variousness that is possible in the experience of the works is consolidated around the material formations that become present with the audience engagement with the work. Audiences come to the works

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not as already completed things, but through their experience of them. Beyond a standard hermeneutics of literary interpretation in which the meaning of a work is shaped by the background of experience brought to it by the reader, the meanings of these works are not brought forward until they are in place. These works, as much as they can be read at texts on the page, are not fully there until they are brought into contact with the lived experience of the reader, until they are set next to the difficulties of navigating crowded streets, the fears of mass surveillance, or the shifting forms of the city. It is this connection between the objects of the work and the meanings that are created that highlight the kinds of cultural materiality at work in these pieces. Across the objects and situations of the works, the social and cultural forms engaged by the works serve as a locus to ground the meanings of the works.

Immersive Algorithms Building on this initial account of the variety of objects, ideas, places, and experiences that readers report in their engagement with the works, it becomes possible to begin to develop an account of the ways that readers made sense of these work and how we might begin to draw out a kind of central thematic common to not only the three commissioned works, but also one that spans individual experiences of the works. Across these three works, we saw readers who were immersed in the work, not just as they were, but as readers thought that they may be: readers’ experiences were framed by the dynamic nature of the interactions and the possibilities that were presented. For the remainder of this chapter, we want to develop this sense of an immersive experience, which we term “anticipatory immersion.” For readers of works of ambient literature, this sense of immersion relies not on a sensory or narrative form of immersion, but upon the dynamic and algorithmic function of the works. As forms of digital media, they rely on processes and patterns established by the authors in order to allow the works to function in a variety of circumstances and conditions. The works mark out a dynamic space within which the experience of the work plays out, a space which is not defined until the moment of the readers’ experience. In this, readers are left to explore both how the works function in their establishment of this space and what possibilities might be offered. It is this sense of immersion in the situated algorithms of the works that

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provides the basis for understanding how readers came to make sense of these three works. As detailed elswhere in this book (notably in Chapter One and Chapter Seven) the idea of immersion can be drawn out in a number of ways, either through the ability of a work to surround a subject in a sensory, special, ludic, or even narrative form of immersion. What is to be sketched out here is a form of immersion that shares much in common with these modes but brings the idea of immersion away from a sensual or cognitive setting and toward a more broadly social or cultural sense. This sense of anticipatory immersion is developed as readers try to feel out the way that the work functions, what they can expect from it, and how they come to know it. In large part, it is a form of immersion that mirrors the ethnomethodological approach taken here: it is an immersion founded on the way that readers make sense of a work as it is situated within a wider field of material interactions. These works of ambient literature provide salient examples of this kind of immersion, but it might be present in any number of circumstances. In order to begin to sketch out a picture of this kind of anticipatory immersion that we saw in our participants, it is helpful once again to take a step back and look at one aspect of the idea of “ambience” as it relates to ambient literature, particular as the term stems from its use in an original text from the field of ambient music. As we have seen elsewhere the liner notes to Brian Eno’s 1975 album Discreet Music is the starting point for many current attempts to define ambience. In them he describes the situation of his initial conceptualization of the idea of ambient music and how it creates a specific kind of listening experience; In January this year I had an accident. I was not seriously hurt, but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of 18th century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn’t the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience. It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.

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In his account, Eno lays out a broad outline of what might be seen as the main thread of thinking around the idea of ambience in music, art, and other fields. What is interesting for us here, however, is something that Eno only hints at, but does not discuss in any depth. Eno’s experience of lying in bed, trying to listen to the music playing from the stereo does not just provide an account of the kind of music that is heard (the low volume music from the record alongside the sounds of the rain and environment), but also provides an account of a kind of listening, one that is attentive to the possibilities of what might be heard. In straining to hear the record being played, Eno is reaching out with his listening, and, in the anticipation of being able to hear the music, engages with the other sounds of the environment on the same level as the compositions on the record. For us here, what makes Eno’s experience special is not the fact of his bringing the sounds of the environment onto an equal footing with the music, but in the way that he reaches out, searching for something to hear. This kind of searching impulse—in which the participant’s engagement with the piece is developed in part by their reaching out or leaning into a sense of anticipation—is given an alternate formulation by Noah WardripFruin (2012) in his account of his interactions with chat bots, particularly one of the earliest popular examples, ELIZA. Designed to model a mode of Rogerian psychotherapy, ELIZA functioned by faking a sense of intelligence by simply turning whatever the human user says back to them in the form of question. Like any number of other early chatbots, ELIZA functioned a bit like a psychic or supposed mind reader, making general enough of statement that would allow the human interlocutor to assume a kind of intelligence on the part of the agent. In discussing his interactions with ELIZA, Wardrip-Fruin describes the way that he slowly came to dispel his own sense of wonder about ELIZA, learning through trial and error how to trigger certain kinds of interactions and linguistic transformations, engaging in a kind of reverse engineering of the algorithms that allowed the bot to present a facade of intelligence. This kind of inquisitive feeling out for the potential and function of a system is on display in readers’ engagements with works of ambient literature, only in this case, instead of focusing on an interaction with an intelligent agent, these works of ambient literature evoke a wonder at their dynamic function within the context of the world of the reader. While neither of these cases give a complete rendering of the kind of anticipatory immersion that we saw in our participants’ interactions

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with three commissions, both Eno’s initial consideration of the idea of ambient music and Wardrip-Fruin’s discussion of the potential reconceptualization of the importance of “the ELIZA Effect” start to give shape to the unique forms of engagement elicited by these works. For the readers we interviewed about their experiences, these kinds of anticipatory movements formed a common basis across the three works in different ways. In the kinds of responsive movements that these works of ambient literature engaged in, they offered structures which encouraged readers to look elsewhere, away from the surface of the work, and to reach toward something else—something other than the piece itself—as part of the experience of the work.

Readers Leaning In Each of the three commissioned works engaged this anticipatory form of immersion in very different ways. As novel interactive paradigms for digital literature, all three of the works engaged the structural form of the work itself as a source of an anticipatory immersion. Readers actively engaged the question of what might be possible in the works, what kinds of interactions might come next, and how their unique situational context might affect the narrative being laid out in the app. Across all three, novel and unfamiliar aspects of the interactions came to be a facet of the interaction itself. Building on this common formal or structural framing, however, each of the three commissions built out anticipatory structures in different ways and with different thematic results. So, for instance, for readers of The Cartographer’s Confession, with its confluence of historical happenings set against the present day landscape of London, there was a gap opened up between what had been and what there was in front of their eyes—a space which readers could fill with their own stories and suppositions. Beyond this, readers knew that they weren’t simply watching as the story was laid out across a present day London, but they realized that it was their particular present day London. They knew that the holiday crowds they came across in Leicester Square were there uniquely because of when they chose to read the piece. For readers of It Must Have Been Dark by Then, on the other hand, this immersive structure linked directly to the pathfinding nature of the work, with readers acting out, on a smaller scale, migrations and movements brought on by global economic and climate catastrophes. Readers did not know where the walk which

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oriented the piece would take them; they could only imagine what might lay in store for them against the shifting backdrop of the city. Breathe presented another distinct thematic response to the anticipatory structures of the experience, leaving readers to engage with questions of technological surveillance, privacy, and the global networks that connection our lives and that we scarcely comprehend. To draw this out further, let’s look at a few examples which highlight the anticipatory experience drawn out by the works. The first builds almost directly from Eno’s early realization of the possibilities for ambient music. The instructions for Kate Pullinger’s Breathe recommend reading the piece in a quiet place at home and, for the most part, the readers that we spoke to did that. As a piece that was purely text-based with no audio components, it was surprising that a number of readers reported the impact that listening during the piece had. For some, the lack of sound proved to be a distraction for a work that was supposed to be a form of “ambient literature.” Making a connection with ambient music, some of our readers were left throughout the piece waiting for the sound to start, leaving the readers to listen closely, wondering if the soundtrack was simply subtle to the point of being inaudible. As a kind of modern day ghost story, the silence initiated by the piece led readers to listen intently to the sounds around them, with their environments providing their own soundtrack in a seeming homage to John Cage. Readers reported the experience of the non-existent soundscape offered by the piece, hearing the creaking of the house around them. In some cases, the truly ambient noises of the environment startled readers to the extent that they wondered how it was possible for the smartphone-based web app to make noises outside of their house, whether someone was lurking outside, waiting for them to read the piece in order to make ghostly noises on cue. Readers became immersed in what they thought was part of the piece as they listened carefully to the world around them, with the sounds of their environment supporting the ghostly aspects of the narrative. More than just illustrating the ways that readers of works of ambient literature reach out toward the environment in which they are reading as they explore the work, the example of readers looking for the sources of a non-existent soundtrack in Breathe also points the way toward a further consideration of the networks of anticipation that are present in the works, particularly as readers are in many cases ignorant of the exact ways in which the pieces operate.

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In another example from Breathe, one reader was struck by a momentary sense of paranoia when the ghostly voice of the text mentioned seeing them nearby a local school. Unaware that the name of a local school was inserted simply because it was the closest school to the reader that could be found in Google’s databases, the reader invented a wider fiction of the work, recalling that they had walked past the school earlier and wondering if the app had been tracking their location even before they began reading. That is, despite being a relatively sophisticated reader, they had no idea how the experience actually functioned, and were left to fill in the experience with their own kind of folk theory of how it worked. Other readers of Breathe questioned whether the app’s awareness of their location extended beyond their use of the web app, and whether they would continue to be haunted. It was not just in Breathe that readers entertained the possibility that there was more to the experience than was actually there. For readers of It Must Have Been Dark by Then, the work seemed to function as a string of uncanny coincidences, with the work aligning with the situation the reader found themself into such an extent that they wondered if there was more to the experience than met the eye; It was just a weird coincidence that the place where it said I was supposed to have my oasis was in the middle of the Brunswick Shopping Centre, which is somewhere I think I’ve only walked past once, maybe, in my whole life. I don’t know it. I’m really unfamiliar with it, and it’s all very, very built up architecture and shopping. I walked through there and it said, “You’re now at your oasis.” Literally, as my foot stopped, at that moment, I was next to this water feature, this water fountain. It seemed like this really beautiful serendipity of horrible contrasting built-up architecture with nature, suddenly it was connecting to the audio. I thought, “Was I supposed to turn up there? Was I supposed to have arrived there? Was that actually written in, somehow? Did I subliminally pick up that that’s where I was supposed to be heading towards?” I don’t know, but it was a really nice coincidence.

Readers routinely developed folk theories for how the works functioned. They would recount in interview how the piece works, sometimes getting it right and sometimes wrong. They were interested in the novelty of the technology itself. For readers, this undercurrent of keeping up to date with contemporary technology seemed pervasive in our audience, largely self-selecting as it was. Even for readers who were not necessarily

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familiar with forms of locational media or electronic literature, their experiences were still framed by a broader and persistent cultural interest in computing and smartphones in particular. In this, readers are not only anticipating the function of an individual work, but of a broader field of what is possible. Situated within a wider field of digital media, readers of these works were constantly on guard for what might happen next with the works, what novel interaction or experience might be offered to them. In It Must Have Been Dark by Then, readers wondered what kind of landmark they would consider and what kind of narrative landscape would be opened up next. In The Cartographer’s Confession, readers questioned whether they could really go into the map shop named in the story and whether the owners would mind their shop being used as part of the experience. In its novel interactions with ordinary text, Breathe caused readers to wonder what surprise might next interrupt their reading. They wondered what piece of personal data might next be brought into the narrative. As one participant put it; I think it just piques my curiosity. Again, I want to see what else the book will do; how else it will make me feel. I am curious to see the different ways that we can incorporate text, movement and location services.

For readers, there was a pervasive sense of wondering what might be included. This extended to wondering how the piece would play out under different circumstances; It was interesting because I live in a bush community and there’s not very much in the surroundings; just trees mainly. So that was interesting for me to do it here and then I want to do it, as I mentioned, on the Central Coast and also in Sydney to see the difference.

Other readers reported reading Breathe multiple times, sometimes allowing location detection, other times not. This sense was not universal, however, with one reader of Breathe noting how they didn’t know what might be unique to their experience and what might not; You see it show up in that, every now and then it would throw in like, “I saw you walking past [name of school],” or something similar referring to where I live and everything. So, those were definitely inserts into the story itself, but otherwise I don’t know. I don’t really know if there was

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anything that changed. I don’t know if the story changes from reader to reader.

What all of these various kinds of experiences added up to was a sense of readers constantly leaning into the works, trying to find their way in them, not as if they were lost, but as a kind of engagement, trying to figure out exactly what kind of beast they were dealing with. Readers are not simply immersed in the sense of a narrative or sensory immersion; readers were immersed in the ways that the works functioned, with how the works filtered the world to them. They became involved in trying to draw out how the works did what they did and what the setting of their experience meant for what they saw in the work, a sense which extended beyond any singular instance of a work. Bringing the world of the reader into the experience, audiences could feel the unbounded nature of these works. The variability of the work came to be a part of the experience of the work itself. Throughout their experiences, readers were left unsure of whether some aspect, some specific word, or sight they came across was an intentional construction of the work or simple happenstance. Knowing that they were engaging with a novel media form, they were on guard for the unexpected, sometimes even when it wasn’t there.8 In their engagement with the works as contemporary forms of media, readers’ immersion in them wasn’t bounded by just the works themselves, but within a wider consideration of both how the works fit within our contemporary technology-obsessed culture and how the works reach out and make connections to the wider world. In this, there is an interplay between these two levels: between the specificity of the individual work or experience itself and the broader cultural context within which they operate. In observing the dynamic flow that exists between these two scales, it is possible start to locate readers’ construction of a meaningful experience.

Subjectivity and Anticipation In its frequent reliance on forms of electronic presentation, ambient literature presents a thematic that seems to be central to the contemporary episteme of the present moment of smartphones, global information networks, algorithms, and, importantly, the (false) sense that all previous human culture is able to be in some way reduced to these sociotechnical

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apparatuses. While it is not possible to reduce all aspects of contemporary life to our interactions with smartphones, works of ambient literature are nevertheless, as a mode of literary practice, able to exemplify some aspects of our relationship with the contemporary world and the way that it is understood. A critical aspect of this understanding is, of course, the link between attention as it might be implicated in these technologically embedded works and human subjectivity. In his book, Indexing It All, Ronald Day (2014) lays out an argument concerning the new forms of subjectivity that arose in the twentieth century’s systematic uses of information systems. For him, the concept of the subject was invented anew as people came to interact with information systems, particularly as this subjectivity came to take the shape of people being set equal to the information systems with which they interacted, with both being considered as pure data. In many ways, Day’s story of the invention of the subject mirrors Jonathan Crary’s (1999) discussion of subjectivity and attention, both in the development of the subject and the relationship between subjectification and media. Day (2014), however, goes a step further than Crary: where previous systems of subjectification relied on a hierarchical, universal, and top-down systems of organization, newer forms of subjectification are guided by algorithmic processing which is opaque and unknown to the user; With increasing recursivity, scale, and ubiquity in sociotechnical infrastructures, algorithms and indexes have become both more opaque and more mobile, hiding the logical and psychological assumptions that once were very clear in traditional top-down and universal classification and taxonomic structures, as well as in other professional information techniques and technologies. (4)

Such a consideration follows closely along Malcolm McCullough’s (2013, 2015) concerns regarding the common visibility of public life, which he sees to be increasingly hidden from view behind invisible information networks and algorithms. For works of ambient literature, which are themselves driven by algorithms and computational structures hidden from view under a facade of a neatly drawn user interface, the relationship that readers have with the works is different from other kinds of literature. Instead of knowing what is being attended to (as in the case of a painting, for instance, where a viewer looks at the surface of a canvas or most books where the text on the

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page gives access to the language of the work), algorithmic digital works confound this kind of attention. Instead of standing in rapt attention to something present, works of ambient literature serve as an unknown and non-present vehicle for attention. In their own computational and algorithmic function they offer a particular tracing of the invisible and unseen algorithmic situation that pervades contemporary experience. Within this algorithmic landscape of sociotechnical interaction that works of ambient literature inhabit and elucidate, the attention of the reader traces along these unseen algorithmic pathways of contemporary experience that are both within and without the reading subject. In this manipulation of attention in all directions, works of ambient literature rely not on an attention of perception, but run according to something like Schopenhauer’s account of the attentive will. They channel the forces and movements of the human being through spaces (both real and virtual, of both material and semantic) that are both present and non-present. In this, there is not a dialectic of attention and distraction, but a unified field of interrelations which comes to reflexively determine the relations we have with the world. As Arthur Schopenhauer (2007) put it in arguing over the à priori nature of perception; The sensations in the hand of a man born blind, on feeling an object of cubic shape, are quite uniform and the same on all sides and in every direction: the edges, it is true, press upon a smaller portion of his hand, still nothing at all like a cube is contained in these sensations. His Understanding, however, draws the immediate and intuitive conclusion from the resistance felt, that this resistance must have a cause, which then presents itself through that conclusion as a hard body; and through the movements of his arms in feeling the object, while the hand’s sensation remains unaltered, he constructs the cubic shape in Space, which is known to him à priori. If the representation of a cause and of Space, together with their laws, had not already existed within him, the image of a cube could never have proceeded from those successive sensations in his hand. (64)

For works of ambient literature, the field of attention that they are engaging is not a flat field like a canvas or even a complex temporal field as in the case of the perception of sound, but is instead a feeling out of the algorithmic space constructed by the application. Through their experience of the work and the various ways that their attention is pushed, pulled, damped down, moved inwardly, and then back out, readers feel their way around the aesthetic object that is laid out by the work. In

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this feeling, it is not just what is present that matters, but also the voids and the movement of ideas as they come into being only to fade away. It is through their movement of attention to both the work and themselves with the work that readers come to feel and understand the shape cut by the work of literature as it is embedded within the contemporary world. Whether or not this process relies on some à priori knowledge is unimportant. Whatever the starting point, it is this movement that characterizes works of ambient literature. Instead of following along a traditional account of the subject–object relations of the view, and as both the viewer and the object can be understood to be, in the modern episteme as laid out by Day, collated both as data along a flattened ontology, the question of attention comes as the participant is embedded and wholly co-present with the object of their attention. Like in the example used by Schopenhauer, readers are not presented with a fully wrought image of the world of their experience, but feel it out and, based on their previous experiences and memories and language, come to piece together the “shape” of what is given. Their attention is not directed toward any object, but comes in their attentive entanglement with it. The work comes to be through this engagement of attention.

Conclusion There is an unknowingness to the experience of these works: how they function, what they will offer, what the conditions of the reader’s particular situation will bring. In some respects, they can be considered improvisational pieces. The authors and designers construct algorithmic spaces which are open to reconfiguration depending on the situation and the reader. Just as the authors of these works can’t predict every occurrence that might happen to a reader in the course of the work or in what ways the particular situation of the reader might impact the thematic developed in the work, the same goes for readers. They are left to slowly feel their way through an unknown terrain. Despite their open structures and resistance to easy analysis, works of ambient literature offer an opportunity to broaden the methods used in literary and media analysis. By focusing on the ways that readers come to the works and how they develop meaningful engagements with them, it becomes possible to start to develop a coherent picture of how these works can be understood, both individually and as a group. By relying

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on an ethnomethodological form of analysis, the way that these works are engaged by audiences becomes apparent. More than anything, these are works which come into existence through the activation of their audiences: they are not located on the page or in the software, but exist in a space between the work of the author and the experience of the reader. The meanings that they put forward are felt out by the reader as they try to grab hold of the dynamic experiences offered. In staying just out of reach, works of ambient literature invite readers to engage in a form of anticipatory immersion, engaging readers as they feel their way along the algorithmic movements of the works.

Notes 1. As Chapter five “It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman” details, the question of a particular reader’s attention, and how they direct their attention within these spaces, is a crucial component for understanding these works. 2. Grudin (1990) provides an early history of the expanding sphere of computerization. 3. “In short, individual and universal singularities, each in its own way, allow the assemblage approach to operate without essences. They also define the proper use of analytical techniques in this approach. While in taxonomic essentialism the role of analysis is purely logical, decomposing a genus into its component species by the successive discovery of necessary differences, for example, in assemblage theory analysis must go beyond logic and involve causal interventions in reality, such as lesions made to an organ within an organism, or the poisoning of enzymes within a cell, followed by observations of the effect on the whole’s behaviour” (31). 4. This consideration of the condensation instigated by these works can be spread across a spectrum ranging from the material components of work to the socio-technical relation of the signifying and semiotic systems of language. A discussion of this collapse, and a theoretical frame for considering this methodological approach, can be found in Marcinkowski (2019). 5. This is seen both generally in the work of Jonathan Grudin (1990) and Minna Kamppuri et al. (2006), but also in the work of Peter Wright and John McCarthy (2010) as they explicitly examined the role of meaning in computing, Lilly Irani and others (2009, 2010) as they examine the postcolonial implications of computing, and Phil Turner (2013) as he examines the interpretive nature of interfaces.

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6. Harold Garfinkel (1967) describes ethnomethodology in this way: “Their study is directed to the tasks of learning how members’ actual, ordinary activities consist of methods to make practical actions, practical circumstances, common sense knowledge of social structures, and practical sociological reasoning analyzeable; and of discovering the formal properties of commonplace, practical common sense actions, ‘from within’ actual settings, as ongoing accomplishments of those settings” (vii–viii). 7. Editions at Play is a collaboration between London-based publisher Visual Editions and Google Creative Lab. 8. For some readers, this even went as far as serving as a rationalisation for what seemed to have been software errors: “I like that it- it’s difficult, because I’m not sure which aspect of it I suppose were intentional and which were maybe not so intentional, because one of the things I noticed was that if I tried to go back a page, sometimes it would let me and sometimes it wouldn’t, it would go forward instead. And I don’t know if that was an accident or not. I both liked and disliked that, because on the one hand it was quite annoying and aggravating that I missed a page of reading, but on the other hand I kind of liked the intrusiveness of it, because I felt like it went hand in hand with the intrusiveness of the ghost and of the overlaying text.”

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An Aesthetics of Ambient Literature; Experience, Narrative, Design Emma Whittaker

As we have seen, ambient literature can be considered as a frame denoting narrative practices in which the structure and story content is intentionally integrated within the reader’s physical surroundings. The reader becomes a participant and their environment is turned into the setting for the story’s events. Thus, these works are differentiated from interactive narratives, ebooks or soundscapes that happen to be experienced on a bus or park bench, or TV, film and radio drama that are broadcast to undetermined settings. Narratives that are non-linear and involve reader interactivity, introduce structural and semantic complexity. This can have consequences for maintaining sense and coherence if story paths branch, as Marie-Laure Ryan (2001, 246–255) has discussed. When the participant’s environment is also incorporated within the narrative, its geography and the live happening of unscripted events, become elements of the work. The formal and circumstantial complexities of these narrative practices have implications for writing and experience design, they can also function for authors, designers and participants, as a bridge into what John Dewey (1934, 18) refers to as ‘heightened vitality’. They do this by encouraging writers

E. Whittaker (B) School of Art, Design and Architecture, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_11

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and participants to actively observe, listen and feel their relations to the wind, the hill, the tree, the street, the building and perhaps also reflect upon their social-cultural and historical context. Active engagement with artworks, in Dewey’s (1934, 144) aesthetics, involves the felt experience, meaning and interpretation. In a process of imaginative remaking of past experiences, the participant enters the work’s rhythm, creating a new pattern of relations to themselves and their surroundings—an act that has potential for aesthetic experience. The descriptors of ambient literature can also be seen as a practical application of Dewey’s aesthetic experience. This chapter delves beyond the superficial comparison and looks at the pragmatist ideas and philosophy of William James that informed Dewey’s Art as Experience, making the case that Dewey’s aesthetics are both narratological in their language and framing of experience and useful for designing ambient experiences (as opposed to a poetics of writing for the form, which is the subject of chapter “Writing Ambient Literature”). The chapter goes on to discuss the narrative interaction mechanisms of ambient literature, specifically drawing on The Cartographer’s Confession, in order to propose connections with the affects of Dewey’s aesthetics and affects that works of ambient literature can produce. Dewey’s aesthetics have received renewed attention in the last thirty years. Thomas M. Alexander (1987, 2016) investigates Dewey’s aesthetics in the context of his broader philosophy, Richard Shusterman’s Pragmatist Aesthetics (1992, 2000) brings together pragmatisms (classical and neoproagmatist) and literary theory, making the case for a theory of an embodied, active experience of art. Shusterman’s ideas are further examined and applied across a range of creative practices in Wojciech Malecki’s edited collection, Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics (2014). Thomas Levin’s Poetics of Transition (1999) discusses Dewey in the context of the classical pragmatists and American literature of the period, and McCarthy and Wright (2005) draw upon Dewey’s aesthetics in their investigation of felt and emotional qualities of technology and human computer interaction. Nicolas Gaskill’s (2008) essay brings together Dewey’s aesthetics with Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of signs to put forward a pragmatist literary criticism. This chapter is specifically concerned with how Dewey describes aesthetic experience as: (1) an act of perception,1 characterised by an emotional feeling of unity and balance, resulting from embodied2 participation with objects as diverse as a thought, a landscape, ceremony, or artwork; (2) a dynamic and

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rhythmic process in which its component parts have the structure of an event; and (3) actively interpreted by the ‘live creature’ interacting with their environment. Harry Heft (2001, 15), Mark Johnson (2007a, 92), Mark Johnson and Tim Rohrer (2007, 17–54), Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi (2008, 98), and others, acknowledge the philosophies of the classical pragmatists, James, Peirce and Dewey as antecedents of contemporary extended, embodied, and enactive theories of cognition. Dewey’s notion of experience is rooted in his classical pragmatism,3 and particularly that of William James’ (1920 [1878], 64) physiologically informed philosophy4 and psychology. In James and Dewey’s ontology, the evolutionary evolved brain and the present environment mutually modify what is perceived and experienced by the live creature in their multimodal sensory interactions with an existent world (James 1920 [1878], 64; Dewey 1934, 226). Experience occurs in action. There is no dualism of matter and experience; the act of perceiving and the objects perceived are both qualities, experienced as thoughts. The differences between thoughts are their relations to us and how they function (James 1912, 137). Even thoughts, when reflected upon, may be experienced as having different ‘feels’ or qualities. When we observe the qualities of our experience, our interpretation becomes more nuanced (Dewey 1934, 305). Finally, for Dewey, the term experience doesn’t just refer to conscious awareness but it has a special sense, meaning ‘heightened vitality’, and at its most intense, it produces aesthetic experience. Experience in the degree that it is experience is heightened vitality. Instead of signifying being shut up within one’s private feelings and sensations, it signifies active and alert commerce with the world; at its height it signifies complete interpenetration of self and the world of objects and events. Instead of signifying surrender to caprice and disorder, it affords our sole demonstration of stability that is not stagnation but is rhythmic and developing. (Dewey 1934, 18)

In Art as Experience, Dewey (1934, 58) cites James’ metaphor for the stream of consciousness, ‘Like a bird’s life, it seems to be made of an alternation of flights and perchings’ (James 1890a, 243). For James, experience is ‘the feeling of activity’ (1912, 171–172), of change, of things going on, for the individual whose body is at the centre of a spatial-temporal event. Their inner event of attention brings objects

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before the mind (1920 [1895], 346).5 Experience happens within the ‘experiencable environment’ (James 1909, 41–42fn) in which cognitive processes, emotions, perceptions, memories, volitions and their consequences occur. In James and Dewey’s accounts, it is in and through a creature’s relationship to their environment that experience takes place.

Dewey’s Aesthetic Experience For Dewey, aesthetic experience doesn’t reside in the object, rather it is a type of perception arising through interaction. The object that invokes the aesthetic experience need not be a majestic mountain or even a crafted work of literature. Everyday events such as an individual’s tending of roses, their appreciation of polished shoes, even their recognition of a bus arriving at exactly the right moment can hold the potential for an aesthetic experience. This is because, in Dewey’s account, aesthetic experience is part of, and continuous with, our everyday interactions in the world. What are the attributes that make such experiences remarkable, whose objects can be commonplace, extraordinary or sophisticated? Dewey (1934, 13) argues that aesthetic experience arises when ‘a sense of equilibrium is reached’. Life, that is often in flux, uncertain, agitated, is felt to come into balance; there manifests a feeling of harmonisation or unity with the world. This equilibrium is not static; aesthetic experience is an event, with a beginning, moving towards its fulfilment, a process that has rhythm. It is part of life, of ‘concrete experience’ (Dewey 1934, 10). Aesthetic experience is felt experience, ‘It cannot be asserted too strongly, that what is not immediate6 is not esthetic’ (Dewey 1934, 123–124). Whereas the non-aesthetic experience, for Dewey, is a series of fragmented incidents or that which moves from one episode to another without any particular starting or end point. When the height of aesthetic experience is felt, it contrasts so strongly with the rest of life that we afford it a special status. No intellectual or practical experience has unity unless it is also an aesthetic experience. Be it a practical task, an intellectual exercise or engagement with an artwork, there is, for Dewey, a circular relationship between aesthetic experience and unity. The ordinary, the ‘humdrum’, ‘slackness’, ‘incoherence’, ‘aimless indulgence’, are the antithesis of the aesthetic experience (Dewey 1934, 42).

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The Event of Aesthetic Experience; Environment, Energy, Emotions Equilibrium is a central idea in James’ physiologically informed psychology.7 The physical actions and reactions of matter form paths of release (James 1890a, 6). When a physical action is repeated, energy will follow the same tendency or it will take a new course. In the brain, habit can be seen as the repeated paths taken by ‘nerve-currents’ (James 1890a, 82) (neurons firing). Equilibrium is achieved when a new set of habits has been established, and energy moves towards equilibrium in the body, reflecting the need for the creature to live in balance with its surroundings—active, responsive, adaptive—a microcosm of environmental systems of which we are part. Dewey’s account of aesthetic experience is rooted in the thorough-going interaction between ‘live creature to his environment’ (1934, 52, 156), in which it acts, interprets and perceives. The eye functions in relation to the hand and the body, acting and interacting with objects and events in the environment (Dewey 1934, 104).8 The surface of the skin is just one way the body interacts with its environment; the self is in a dynamic interdependence with its surroundings (Dewey 1934, 61). The interaction between the organism and the environment is transformed into participation and communication (Dewey 1934, 22, 256). The environmentally situated perceiver is in active exchange with the physical, social, cultural world, in all its dimensions. Qualities arise from interaction; Dewey (1934, 125, 136) argues that there are no experiences of pure and simple qualities, even under laboratory conditions, qualities of objects occur in their connection and interplay with other things. Any attempts to separate form and matter result in dividing the live creature from its environment. Experience, for James and Dewey (1934, 184), is characterised by the particular happening moment, rather than its general conditions. Citing James, Dewey (1934, 124) argues that perception is not value free, rather the creature’s relations to objects are part of its experience. We can find these ideas developed in James’ (1907, 244–245; 1909, 48–49) philosophy of radical empiricism, in which he argues that the individual’s relations to objects of experience (to be ‘next to’, ‘with’, ‘in’, ‘on’, ‘from’, ‘as’, ‘of’, etc.) are as much part of the experience as the things themselves. Dewey also notes that which mediates, such as reading a painting’s title, is part of the experience.

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Most ordinary perception lacks aesthetic experience’s sense of completeness. Generally, we perceive sufficiently to class and name objects, when we cannot, resistance is met. There is lack of clarity, a feeling of incoherence. However, if ideas flow and seem congruent, an aesthetic feeling can arise, a sense of ‘full perception’. This is accompanied by a release of energy that is organised and rhythmic, Dewey (1934, 184) argues. He places the interaction and movement of energies at the centre of his aesthetics. As there is an interaction of energy inside the body, so there is without. Form is the operation and ‘dynamic organisation’ of the ‘outward embodiment of energy’, dynamic because there is onset, it happens over time, there is rhythm, development and fulfilment (Dewey 1934, 57). Rhythm, ‘the ordered variation of changes’ (Dewey 1934, 160–161), is everywhere in nature—transformation from seed to plant, regularity of activity and sleep, the turn of the seasons, the movement of celestial bodies—each with their own necessary and particular beat. Each aesthetic experience also has its own pattern, expressed in the object itself and in the individual’s ‘active process of perceiving’ (1934, 169). Rhythm occurs in spatial and static works, buildings and paintings, as well as temporal art forms. Aesthetic experience doesn’t necessarily mean beautiful, the apparently ugly and discordant can be used for aesthetic effect when it serves a particular rhythm (Dewey 1934, 180). Therefore aesthetic experience is an event, its form has structure, movement and transition between parts, that proceed towards unity, ‘[Form is]…the operation of forces that carry the experience of an event, object, scene, and situation to its own integral fulfilment’9 (Dewey 1934, 142). The object of an aesthetic experience is perceived as the consequence of previous actions that lead to the event of inception and progress to the final appreciation of its fulfilment (Dewey 1934, 44). The process can involve tension, an undergoing of disruption, before its resolution and completion. Not stasis or stagnation, but the closing of a circuit, the movement from one stage to the maturation of another. Whether the event is challenging or pleasurable doesn’t affect the total quality of aesthetic experience. The completeness and unity of aesthetic experience is emotional. Emotions are qualities whose changes Dewey likens to the unfolding of a drama; All emotions are qualifications of a drama and they change as the drama develops…The intimate nature of emotion is manifested in the experience

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of one watching a play on a stage or reading a novel. It attends to the development of the plot; and the plot requires a stage, a space, wherein to develop and time in which to unfold. (Dewey 1934, 43)

Dewey’s (1934, 56–57) aesthetic experience has three interpenetrating phases: intellectual—meaning, practical—the percipient interacting with events and surroundings, and emotional —sense of unity, completeness, comprising movement between a feeling of harmony to that of disjuncture, preceding to equilibrium. Emotion can signal actual or impeding disruption, whereas overpowering emotions are non-aesthetic, that is not conducive to balance or unity (Dewey 1934, 51). When all the parts link and move towards a consummation and close they have aesthetic quality (Dewey 1934, 56). For Dewey, all art is the organisation of energies. That organisation has no existence outside of the energies themselves. The is no dualism between matter and form, there is just matter that is variously formed, be it pigment on canvas, spoken or written words (1934, 198). We can talk in retrospect of what matter is and how it is organised, but this is the intellectual discussion that follows, ontologically he argues there is ‘stuff’ (Dewey 1934, 199, 218).10 It is the relations and values within the work, and with the percipient, that determines whether an aesthetic experience takes place; Art is a quality that permeates experience; it is not, save by a figure of speech, the experience itself. Esthetic11 experience is always more than esthetic. It is a body of matters and meanings, not in themselves esthetic, become esthetic as they enter into an ordered rhythmic movement towards consummation. (Dewey 1934, 339)

For Dewey (1934, 279, 280) when imagination12 is embodied, it can become art. There exists an intentional impressing of form and order upon a medium that they did not originally possess. Reworking and revision are involved in creative processes, from which structure and shape are formulated. Even spontaneous artworks have undergone some form of revision and iteration, before the act of making (Dewey 1934, 78). The artist draws from attitudes and meanings of prior experience, a shared ‘public’ language (Dewey 1934, 62, 67–68) and acts as a vicarious audience while the work is in progress. Thought, emotion, sense, purpose and impulsion are ‘phases of the self’ (1934, 262), that all play a role in the

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active and receptive relations of artist and the participant, as live creatures in their environment. ‘Communication is the process of creating participation…’ (1934, 251), for Dewey (1934, 344) art is participatory, whether reading a novel, walking around a building or watching a play. There is an interaction and transaction between the artist, the artwork and the environment, and also between the percipient, the object and surroundings. The participant’s ‘store’ (1934, 63) of past experiences, current and subsequent reflection upon the event, contribute to their aesthetic experience, changing with each encounter the work (Dewey 1934, 176). However, not all interactions result in an aesthetic experience, parts of a work may be incongruent and without unity. To really perceive a work of art is different from merely recognising it, Dewey argues. The perceiver experiences a process, a ‘performance’. While the participant’s imaginative act is not the same as that of its creator, they both involve the creative ordering of the elements of the form, in order to experience it as a whole (Dewey 1934, 55–56). And yet meanings imaginatively summoned, assembled and integrated are embodied in material existence that here and now interacts with the self. The work of art is thus a challenge to the performance of a like act of evocation and organisation, through imagination, on the part of the one who experiences it. It is not just a stimulus to and means of overt course of action. (Dewey 1934, 285)

‘Because objects of art are expressive, they are a language’ (Dewey 1934, 110). Media employ languages particular to themselves, and as such translation between art forms and words inevitably gives rise to new meanings. These are not fixed and although they are prompted by the work, the artist’s intentions are not necessarily communicated. The object therefore ‘operates’ in the experience between the participant and the work (Dewey 1934, 108). Contexts can change interpretation, for example, our response to a work of tragedy can point to qualities and values that exceed the description of a calamity. One of the ways that artworks can convey meaning and enhance the potential for the sense of harmony and unity is through making the individualised common, by creating definiteness. Focal points13 of an object operate in relation to that which recedes, the vague and the dim both function as part of the total situation. Vagueness is only a problem when it becomes an obstacle to what we want to know about. The quality that

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binds the focal parts of an experience into a unity is the discernment of parts seeming to belong and be relevant to an experience, while others do not. In a novel, a realistic depiction of a scene in words can become, as an idea, a possibly extant site. If unity of parts is not felt, the experience of the story will be of the mechanisms employed, of their seams and disjuncture, while a participants’ own imaginative engagement and interpretation may not result in that which the creator feels or believes—the nurse deciphering the sneeze as a sign14 of a cold (Dewey 1934, 64). For Dewey (1934, 23) the mind, body, soul, matter and spirit are part of experience. If we focus our attention on the horizon, or on a lichen through a microscope, we have a sense that what is perceived is part of a larger whole, that however wide or minute our viewpoint there is always more, an ‘indefinite expanse’ of the universe. An artwork can intensify the sense of the whole which is ‘implicit in ordinary experiences’, the something ‘not understood’ (1934, 201–202), almost ‘mystical’ (1934, 305). If you try to describe the quality of the unity of a work of art, you begin to separate and discriminate its parts. While the parts comprise the work, its pervading quality is the unity of those individual elements. They are felt, immediately experienced, ‘emotionally intuited’ (Dewey 1934, 200). Dewey relates artistic expression to James’ description of religious experience—as the culmination and ‘rearrangement’ of past experience (Dewey 1934, 75). In summary, every artwork has a subject, its medium, together with its ‘subject-matter’—what the artist and the audience bring to the subject (1934, 115). The general conditions of an aesthetic form are, ‘…continuity, culmination, conservation, tension and anticipation’ (1934, 143). The event has continuity15 with, and conservation of, prior experience; it has movement, a ‘progressive massing of values’, occurring in ‘rhythmic pauses’ and consummations; that lead to the fulfilment of the event. Variation in rhythm adds interest and contrast as long as it does not disrupt the unity of the whole (1934, 173). The audience is an active participant in this process that may involve resistance or tension, the revising of beliefs, solving an enigma or a remaking of old experiences. ‘[In order to] enter integrally into a new pattern…We are carried to a refreshed attitude toward the circumstances and exigencies of ordinary experience’ (Dewey 1934, 114, 145). Whether a narrative app, stand-up comedy or short story, each medium has its own set of relationships to parts to the whole (1934, 178). The

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medium is integral to the work, not just a carrier that can be substituted for another (1934, 206) and for the experience to be aesthetic the medium and idea conflate. A composition functions to individuate parts of the work by providing definition to its qualities, that gives it energy, Dewey argues (1934, 210–211). Definition of masses, whether that be elements of a painting, couplets of a poem or the division of spaces within a building, help to maintain a relation and rhythm of parts to the whole. Narrative is also made up of parts that form a rhythm. What would a novel or a drama be without different persons, situations, actions, ideas, movements and events? These are marked out technically by acts and scenes in the drama, by various entrances and exits and all the devices of stagecraft. But the later are just means of throwing elements into such relief that complete objects and episodes on their own account – as rests in music are not blanks, but, while they continue a rhythm, punctuate and institute individuality. (Dewey 1934, 211)

At the beginning of the chapter the argument was put forward that Dewey’s theory narrativises the aesthetic experience. He does this through the metaphors and analogies that populate his writing, that present the operation of aesthetic experience as the process of a spatial-temporal event, where resistance and tensions lead to completion and equilibrium, ‘…the accumulated experience must be as such as to create suspense and anticipation of resolution’ (1934, 143). What may be perceived as discordant or ugly may be part of the embodied object, whether an artwork or landscape, ritual or otherwise, yet if it contributes to its overall rhythm and builds towards fulfilment, there is aesthetic perception. In a close echo of Dewey’s account of the structure of aesthetic experience, Tzvetan Todorov’s (1969, 70) structural narrative theory,16 ‘a typology of plots’, posits that a minimal plot is a process from the state of ‘equilibrium’ in the story, shifting into ‘imbalance’, before returning to the state of balance. While the descriptors of Dewey’s aesthetic theory have narrative form, it doesn’t necessitate that all narratives, by virtue of their structure, are aesthetic. The ‘narrative turn’ (Kreiswirth 2005, 377) in the 1960s associated with Roland Barthes, Claude Bremond, Gérard Genette, A. J. Greimas and Tzvetan Todorov saw structural narrative as a lens through which all areas of life may be interpreted, from communication, to education. However, other aspects of Dewey’s theory need to come into play for there to be aesthetic experience.

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Dewey’s aesthetic experience places emphasis upon perception (through embodied action and interaction with the world), participation (through active imagining and interpretation), and a heightened sense of being (when a unity of experience is perceived). Here, these components are developed into an aesthetics of ambient literature: 1. Structure—the underlying structure of the aesthetic experience is movement and transition, disruption and tension that move towards resolution and become fulfilled. 2. Rhythm and dynamism—are features of the aesthetic experience of form, defined as an arrangement of changing variations and descriptors of a live creature’s active and receptive, relations with their environment. 3. Participation—with the art object involves active interpretation in acts of imaginative remaking of past experiences by the creators of the work and participants. 4. Balance and unity—are felt features of the aesthetic experience; emotion guides us to what is imbalanced or in harmony. When these aspects come together there can be a sense of heightened vitality— aesthetic experience is heightened experience. In the discussion that follows, these four tenets are discussed in relation to, The Cartographer’s Confession, drawing upon participants’ reports of their experience.

Ambient Literature, a Case Study: The Cartographer ’s Confession (2017) 1. Structure—the underlying structure of the aesthetic experience is movement and transition, disruption and tension that move towards resolution and become fulfilled (Fig. 1). When Dewey refers to aesthetic experience as an event, it is its unity that is important, its overarching quality,17 ‘It is not a variation in a single feature but a modulation of the entire pervasive and unifying qualitative substratum’ (1934, 161), as Mark Johnson has observed (2007b). This aesthetics of ambient literature extends Dewey’s notion of the qualitative event to the various ways that structure functions in locative works

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Fig. 1 Participant using The Cartographer’s Confession app. Story by James Attlee. Creative Producer, Emma Whittaker. App developed by Calvium. Photograph, Emma Whittaker

and the mechanisms by which participants interact with the story and the environment. The narrative structure of The Cartographer’s Confession takes the form of a quest, a search for a missing mother and for personal and historical truth. The enigma of Thomas Andersen’s map initiates the reader’s mission. Why would a cartographer produce a map that features disparate and apparently random places? The literary container of Schilling’s ‘research materials’ provides an in-story rationale for the app and the nested media it contains. The main storyline follows the protagonist’s childhood in the 1940s, his adolescence, and early twenties, played out across three chapters, with a structure that broadly takes a Todorovian pattern. Each chapter is built from smaller components, Schilling’s transcriptions of Andersen’s notebook and his mother’s letters (text on-screen), excerpts from Andersen’s

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recollections recorded on cassette tapes in the 1980s (audio recordings), photographs taken by Andersen’s friend in the 1940s and 1950s and an illustrated diagram18 (zoomable images on-screen). Andersen’s collection of 1930s newspaper clippings, excerpts from Shakespeare and Thomas de Quincy, and a book on birds called Why Birds Sing (1932), by Jacques Delamain form a subplot. These materials have their own narrative arc and are positioned within the chapters, offering clues to the mystery behind Andersen’s confessional, resolving key enigmas raised in the main plot and posing others. They draw attention to apparently insignificant details in Andersen’s recordings (the Thames, characters’ interactions with birds and inscriptions on London statues) that become leitmotivs in turn, creating rhythm in the story and metaphors for its broader themes of navigation and migration, alienation and belonging. Swallows appear as a visual motif throughout the app, as a dual symbol of migration and freedom. While the narrative structure deals with the ordering of story events, the interaction mechanism is the means by which the participant engages with the narrative. Locative works can involve walking, observing, interpreting, puzzle solving, as foregrounded in Janet Cardiff’s Missing Voice (Case Study B) (1999). These activities occur in tandem with the story, presented as a continuous sound file. This linearity doesn’t preclude plot twists and turns, only the re-ordering of storylines. In contrast, nodal narratives are composed from a number of parts, allowing for participant interaction to also determine the order of narrative events. The rationale for dividing the narrative into parts, such as by characters, time periods, events, themes or places, etc., depends on the overarching experience design, the particularities of location, the story, the quantity of content and the medium of a node (voice, soundscapes, text, images). The logic underpinning the configuration of these nodes can be determined by the chronological sequence of events, locations, characters or other story themes and by the actions required of the participant. In Cartographer’s, there are many small nodes, in the form of archive materials, that are grouped into clusters, and can be experienced in any order. The clusters have a linear sequence and are governed by the rule that all the nodes in a cluster must be ‘completed’ before moving to the next in the sequence. Each chapter has a number of clusters, that allow for a ‘branching side paths’,19 narrative trajectories that return to a core linear structure. This gives greater control over the presentation and resolution of enigmas, that build narrative tension and resolution, and hold the

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potential for a unified experience—at least in terms of the logical coherence of the narrative. The reader of The Cartographer’s Confession sees a contents page with the chapter titles that are ‘unlocked’ sequentially. An on-screen map zooms to the area of London where a chapter is set, revealing a number of pins denoting significant places where GPS releases the relevant parts of the story in the form of on-screen ‘archive’ materials and sound files. Participants choose any route to get to the pins, allowing non-linear interaction with elements within a chapter (the branching side paths), with additional materials released by timer (Fig. 2). Participants plot their journey between chapters, located in Southwark, The West End and Bermondsey. Their position is represented as a blue dot on the digital map. The contrast between the participant’s digital navigation of the city, and the nineteenth-century cartographer’s intimate knowledge, rendered by hand on paper, thematically ties together the narrative and the interaction mechanism. Relations between analogue and digital are echoed in presentation of the story as entries in an archive,

Fig. 2 The Cartographer’s Confession written by James Attlee. Creative producer Emma Whittaker. Smartphone app interface and visual design by James Brocklehurst. Illustrations by Grace Attlee and James Brocklehurst App developed by Calvium

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indexed by ‘the chronology page’ that enables access to the archive materials and for the reconfiguration of meanings. In the final scenes overlooking the Thames, ‘secret’ pins sequentially appear on the map. This allows for all the clues to be in place before the story’s denouement. There is at this point, a shift from the predominately present tense frame of hearing past tense memoires, into the 1960s as present tense. Here, we experience audio excerpts from Schilling’s film, telephone dialogue between Andersen and his father, the face-to-face meeting, and their decisive entanglement on Angel’s Steps, leading into the Thames (Fig. 3). GPS has been used as a locative storytelling mechanism for almost two decades, in works such as Teri Rueb’s Trace (2004 [1999]), Nature Trailer (2003) developed at Media Lab Europe, Dublin, by Donovan, Wood, Davenport, & Strohecker, Riot! 1831 (2004), created by Liz Crow and Ralph Hoyte, Mobile Bristol and Hewlett Packard. The interaction mechanism of Cartographer’s Confession combines GPS and the timed triggering of audio, text and images. It also employs conventions familiar

Fig. 3 The Cartographer’s Confession written by James Attlee. Creative producer Emma Whittaker. Smartphone app interface and visual design by James Brocklehurst. Illustrations by Grace Attlee and James Brocklehurst. App developed by Calvium

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to travel guides or walking tour apps, such as dropped pins, audio interface, pinch and spread to enlarge images and maps. This work introduces literary complexity to the form; its length is that of a novella, a multifaceted story, plotted over a large geographic area. Its visual style and interface play with the conventions of the book, incorporating chapters, research and a chronology. It uses nested media as sound, text and images on-screen that add to the complexity of the structure and interaction mechanism. In locative narrative practices the narrative structure is integrated with mechanisms that enable the reader to interact with the story. Employing narrative devices such as enigmas, disruption and resolutions hold the potential for a sense of fulfilment and balance, mirroring the aesthetic experience itself. A participant commented, Not that I could see where the end was going, but there was a sense where the end was going. There was that kind of moment where… It’s a Chekhov’s Gun bit, that, you know, if you put a gun in a drawer in act one you’ve got to fire it by act three. The photograph is the point where you go, ‘I know where this is going now’.…The photograph of his mother. The shot of his mother and the man…The whole thing turned on that…that was really, really powerful, really evocative.

The embedding of the interaction mechanism20 —walking, navigating, searching, puzzle solving—within the narrative, embody participation and invite active interpretation. However, complexity can also bring unintended obstacles—getting lost, technical challenges, confusion, that have the potential to impede aesthetic experience. 2. Rhythm and dynamism—are features of the aesthetic experience of form, defined as an arrangement of changing variations and descriptors of a live creature’s active and receptive, relations with their environment. In locative narrative practices, the participant, the narrative object (the book, mobile device) and the story, all have explicit relations with the environment in which they are experienced. The extent to which coherence is perceived between these elements can determine whether they are felt to be in rhythm with the environment. One of the ways they integrate the story into the participant’s surroundings is through the mechanism

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of the storyworld. The ‘storyworld’ refers to the places, characters and events that together form a story’s particular sphere of life, such as, J. K. Rowling’s wizarding world, Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland or Harper Lee’s Maycomb. Ryan (2006, 8), Herman (2009, 193), and Ryan and Thon (2014, 5) characterise the ‘storyworld’ as concept, that they argue allows it to be recognisable, irrespective of the medium in which it is represented. However, the ‘experiential storyworld’ model (Whittaker 2017, 50; 2019, 84) says that when a story’s places, characters and events occur in different media, including our retelling in thought or speech, it is the particular instantiation of that storyworld’s specifiable content and how their qualities seem to the interpreter, that produces the idea of Hogwarts, Wonderland or Maycomb. The difference in the positions can be framed as a traditional philosophical problem of substance, ‘what qualities are essential to the storyworld’s identity?’ We can label a depiction as Wonderland because it appears to have consistent qualities with those we associate with our prior experiences of that place, whether we encounter it in the form of written text, moving image or via secondary reference, a critic’s description or friend’s recollection. However, the representation of a storyworld’s qualities in a different context may mean we don’t associate them with their referent, or conversely, a Queen of Hearts playing card may stand in for Wonderland. In James’ (1907, 85) terms, there are only modes of appearing; London Bridge has ‘greyness’, in the particular context of a happening event —its ‘experienceable environment’ (James 1909, 41), or the ‘whole situation’ (1934, 202) in Dewey’s terms. The storyworld, defined in terms of its modes as appearing, is particularly relevant to locative narrative practices. It underscores the participant’s active interpretation of a storyworld, in contrast to ways of ‘telling’ (White, 1981, 1), that emphasises the author’s intended meaning of the text. Dewey articulates a similar argument, when he says that aesthetic experience is that of ‘qualities’ (1934, 224), occurring in the act of perception, rather than intrinsic to the object. The storyworld of Cartographer’s moves between the different time periods and locations. The protagonist’s reminiscences and collection of 1940s reportage photographs show real people and places who are named as characters—the man with the monkey in post-war Borough Market, the pensive couple crossing Waterloo Place, workers unloading sacks from a barge opposite St. Pauls and mist rising around London Bridge. The boundary between the world of the story and the environment can be

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permeable. Fact and fiction entwined by belief and action, as we hold up the phone and compare the photograph with our current view.21 A participant commented, …being able to look across the river and experience that whole story about arriving on the boat and just being able to watch the boats coming and going and see St Pauls over there.

The photographs set up rhythm of relations of the story to the place. Traffic and buskers may be perceived as disruptive or enfolded into the atmosphere. Disruptions to comprehension in the form of narrative enigmas can be experienced as part of the narrative’s rhythm, while that which is perceived by some as structurally illogical, can break the unity of the artwork. I found sometimes the mismatch between what I was looking at, and the kinds of images that were on the screen, confused me slightly.

A narrative that refers to your surroundings, via a mobile device or in the form of a printed text, can mediate the narrative experience in two directions: the world of the story is supplemented by the events actually happening around you; and your perception of the environment is mediated by the text such to affect interpretation. You hear the barge chugging up the river, it becomes significant in the perceptual scene when it’s referred to in the story you’re reading. Ambient sound can be intentionally ‘composed’ by directing attention towards aspects of the environment and the framing of its interpretation within the text. …the places became strangely alive through the stories, through the eyes of the narrator. Because the narrator is often talking about, I was there, this is what happened to me there. So somehow the places become quite vibrant.

The narrative can affect the potential for aesthetic experience. The causal relationships between story events require a logical relationship with the plot and the storyworld in order that they seem plausible. Plausibility can be internal to the narrative structure, the logical connections between a particular story’s own world and events. Plausibility can also be function of a story’s external relationships to the narrative, its style, its representation of, and relations to, referents in the world—would people in x

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scenario exhibit these types of behaviour and is the depiction of the causal relations between events logically possible in the ‘real world’? Coherent relations between the internal fictional world-logic of the representation and the external-world-logic can rest upon a feeling of coherence. If our overarching emotional response to a story is that of balance and unity, it may feel coherent, even if some elements may not be strictly logical. Coherence can also be an effect of ‘bridging objects’—those that have active function both in and outside of the storyworld, such as the smartphone used to deliver the story. Its use presents a number of questions—is its presence diegetic or non-diegetic? If the phone is acknowledged in the world of the story, does it ‘play itself’ or function as a prop? In Cartographer’s the app is presented as a repository of the ‘research behind the film’, as a biographical archive of text sound and images, its map is used to navigate around London. 3. Participation—with the art object involves active interpretation in acts of imaginative remaking by the creators of the work and readers. Ambient literature invites the reader to engage in interactions that go beyond active interpretation—to be a protagonist, bystander or omniscient observer. In Cartographer’s, they largely play themselves, a reader who physically navigates into the world of a story, listening to multiple registers and imaginatively moving between time periods, to interpret conundrums presented by fragmentary evidence. At the edge of Borough Market, we look up at the flat in which Andersen lived in as child, shared with Benny, Al and the monkey, and hear him recall his mother’s parting kiss. A photograph depicting a market stall and a boy picking up a Tortoise, we presume to be Andersen, appears while listening to his audio memoires. As we look at the photograph on-screen, shoppers brush past. The live rumble of delivery lorries, voices of patrons outside the Market Porter pub speckle the auditory scene, that is layered with the recorded 3D soundtrack22 from Schilling’s film. Sound is a representational device, depicting aspects of the story that are not spatially or temporally accessible. On other tapes, Andersen ruminates on finally learning how he was hidden by his mother in her suitcase, fleeing Germany. If a participant decides to pause a recording, the soundscape cross-fades from the scene described, in this case, the station in Hamburg and back to the London

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of the 1950s, when Andersen was searching for his mother. Sound has the potential to confound or transition the listener between nested fictions, illustrated by varying accounts, …the attentive reading bit was difficult in Borough Market, and that, kind of, pulled me out a little bit, it kind of pulled me out of the experience. There was construction as we were coming round the corner into Borough Market… that construction noise is kind of apt in the background of this story…So some of the modern day sounds encroaching really made sense…

The use of spatial audio in locative narratives can give the sense that sound heard through headphones appears to be located in the space around the listener, rather than in the head. It has the potential to extend the sense of naturalism by replicating, to some extent, the localisation cues that contribute to the everyday listening experience, a technique used frequently in narratives by Cardiff and Bures Miller to integrate storyworlds within the participant’s location. Listening on non-insolating in-ear or on-ear headphones, as suggested in the app instructions of Cartographer’s, allows recorded narrative in the form recorded music, sound effects and voice, to bleed into ambient sounds, creating a live mix, where discernment and classification of sound sources can become ambiguous and recorded sound effects can appear to be issuing from the surrounding environment (Whittaker 2013, 18). Jon Dovey and Constance Fleuriot (2011, 99) have described the experience of ‘convergences’ between media and the environment that they refer to as ‘magic moments’ and ‘synaesthetic confusion’. Music and other noises can be used to signify that the work is in progress. In Cartographer’s the soundtrack acts as a bridge between locations while we are travelling, to keep us in the story world. This can enfold the listener or irritate, as participants commented, The waves, even when you’re walking around, and one point we were underground, going to a Tube station or something, and you could hear waves. Somehow, that was really effective. It made you a day in the story, if that makes sense? I did like the water sounds and that was incongruous at times, there were the waves, [waves] would be in somewhere that weren’t near the water but it didn’t really matter, it was just a way of keeping me inside the world of the story a bit.

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Andersen’s story is epic in its time frame, set across the twentieth century with historical references from antiquity to the modern era. Story events range between Oslo, Venice, Berlin, Hamburg and London, while the experience on the ground is geographically distributed within three London boroughs. There are a number of minor figures and five main characters. Grasping a narrative’s complexity, its time periods, characters, locations, can help give the narrative a sense of unity, whereas confusion can disrupt of the flow of experience. How can the participant engage with the physical demands of the interaction and environment, keep track of the narrative events, become aware and contemplate nuanced and more subtle story ideas? Three strategies are used in The Cartographer’s Confession: providing sense-making tools, using different media to present the story, and giving the participants controls to modify their experience. Sense-making is incorporated into the interaction mechanism using a visual sketch of the three areas of London, annotated with Catrina Schilling’s research and Andersen’s notes. As story sections are often encountered nonsequentially, they can be accessed via the ‘chronology’ screen, a scrolling timeline of Andersen’s life, illustrating relationships between dates, events, characters and places. In the ‘locative mode’, the timeline only becomes populated with icons of the archive materials as they are encountered on location, in order to retain the relationship between the story and the places to which they relate and to maintain the narrative tension, by withholding of some materials until others have been read. Customisation of experience, via the ‘armchair mode’, unlocks all chapters and story sections along the timeline so they can be accessed again or experienced anywhere. This feature has the side effect of removing the geographic context that provides the live backdrop of the story. In practice, participants use a combination of visiting the geographic locations and accessing materials elsewhere. After I’d done the second chapter I did go back and ‘armchair-mode’ bits of the first one again just to say, it’s my understanding of these characters and their relationships, before I went in and ‘armchaired’ the last bit, as I say, about a week or two later.

Ambient literature can employ a number of participatory modes, however there are a number of variables, such as, the participant’s attitude—their response to environmental conditions, weather, noise, crowds, traffic, etc.

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that can affect if ‘active interpretation in acts of imaginative remaking’ result in aesthetic experience. 4. Balance and unity—are felt features of the aesthetic experience; emotion guides us to what is imbalanced or in harmony. Ambient literature that places an emphasis on writing may conceivably be of any length, from a haiku to a novel. Longer works can present a practical challenge in terms of the relationships between the story and geographic locations, the duration of engagement, and how the work is accessed, for example, as a managed event, or available for individuals to download and experience at any time. Cartographer’s entails a commitment of 4–5 hours, combining walking and public transport. The city is designed as the stage for Andersen’s topographical and emotional journey. We experience its visual, aural and olfactory liveness through his eyes. We are encouraged to plan our route, decide when to walk or catch a bus, take breaks, peruse Schillings research in cafés and recharge our phones, as we follow in her footsteps accompanied by the soundtrack to her film. It can be completed in one or many visits, allowing for incremental engagement and review elsewhere. While some works are sited in a type or one specific location, there is no physical distance to be travelled. Kate Pullinger’s Breathe (2018) is intended to be read in a participant’s bedroom, in parallel with the main character. Other locations become part of the story using narrative techniques such as nested media, interactions with characters in remote places on social media and the recollections of past events. The integration of live data into the story, such as local amenities and weather pertaining to participant’s locale, also expands the geographic bounds of the bedroom. Another strategy used to compress geographic distance is transposing distant regions onto the participant’s immediate surroundings, as in Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then (2017). The story is mapped onto place according to the spatial proximity of points that are digitally marked by the participant. In Misha Myer’s Way from Home (2002–2008) asylum seekers and refugees made maps of places they regard as home and used them to them to navigate around Plymouth, UK, while recording their memories those locations and their responses to their new environment, for participants to re-walk and see their surroundings differently.

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There is the potential for locative narrative works, that fall within the frame of ambient literature, to be perceived as a unity, for a sense of heightened vitality to be felt. While Dewey does not discuss the precise duration of aesthetic experience, he says it occurs when all the parts of an experience come together, and that on different occasions our experiences of the same work will vary. When an artwork takes a number of hours or longer to experience, the potential for equilibrium, a sense of balance and unity, it can be argued, may occur at points during the work and may be fleeting or sustained. The Cartographer’s Confession, then, does not attempt to transport the participant into the past, we occupy the twenty-first century present, evident by the skater boutique at street level and the mobile device held in our hand. Instead we move between our present and the story’s past in two ways: Andersen’s memories borrow from the liveness of now— we stand outside his old address; and the fictional memories obtain the validity of being of the past—we look at the photographic ‘evidence’ of his life, his mistakes and wrangling with his cassette recorder remain in Schilling’s digitised recordings. While the liveness and validity rest upon another fiction, Catriona Schilling is herself a fabrication who presents the history of another fictional character. A false dichotomy can be created between the mediated—the cassette recording and Andersen’s story world in which they take place. Counterintuitively, fictional events can also be lent the semblance of the real in the form of recordings that profess to have (actually) happened in the past. In addition to shaping the depiction of time, nested media often portrays events as happening elsewhere, extending the parameters of the fictional world.

Conclusion This chapter has examined John Dewey’s aesthetic experience. Connections have been drawn between its ontology, its relational framing of experience, its three interpenetrating phases (intellectual —meaning, practical —the percipient interacting with events and surroundings, and emotional —sense of unity, completeness) and its narrativised language and structure, with that of locative narrative works that fall within the lens of ambient literature. In doing so, four tenets of aesthetics of ambient literature have been put forward (Structure, Rhythm and Dynamism, Participation, Balance and Unity).

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In the engagement with ambient literature, what are the conditions under which an aesthetic experience may occur, and is it possible to create these conditions? The participant, narrative object (the book, mobile device) and the story, all have explicit relations with the environment in which they are experienced. The reader simultaneously occupies the physical environment and that of the story world. The extent to which coherence is perceived between these elements can affect whether they are felt to be in rhythm with the environment. Entering into works of ambient literature goes beyond active interpretation, it frames the role of reader within the narrative as a participant, it asks them to imaginatively become a protagonist, bystander or omniscient observer. Keeping track of a narrative’s complexity, it’s time periods, characters and locations can help give the narrative a sense of unity, whereas confusion can disrupt of the flow of experience. Physical and mental challenges can be presented through distances to be travelled and navigated, tasks to be completed and paradoxes to be reconciled, for example, looking at the device and being in the environment. In addition to the four tenets of aesthetics of ambient literature, three strategies for creating these conditions can be summarised as: (1) the language of priming—the writing of locative narratives can embed how the participant should ideally feel and interpret a scene. It can frame the participant’s relationship with the story, who they are and the actions they should be performing; (2) curating situations—locations can be chosen that fit with the storyworld and by creating opportunities to enable the actions required by the story to be performed; (3) supplementing perception—the narrative can be enhanced with soundscapes, sound effects, images and other media that add depth to the representation of the narrative scene. This can aid imagining or provide a counterpoint that infers alternative or more nuanced interpretations. Music can be used to affect emotional responses; however, particular genres may not be to everyone’s taste and irritate, if the music doesn’t seem justified by the subject matter or framing. There is of course a difference between, ‘I thought it was a really enjoyable experience’, to feeling a heightened sense of vitality, having an aesthetic experience. I have argued elsewhere (Whittaker 2017, 2019), that a participant’s attitude towards a work partly determines the types of experiences that are felt. As William James says, ‘…faith in a fact can help create the fact’ (1910 [1896], 25), on the grounds that how we act towards an idea can help in its realisation or go some way towards making

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it possible. Dewey’s notion of participation enfolds aspects of this idea— aesthetic experience of artworks requires remaking of past experiences. This isn’t a passive engagement, and if the participant doesn’t engage in active interpretation it is unlikely they will have an aesthetic experience. In this aesthetics of ambient literature, there is a shuffling of the hierarchies of the real. Sense-making is ambulatory, physical movement through spaces delimits and expands what is perceived and the movement between materials produces new textual readings in a continual reconfiguration.

Notes 1. Dewey (1934, 169). 2. ‘Without an external embodiment, an experience remains incomplete; physiologically and functionally, sense organs are motor organs and are connected, by means of distribution of energies in the human body and not merely automatically, with other motor organs’ (Dewey 1934, 53). 3. Dewey refers to William James a number of times in Art as Experience, particularly in relation to cognition. The book is based on a series of lectures Dewey gave as the first William James Lecturer at Harvard in 1932. Dewey does not use the term pragmatism, while the ideas articulated, particularly concerning the role of action and the environment in experience and perception, strongly reflect classical pragmatist themes. Dewey’s (1934, 52) discussion of aesthetic experience in terms of qualities and relations, ‘In so far as the development of an experience is controlled through reference to these immediately felt relations of order and fulfilment, that experience becomes dominantly aesthetic in nature’ picks up a key aspect of James’ philosophy of Radical Empiricism (James 1912 [1904], 10) and in his earlier psychology (James 1890b, 27). 4. James’ philosophies of pragmatism and radical empiricism. 5. These ideas are discussed in further detail in Whittaker (2017, 74). 6. Dewey and James reference to ‘immediate’ experience, is not a claim for pre-conceptual or pre-linguistic knowledge and thus falling into Sellars (1963, 128) trap of ‘the given’. On the contrary, they do not take ‘sensecontent’ (that which is perceived) to be the foundation of non-inferential empirical knowledge (of sense perceptions), while simultaneously holding the contradictory position that it is (unreliable) secondary qualities—‘particulars’—that are actually sensed, and they do not take non-inferential facts to be particulars (Whittaker 2015, 278). 7. ‘The most complex habits…[are] nothing but concatenated discharges in the nerve-centres, due to the presence there of systems of reflex paths, so organized as to wake each other up successively—the impression produced by one muscular contraction serving as a stimulus to provoke the next,

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8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

until a final impression inhibits the process and closes the chain’ (James 1890a, 108). These notions are expanded by proponents of embodied perception, in the work of J. J. Gibson’s ecological theory of visual perception (1986 [1977], 244) and in Alva Noë’s philosophy of action in perception (Noë 2004, 49; 2012, 123). Dewey’s italics. There are echoes here of James’ ‘radical pluralism’ (James 1912, 91). Dewey uses the spelling ‘esthetic’ for aesthetic in Art as Experience (1934), with the acceptation of quotations, the contemporary spelling of aesthetic is used in this chapter. Dewey’s definition of imagination is a distinctly pragmatist in flavour ‘…the conscious adjustment of the old and the new is imagination’ (1934, 283). James argues that in order for a new idea to be accepted as truth it needs to fit satisfactorily with existing ideas and extend them in an acceptable way (James 1907, 206). Does the background function as a definite object in works of ambient literature? The background is composed of definite objects posing the question is there a ground behind the background? Therefore, the idea of background and foreground becomes reframed, the actions and the environment are both objects, and ‘the ground’ takes on other ontological or epistemological meanings. In the discussion of interpretation, Dewey draws upon James’ emphasis on emotion in the recognition of unity and balance and upon Peirce’s (1867, 287–298; 1905, 493–494; 1906) triadic system of signs for meaning making. Another classical pragmatist feature of Dewey’s aesthetics is the notion of continuity. In order for new ideas to be accepted as true those need to fit with existing truths. New ideas need to fit satisfactorily with our existing ideas, extending them in an acceptable way. James (1897, 62) describes the feeling of continuity as having an aesthetic value, playing a role in what we perceive and conceive, fitting with our expectations; feeling right. Todorov (1969, 75) accounts, ‘This term ‘equilibrium’, which I am borrowing from genetic psychology, means the existence of a stable but not static relation between the members of a society; it is a social law, a rule of the game, a particular system of exchange.’ The language Dewey uses makes us think of narrative structure, that is also dependent on the whole for the meaning of its parts, but he is not saying that aesthetic experience has story content. The app’s illustration, ‘Catriona Schilling Research’ was created by Grace Attlee and James Brocklehurst. Marie-Laure Ryan (2001, 246–255) presents an excellent diagrammatic representation of nodal configuration of interactive stories.

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20. A series of scoping questions can help to develop the relationship between the narrative structure and the interaction mechanism: a. How is the world of the story experienced in place (through listening, reading, walking, performing activities, etc.)? b. What is the participant’s mode of navigating around the location? (Digital or paper maps, verbal instructions, wandering without specific direction, landmarks/street signage, etc.)? c. How are media files triggered in particular locations (combinations of positioning technologies, such as, GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation, geomagnetic, Bluetooth, inertial sensors, camera-based object recognition, or timed release of files, user actions, such as completing a task or pressing button, scanning barcode, QR code or NFC, etc.)? d. How does the world of the story ‘map over’ the geography of the location (story locations and physical locations identical, some aspects of the physical location are identical, the physical location is reconceived and interpreted as an alternate place, for example)? e. How is the story world evoked (dialogue, narration, soundscape, sound effects, music, and imagery)? f. How does the passing of time in the story, relate to the participant’s ‘real time’? g. What is the role of the participant (are they a protagonist, a minor character/bystander, an omnificent unseen presence, playing a role ‘outside’ of the main story, such as an investigator, journalist, relativedescendant, for example)? h. How the is narrative structured (linear, branching path, nodal, fragmentary, etc.)? i. What are the relationships between the narrative structure and how the participant interacts with the device and the narrative? (Whittaker 2017, 2019) 21. An action utilised in early augmented reality applications such as BigBang’s (2011) Historic Market Street , an augmented reality smartphone App using the Layar software. 22. The sound design for The Cartographer’s Confession was created by Jay Auborn of dBs Music.

References Alexander, Thomas M. 1987. Dewey’s Theory of Art, Experience and Nature. New York: SUNY. ———. 2016. “Dewey’s Philosophy of Art and Aesthetic Experience.” Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal 2 (1) (Art. 9): 59–67.

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Attlee, James, and Emma Whittaker. 2017. The Cartographer’s Confession [iOS and Android Applications]. Accessed March 7, 2019. https://itunes.apple. com/gb/app/the-cartographers-confession/id1263461799?mt=8; https:// play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.calvium.apptrails.ambientliteratu rejames&hl=en_US. Bigbang. 2011. Historic Market Street [Augmented Reality Layar App]. Accessed March 7, 2019. Accessed May 7, 2019. https://www.layar.com/news/blog/ 2011/02/24/stroll-down-san-franciscos-market-street-like-its-1899/. Cardiff, Janet. 1999. Missing Voice (Case Study B) [Audio Walk]. London, UK: Whitechapel Library to Liverpool Street Station. Accessed February 3, 2019. http://www.cardiffmiller.com/artworks/walks/missing_voice.html. Crow, Liz, Ralph Hoyte, Mobile Bristol, and Hewlett Packard. 2004. Riot! 1831 [Locative Narrative]. Bristol, UK: Queen’s Square. Delamain, Jacques. 1932. Why Birds Sing. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd. Dewey, John. 1934. Art as Experience. New York: Perigee. Donovan, Brendan, Alison Wood, Glorianna Davenport, and Carol Strohecker. 2003. “Nature Trailer: Physically Navigate Stories in the Wild.” Design Methods for Ubiquitous Computing in the Wild Workshop, Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia. 2nd International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia December 2003, Linköpings universitet and the Santa Anna IT Research Institute, Norrkoping, Sweden, December 10–12. Accessed February 3, 2019. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0a96/0b31a5ec8fcb823 988619eee6ced7e028408.pdf. Dovey, J., and Fleuriot, C. (2011). “Towards a Language of Mobile Media”. In The Mobile Audience: Media Art and Mobile Technologies, edited by Rieser, M. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V. Gallagher, Shaun, and Dan Zahavi. 2008. The Phenomenological Mind: An Introduction to Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science. London: Routledge. Gaskill, Nicolas M. 2008. “Experience and Signs: Towards a Pragmatist Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 39 (1) (Winter): 165–183. https://doi.org/ 10.1353/nlh.0.0013. Gibson, James J. 1986 [1979]. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Heft, Harry. 2001. Ecological Philosophy in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism. Malwah, NJ: Laurence Erlbaum Associates Inc. Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. James, William. 1890a. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 1. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ———. 1890b. The Principles of Psychology. Vol. 2. New York: Henry Holt and Company. ———. 1907. Pragmatism. New York: Longman, Green and and Co.

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———. 1909. The Meaning of Truth. New York: Longman, Green and and Co. ———. (1910 [1896]). The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. New York: Longmans, Green and Co. ———. 1912. Essays in Radical Empiricism. New York: Longman, Green and Co. ———. 1920 [1878]. “Remarks on Spencer’s Definition of Mind as Correspondence.” In Collected Essays and Reviews. New York: Longmans Green and Co. Johnson, Mark. 2007a. The Meaning of the Body. London: University of Chicago Press Ltd. ———. 2007b. “Dewey’s Zen: The ‘Oh’ of Wonder.” Paper presented at Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, 34th Annual Meeting, Marriott Columbia, University of South Carolina, March 8–10. Johnson, Mark, and Tim Rohrer. 2007. “We Are Live Creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism, and the Cognitive Organism.” In Body, Language, and Mind, Vol. 1, edited by Jordan Zlatev, Tom Ziemke, Roz Frank, and René Dirven, 17–54. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kreiswirth, Martin. 2005. “Narrative Turn in the Humanities.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory, edited by David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan, 377–382. London: Routledge. Levin, Thomas. 1999. Poetics of Transition. Durham: Duke University Press. Malecki, Wojciech, ed. 2014. Practicing Pragmatist Aesthetics. New York: Rodophi. McCarthy, John, and Peter Wright. 2005. Technology and Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Myers, Misha. 2002–2008. Way from Home [Artist Walk Work]. Accessed May 7, 2019. http://www.livingmaps.review/journal/index.php/LMR/art icle/view/61. Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. 2012. Varieties of Presence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1867. “Five Hundred and Eighty-Second Meeting, May 14, 1867, Monthly Meeting; On a New List of Categories.” Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 7 (May 1865–May 1868): 287–298. ———.1905. “Issues of Pragmaticism.” The Monist 15 (4) (October): 481–494. ———.1906. “Prolegomena to an Apology for Pragmaticism.” The Monist 16 (4) (October): 492–546. Pullinger, Kate. 2018. Breathe [Ambient Literature Web Application]. Accessed February 3, 2019. https://www.breathe-story.com/. Rueb, Terrie. 2004 [1999]. Trace [Memorial Sound Installation]. British Columbia: Yoho National Park. Accessed September 24, 2020. http://www. terirueb.net/trace/.

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Ryan, Marie-Laure. 2001. Narrative as Virtual Reality. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. ———. 2006. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ryan, Marie-Laure, and Jan-Noël Thon. 2014. Storyworlds Across Media: Toward a Media-Conscious Narratology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1969. “Structural Analysis of Narrative.” Translated by Arnold Weinstein. NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 3 (1) (Autumn): 70–76. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1963 [1955–1956]. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In Science, Perception and Reality, 127–196. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Speakman, Duncan, et al. 2017. It Must Have Been Dark by Then [iOS and Android Application]. Retrieved February 3, 2019. https://itunes. apple.com/gb/app/it-must-have-been-dark-by-then/id1228697864?mt=8; https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.calvium.apptrails.amb ientliteratureduncan&hl=en. Shusterman, Richard. 1992. Pragmatist Aesthetics. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2000. Pragmatist Aesthetics. 2nd ed. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield. White, Hayden. 1981. “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality.” In On Narrative, edited by W. J. T. Mitchell, 1–23. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whittaker, Emma. 2013. “Listening to Locative Narrative, Illusion and the Imaginative Experience.” Leonardo Music Journal, Special Edition Sound Art, 23 (December): 17–18. Accessed 7 May 2019. https://www.mitpressjournals. org/doi/10.1162/LMJ_a_00144. ———. 2015. “Inside the Snow Globe: Pragmatisms, Belief and the Ambiguous Objectivity of the Imaginary.” Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 13 (3): 275–284. ———. 2017. “Transitions-Felt: William James, Locative Narrative and the Multi-stable Field of Expanded Narrative.” Plymouth University, PhD Thesis. Accessed May 2, 2019. https://pearl.plymouth.ac.uk/handle/. ———. 2019. “The Wave-Crest: Narrative Complexity and Locative Narrative.” In Narrative Complexity, Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution, edited by Marina Grishakova and Maria Poulaki. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/university-of-nebraska-press/978 0803296862/.

Breathe: An Artist Interview with Kate Pullinger Jonathan Dovey and Kate Pullinger

Breathe tells the story of Flo, a young woman who has the ability to hear ghosts. The research question specifically addressed by Breathe asked “How can the affordances of smartphone technology be used to create works that are situated in time and space in relation to the presence of a reader?” (Fig. 1) This interview between Jon Dovey and Kate Pullinger took place in October 2018. Dovey: Could you say something about the inception of this project— where it came from and your starting point for writing it? Pullinger: For me there were two agendas: the Ambient Literature project, and the opportunities that afforded, and my own writing practice and the way its been going, in terms of digitally mediated forms, over the last 15 years or so. In addition, over the last couple of years I’ve become very interested in the smartphone as a delivery platform for fiction.

J. Dovey (B) Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] K. Pullinger Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_12

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Fig. 1 Breathe by Kate Pullinger (Photo Benjie Croce)

The projects that I’ve been involved with in the past, before say 2014, were all meant for desktop or laptop computers. In 2014–2015 I embarked on a collaboration with a German start-up called Oolipo; they were trying to create a commercial platform for stories for the smartphone. That resulted in a novel-length work called Jellybone, which came out in autumn 2017 after almost 3 years of development. So, during that period I’d done a lot of thinking about the affordances of the smartphone, in the idea of creating a form native to the smartphone. Then the Ambient Literature project allowed me the opportunity to take that thinking further, with a different set of creative partners. It also enabled me to develop that character who I’d already been thinking about, and working on, during the whole Jellybone project: Flo Evans, a young woman who can communicate with the dead through her phone. When I first started working on Jellybone I decided I’d like to try to create a character and a storyworld that could be explored across multiple platforms. So when it came to work on Breathe, Flo had been living in my head, by that stage, for several years already. Dovey: Can you describe the trajectory of the project? What did you do? Who got involved when? Where did it finish? What was the narrative of the production process? Pullinger: Two things happened at the same time. One was the Ambient Literature project production process, which started with a discussion with Calvium who’d already worked on the first two ambient

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literature projects, with Emma Whittaker as project producer. But at the same time, I was having conversations with Tea Uglow from Google Creative Labs Sydney. Tea and I spoke at an event together in Brisbane, where we were talking about the future of the book. In that discussion, and subsequent conversations, I described to Tea what I wanted to do, which, at that time, was really around thinking about how to use the smartphone to interact with the room, to find ways to bring ghosts into a reader’s room through the smartphone. Tea’s response was, “Oh Google can do that. We can do that.” So we continued the conversation, bringing in Anna Gerber and Britt Iversen from Visual Editions, the London-based publisher who work with Google Creative Labs on their joint project, Editions at Play. Together they publish somewhere between two and four books for the smartphone every year. They’ve been doing that for three years now. Dovey: So you decided to work with Editions at Play instead of Calvium? Pullinger: Yes. The process was very different than anything I’d ever been involved with, partly because there were four teams involved. There was Visual Editions in London, there was Google Creative Labs in Sydney, there was Grumpy Sailor, the Sydney-based design agency that Google Creative Labs work with, there was the Ambient Literature project, and there was me. So, there was a lot of navigating to be done in those relationships. Dovey: You’ve got this story, and this storyworld, and this idea about ghosts and Flo. How much of the eventual narrative arc for Breathe did you have at that point, where you started off in terms of thinking about the stories about reconnecting with lost mothers in different kinds of ways, and diaspora and the refugee crisis and those issues? Pullinger: Yes. I had all of those ideas in my head from the beginning, or very early on, because that was the story I wanted to tell. The first Flo story, Jellybone, had a storyline woven into it about human trafficking. I was interested in the idea of a young woman who not only communicates with the dead, but she communicates with specific types of dead people, people who are trying to be heard, or trying to be noticed. I think that many of us were preoccupied with that migration, across the Mediterranean, in those years. That’s continued to preoccupy me. Dovey: In some ways the ghosts represent what’s repressed in public consciousness?

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Pullinger: Absolutely, yes. I quite often go to the Mediterranean and, for me, there’s a real tension there about swimming in that sea, and thinking about those stories, those people. Dovey: Can you talk a bit about the process? I’m thinking about your role, as a writer, about the relationship between design coding and authorship, because an enormous amount of the affect in this work comes from the way that the words and the design function together, at the surface of the screen, because it’s brilliant, at that level, and it’s very affecting. I wondered if you could say something about how it was to be a writer, working with those affordances and constraints. Pullinger: Well that aspect of it was a huge amount of fun partly because of the ideas that were presented through the collaborative process, from Grumpy Sailor, Google Creative Labs, and Visual Editions; the visual ideas were always really amazing, really interesting, and very exciting. For me, that was also a new experience, working with designers who were accustomed to a certain type of aesthetic on the smartphone. That felt very new, and different, to me and that was a very enjoyable part of the process but, also, we had lengthy discussions about what we could actually achieve. We very much started out with blue-sky thinking about, for example, how can we bring a ghost into the room? Then we went through an iterative process while we figured out what could actually be made to work within both the timeframe, the budget, and restrictions imposed by everybody’s working conditions etc. Dovey: Part of that constraint was also to do with the fact that the design work, in Breathe, became much more focused around the page rather than the wider affordances of the phone, or, as it were, the wider sensorium of the phone in a room. I remember at one point you wanted to work with the torch in the phone. Pullinger: The torch was the very first thing that came up in my conversations with Tea Uglow. That’s still some way off, but for me, that was a very thrilling idea, that you could use the phone to project in a room without having to have any additional kit. But we weren’t able to make that work. Dovey: How did you write the text within the constraints of the collaboration? Pullinger: The story was developed collaboratively from the very beginning. Not the text and not the ideas behind the text, but the way the story would work on the screen was developed collaboratively, from the

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very beginning, in a Google doc. There was an ongoing process of everybody involved saying, “We can do this. We can’t do that. We want to try this. That didn’t work. We’re going to try this,” etc. Dovey: Did you feel in control of your storyworld or did you feel compromised? Pullinger: I think most collaborations involve a degree of compromise. At some point a decision was taken to pull all our design ideas into a template that used pages, to move closer to the idea of “the book in a room”. I think the pages work very well in this text, but prior to going through the process of making this work, if you’d asked me I would have said, “Why would you use pages? Why are you going to use pages in a digital form? Why are you making it so bookish when it’s not a book?” However, the page structure works really well in Breathe. Dovey: We also talked about using audio at some point as well. We had an assumption that you’d use sound because many of the other works of ambient literature use audio in some way shape or form. Then that wasn’t possible for all kinds of reasons, to do with the constraints that you talked about earlier on, but this turned out to be a really great decision for the project, for the research. Pullinger: Yes. It’s absolutely true that, for Breathe, those two decisions—to use pages, to not use sound—are part of what makes it what it is in the best possible way. I think that’s a very interesting thing that emerges from collaborations. I think the willingness to collaborate in that way—to give over to other people’s ideas and judgements—might be something that not many writers, of fiction, have. Not to boast but, I think the fact that, if you’re a novelist, you have complete control over the world you’re creating; to give up that control is quite difficult for some writers. Dovey: I think if you write for theatre, you have to understand that your world is a collaborative world. Pullinger: And film. Dovey: I wonder if you feel as though when you’re working with code and designers and interfaces, it’s a narrower field of possibility, in a way, or the wiggle room around the moment of implementation and interpretation is much narrower than it would be if you were working in film or theatre. Pullinger: That was very true of this, absolutely, but I think I’m still prone to technological positivism and think that, “Oh you can do anything,” when, in reality, you can’t.

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Dovey: I think this is very important because I think in our attempt to try to share the idea of writing in this formula, as authors, the idea of collaboration is really important to be open about. What would you say to other writers who might be considering working in this form, with these kinds of teams of designers or coders, musicians, labs? What would your advice be? Pullinger: I think if you’re not excited by the idea of collaboration then don’t do it. I think you have to find it exciting otherwise you’re not going to be able to do it. Dovey: I want to talk about location in the story, the way that location and other forms of sensing work in the story. But before we talk about location in the contextual sense of human-computer interaction, I want to talk about the specific location that you imagined for the work because, certainly, this research project positions itself, in some ways, at the end of a history of thinking about locative media. We’ve argued for the idea of ambience as a distinct from the general history of locative based projects. Many of those are designed for outdoor locations, for walking, or for heritage sites, or for stories that evolve in the outside world in some way. You took a very different starting position to that. Can you say something about what your starting position was and why? Pullinger: I wanted to create a piece to be read in your bedroom at night. That was very much part of my idea from the very beginning. Part of that was because of this interest in the smartphone as a reading platform. What kind of fiction reading is native to the smartphone? For me that was also, partly, in reaction against pieces that require you to navigate the city, because of the tension I felt around the assumptions these works make about how comfortable people are navigating the city. The idea of a piece that you read alone, in your bedroom, at night was also because Breathe is a ghost story and I know most people, women in particular, would rather read a scary story in their bedroom at night where they, actually, feel quite secure as opposed to out on the street. Dovey: So did you understand that as a distinct move of a feminist aesthetic, to reposition the work in that site? Pullinger: Yes, absolutely. Dovey: In terms of thinking about the ubiquitous sensing potential of a phone, a bedroom provides a fairly limited pallet of input to play with. Can you say something about how location changes the story, and how

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location changes in the story? What are the moments where the situation of the phone and the situation of the space affects the story? Pullinger: The story pulls in location data from the world around you, via the location API. I wanted to locate the story in the reader’s world, where they actually are, at the same time as playing with the idea that the phone knows where you are, and is a surveillance tool. One of the things that we had a long discussion about, in the collaboration, was what affordances of the phone to use. During my initial discussions with Emma and Calvium, before I became involved with Editions at Play, we had talked about all kinds of things that the phone can do, all kinds of things that the sensors in the phone can do, from making the phone ring and vibrate and notifications to requiring the reader to move the phone in certain ways to access certain parts of the story. What we ended up with, through the use of the three APIs that are in Breathe, is much more subtle than that. I think, again, that was a very useful and interesting outcome of the collaboration. Dovey: What are the APIs that are used? What data are they pulling into the story? Pullinger: Location, weather and time, but in a very broad way with all three applications. For instance, with time and weather, the story changes according to the season, as well as according to the temperature. So instead of the story telling the reader that it’s 13 °C in March, the text might mention that it’s a cool spring day, depending on these conditions. That’s extremely subtle. You would not notice it unless you read the story more than once, at different times of the year. Dovey: So there are certain moments in the text, if I saw it all laid out, where there would be a number of alternatives depending on what the weather API is telling me. Pullinger: Yes, and the same with time. So time could be morning, evening, night, as well as specific time. Dovey: The phone also makes use of its camera in an interesting way. How does that work? Pullinger: For me, that’s the most tantalising bit of Breathe. The camera is only used once but I think it could, potentially, be interesting to develop its use further. When you open the URL on your phone it asks you to enable use of your camera, as well as your location. Then, suddenly, you see the initial text of the story through the lens of your camera, the text is superimposed on your room. That image comes back

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into the story repeatedly but the camera doesn’t take anymore images. The ability to bring in your actual surroundings into the story in that way, to me, seems very interesting. I think the fact that it’s only used in that tiny way in the story is also quite effective because it’s like a ghostly moment, when you see your room. Dovey: So as well as the text becoming ambient and responsive, through those three APIs and through the camera, there’s something else that goes on which are design elements—when you realise that you’re being asked to rub the text out, or the way the clouds obscure the text and also, without spoiling the text for people that haven’t read it, the way that certain kinds of interruptions, from other presences in the story, try to butt into the actual page world of the story. There are things that are going on at the level of the surface of the page that also enrich the experience immensely, just as much as the APIs. I think they’re almost equally effective, in terms of what they make you feel about the storyworld. I wonder if you could say a bit about those elements. Pullinger: Those are the five interrupting ghosts, as we called them, the five different behaviours of the interrupting ghosts. Again, that arose through the collaboration. At one stage I thought that there would be a multitude of additional voices in the story. Once we’d settled on the overall length of the work, it became apparent that would be too confusing and that it would be better to narrow it down. So we came up with this idea of the five interrupting voices, and their specific behaviours, that are interspersed in the story. One of the discussions was around how much to do with all of that, how often to use those interrupting voices and, indeed, how often to use the conditional text that interacts with the APIs. The developers were keen for there to be a lot of variable text in the story. I kept reigning back in on that because I wanted it to be subtle, and I wanted it to have a narrative purpose. I found making the conditional text subtle challenging; it’s not easy. It’s easy to say it’s 4 p.m. or 5 p.m. and 13 ° outside and you might be feeling a bit chilly. It’s much more difficult to create a text where that chilliness isn’t stated but a variable part of the narrative itself. Dovey: Very interesting. That is the grammar of ambience, in its technical sense—serving the meaning-making experience of the story. That actually you have to foreground the latter and control the former, in order for it to not become a game-like demonstration of possibility.

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Pullinger: Absolutely. Dovey: That’s really useful. That, in terms of advice for writers, might actually be even more useful than, “You’ve got to want to collaborate,” because it’s more fine-grained isn’t it? Pullinger: Yes. Dovey: Let’s move onto thinking a bit about the idea of ambience. I want to start this part of the conversation by asking you to reflect upon how this was different to writing digitally-mediated fiction, because you’re very experienced in thinking about interactivity in fiction and what that’s meant to you, over a long period of time of practice. Could you say something about how you might understand those two fields as different, now, from having worked on this project? Pullinger: For me, it’s more about what’s similar about the two modes. One of the things that I have kept doing, unashamedly, is writing linear texts. By that I mean I’m not interested in branching narratives, and I’m not interested in computer-generated narratives either. So, for me, all of the work that I’ve done in digitally-mediated fiction has that as a uniting, abiding, force. The main difference with this piece is that, ironically, it resembles a book more than any of the previous work I’ve done, which has tended to use visual media in a way that’s more integral, more obviously integral, than it is in Breathe. But that’s partly an illusion, because the things that are going on in Breathe are as complex as anything going on in a work that combines media, or a multimedia interactive work. Dovey: I think there’s something quite interesting in that distinction, but it’s also to do with the way in which the affordances that Breathe depends upon, and is delivered through, are also affordances that draw attention to the form and the meaning of the device itself, in the modern world, as opposed to interactive fiction which uses images etc. in a way more like the graphic novel or the computer game. They are, in a funny kind of way, more familiar and slightly less startling. Pullinger: Yes. Dovey: Tell me how you feel about the idea of ambience, then and whether or not it’s changed as your idea of what we might call this field of practice, from digitally-mediated fiction, or locative media. How has making the work changed your understanding of what ambience might mean, in this context?

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Pullinger: It has demonstrated to me the potential power of situatedness, in terms of drawing the reader’s world into the work itself, in a way that good old-fashioned locative media hadn’t done to me before. Dovey: Something that really interested me in the work was the way that time works in Breathe and its relationship to what one might think of as a more general sense of the ambient moment, of the reading experience. Can you say a bit about the different sorts of timescales that are in operation, in Breathe? Pullinger: I think one of the reasons why it works as well as it does is because you can read it all in one go. You know from the outset that that’s achievable. With a 15–20-minute duration readers aren’t intimidated and that notion, from gaming, of the ‘session promise’—‘This is what I’m in for’—really helps with Breathe. But at the same time, I think that within the narrative itself, just like with a short story for instance, you can move back and forth across big stretches of time, fluidly, through narrative. That’s what you can do with prose. Dovey: There’s the session promise, and there’s the narrative construction which goes back; at least two of the characters, who are in the story, do a lot of memory work, a lot of remembering the past and, particularly remembering lost mothers. But in terms of the experience design, one feels as though one is in a very present moment. Not in the way that one does when one reads a short story, from a book, but more in the way that one does when one is in a theatre, where everything is actually happening, now, in the room. It has a lot of that sense of immediacy. I wondered if you could talk a bit about that from a writer’s point of view. Pullinger: That was something I was trying to achieve through the narrative. That is another way in which the constraints that were imposed on the narrative were helpful, in that there was not a lot of space to tell what is, hopefully, a compelling but at the same time multi-layered story. For me, that’s the key writing challenge. That idea of how words can compel people to keep reading is something that I’m very interested in. Dovey: As well as some of those features and languages there are a lot of very short sentences, and a lot of different voices cutting across one another and memories. It’s also written in the present tense: “They’re right here. They’re watching me. They’re watching you. I’m close by.” Pullinger: They drive you forward. Dovey: They drive you forward. They’re very punchy and immediate and create this sense of an unfolding moment, that is both your moment in your bedroom right now, and these are the voices that are present with

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you here and now, as well as that here and now being, then, connected through the technology of the machine, and through the memory of the characters, to these other time zones. Pullinger: I also think it’s partly to do with the specificity of the smartphone, and the way in which so many of us have very intimate relationships with the phone, and how you are used to being compelled by what the phone has to say to you, either because someone has sent you a message, or someone is trying to get hold of you. Dovey: It has an urgency. Pullinger: Also, there’s a way in which we find our phones addictive. Breathe plays with that, and uses that, as part of what makes you want to keep swiping. Dovey: So it has to be urgent. It has to be immediate. It has to be present tense. It couldn’t be Tolstoy? Pullinger: It couldn’t be Tolstoy, definitely not, but I also think there’s other ways of telling compelling stories. I don’t think it always has to be present tense but this particular story had to be present tense. Dovey: One of the chapters that I’ve been co-authoring for this book is about the idea of critical ambience. I’m interested in the idea of forms that draw attention to their own construction, in the experience of their consumption, so that you’re made aware of the way that things are being made, in your pleasure and enjoyment of them. It seems to me that Breathe does a lot of that. Pullinger: For me it feels unavoidable. It’s part of our history of thinking that technology, itself, is haunted. The idea of haunted technology draws our attention to the technology itself, like the poltergeist in the TV, etc. Dovey: Could you say something about what you’d like to see happen, in this field of writing, in the future? Pullinger: I think that the whole notion of situatedness is very interesting; I think we’re onto something there. That is very compelling. Dovey: What do you think about the question that we’ve debated, within the research team, about how you would conceptualise what a more standardised platform would be, for these kinds of experiences? One of our learnings has been that all the most interesting experiences of this kind have bespoke platforms. People have handcrafted a unique set of codes and designs and so on, which makes it quite difficult for publishers and writers to understand. Should we be arguing for something which is a platform? Or is it the case this is an avant-garde practice

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in which everything is always handmade and handcrafted and bespoke and it’s interesting in its own right for that, as a practice that lives in that margin. Pullinger: That’s what Oolipo tried to do and failed after three years— create a platform for writers. It’s also what Wattpad is trying to do, currently, through Tap. Wattpad has 63 m active users and a 12-year history of user-generated content. If they can’t make a platform work then it’s hard to imagine who could. I feel like I’ve seen too many start-ups who’ve tried to create tools for creators go to the wall. Dovey: Well on that happy note we’ll finish! Credits for Breathe Story, Narrative and Text Kate Pullinger Visual Design, Development, and Programming Editions at Play, a collaboration between Visual Editions and Google Creative Labs Sydney, with additional design from Grumpy Sailor

Writing Ambient Literature Tom Abba and Amy Spencer

This concluding chapter addresses the manner in which an ambient work is written, or more accurately, composed as a work of literature. As outlined earlier, the project’s selection of literature as a foregrounded approach to the compositional space within which these works are produced is not without problematic connotation, however the converse of those political, social and epistemological problematics is to highlight the ambition of an ambient literature to produce works that occupy a space designed with story as their primary function. We have considered ludic qualities, alongside the material, experiential and performative functions of immersive work, but these works are designed to speak to the role of language, writing, and the literary as their driving function. Throughout the development of this project, and its accompanying workshops, commissions and audience receptions, there existed two

T. Abba (B) Digital Cultures Research Centre, University of the West of England, Bristol, UK e-mail: [email protected] A. Spencer Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries, Bath Spa University, Bath, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6_13

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opposing (and occasionally complementary) manners by which to understand the work being undertaken. Ambient literature, throughout this volume, can be understood as a lens by which to understand a canon of work that predates our project, and continues beyond it. In that manner, this canon is an expanded one, encompassing soundwalks, immersive experiences and more.1 The preceding chapters, therefore, examine those works alongside those produced within the project, and understand their histories, politics, receptions and productions in order that we might better appreciate how data might aspire to literary form, and how presence impacts and is impacted in turn by a performative mode of storytelling. Alongside that lens though, there is another way by which to understand the ambition of the project. Ambient literature is also the study of objects that deliver and embody digitally mediated situated storytelling. The works produced within the scope of the project—three major commissions and two that occupy a minor key, compose work that represents a specific tenor of immersive storytelling coined as ambient literature. As such, specific qualities of language, experience and mode become visible when addressed as immaterial manifestations of storytelling. This chapter will accordingly lean towards the latter interpretation of our work, exploring qualities present within each work as they might be understood as examples of ambient literature as objects. In so doing this chapter also aims to offer some approaches to the writing of ambient works in this manner. As an ambient work is an event produced by the intersection of complex systems, the process of conceiving and writing it requires an understanding of the complexity of those systems precisely as they intersect at the moment of enactment. Each reader’s experience of a text, be that a conventional novel, short story, novella, experimental Nouveau Roman, or film, television or radio play is inevitably mediated by their situation. Situatedness here, though, is as we have seen, understood as a specific consideration of the reader’s presence in relation to the text; their mood, the time of day, where they are reading; but the truth is that every reader is a situated reader to some extent. What changes within a work we are describing as ambient is that the writer is deliberately manipulating and employing aspects of that situation in order to generate affect. Those complex systems comprise a set of competing, or overlapping contingencies through which an ambient work is constructed. As we have already seen in this volume, they consider the role of the reader, the nature of the digital intervention to the text, the space within which

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the experience takes place, the tension between attention and distraction, the specifics of the temporal experience, the tenor of the work, and the manner by which the reader is addressed. Each impacts on the reader’s experience of the text—rising and falling in significance over the course of a work. Understanding the relationship between each of these and the resultant textual object establishes a ground from which to begin to consider the manner by which such works are written. There are, we propose, no absolute rules by which ambient works operate. Were we to describe them as such, we would render ambient literature inert, a stale form unable to grow or develop beyond the confines of our research project. What is possible though, is to conceive of and analyse a series of grammars that underpin ambient works. To that end, these grammars might be considered as a poetics for ambient literature. This chapter proposes that this poetics involves an engagement with seven features; embodied reading, movement, reflexive technology, performance, textual space, unpredictability and temporality.

Ambient Poetics We posit that ambient literature is in its general conception a mode of embodiment. A reader of an ambient work is present within the text to a different degree than a conventional text allows. The works themselves seek to respond to the presence of their reader, manipulating aspects of that presence in order to reinforce the physicality of a reader’s situation. These responses might correspond to a direct address to the reader’s bodily presence (as they move through space, or respond to external stimuli), or a reflection on the connections between that presence and the world around them. That the reader is embodied within the textual object places their perceptions of the story, their interpretation of events and sequences, as central to their understanding. Ambient literary works, as we have seen,2 drive the reader forward in such a way that skipping back a page or two to clarify a detail, to remind oneself of a character’s action, is more problematic than within a conventional text. It is possible to conceive of an ambient work that specifically permits moving forward and backward through the work, but as these objects have emerged into the world thus far, a particular feature of their mode of address has been that, due to the technologies they use, they do not naturally afford reading in this way.3 As we live our lives in a forward, temporal sequence, so ambient

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literary works echo this aspect of our embodied experience and it becomes a conceptual feature. In light of this, we propose an embodied experience (within ambient works) as counter to Aristotle’s declaration that; Epic poetry and Tragedy, Comedy also and Dithyrambic poetry, and the music of the flute and of the lyre in most of their forms, are all in their general conception modes of imitation. (1996, x)

Aristotle’s dictat has (largely) held true for the canon of Western dramatic and literary forms. Rules, grammars, devices and protocols for storytelling are built upon the foundational conception that the reader/viewer is witnessing an imitation of the complexity of human life. However, is this experience of being embodied within a physical location and within a narrative, different from other types of locative storytelling, where writers and artists use GPS to tell stories through tagging locations? There is a long history in arts and performance by artists such as Janet Cardiff who creates audio walks and writers such as Eli Horowitz, who in The Silent History (2012) allowed a distributed network of contributors to tag stories within the larger frame-world of the work to GPS locations, requiring a reader to move between spaces to access story with the use of a smartphone. Working at the intersection between performance and game are Blast Theory, an artist group using interactive media to engage audiences. Others have explored this terrain and experimented with the idea of the situated reader who engages with a physical location through their movement through time and space. Ambient literature seeks to make work that responds to the presence of a reader. As such, the imitation of reality (or events, actions, natures) that Aristotle places at the heart of his poetics sits outside of the ambition of an ambient work. Our suggestion that embodiment lies at the heart of these works reflects the requirement that a reader be present in order for the work to manifest. An ambient work might be visible prior to this manifestation, in that, aspects of the work exist as physical objects (an accompanying book, artworks, signifiers in the environment); however, unlike a conventional printed text, an ambient work cannot be understood as a whole ‘thing’ until the experience is over, it is therefore ground over figure. Its paratextual elements—which certainly exist and can be recognised—also exist within the frame of the work itself. Genette’s suggestion (quoting Phillipe Lejeune) that paratext might comprise

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‘a fringe of the printed text which in reality controls one’s whole reading of the text’ (1991, 2), the extension of which includes those physical aspects of the text’s container that control aspects of said reading (paper weight and cut, for example) can be seen in ambient works to include the modes of delivery of digital components. Words We Never Wrote, in that it makes use of Bluetooth beacons and installed artworks within an enclosed space, has different paratextual cues than It Must Have Been Dark by Then, which takes place outdoors in a public space. In both It Must Have Been Dark by Then and The Cartographer’s Confession, new factors are also brought to bear—the weather, time of day, whether the space is crowded or quiet—shaping each reader’s experience and rendering their reading unique to them alone. Words We Never Wrote does away with some of these factors—weather is no longer as much an arbiter of experience—and instead the reader has a more direct relationship with the text, possibly offering a mode of reading closer to performance. Breathe, in turn, permits weather to inform the proximity of the story to the reader’s own temporal and geographic location. Conditional text within Breathe, experienced as a background feature of the story and largely invisible to readers of the work, is nevertheless instrumental to the ‘haunting’ experienced as the primary affect of Pullinger’s story. Considered as a whole, these factors, and more, might be interpreted as means of controlling the pitch of an ambient piece, an initial set of building blocks towards a textual as well as embodied experience. In his 2016 study The Weird and the Eerie, Mark Fisher begins by outlining the tensions and difficulties emerging from the extension of Freud’s attempts to explore the unheimlich as a way to understand our relationship with the familiar and the strange. Fisher suggests that the quality of the weird as manifesting ‘that which does not belong’ (Fisher 2016, 13) is a sign that we (as readers) are in the presence of the new— ‘that concepts and frameworks we have previously employed are now obsolete’ (2016, 13). He goes on to propose that the eerie entails a disengagement from the urgencies of the everyday. Experiencing an ambient work asks that the reader construct a new set of responsive manners related to, but at a remove from, conventional storytelling. A voice in their ears might be a narrative voice or a substitute for their own thoughts, positioning them inside the story. That an ambient work makes use of the reader’s location to facilitate aspects of story suggests that Fisher’s proposals concerning the collision of realistic and a traumatising, transcendental ‘other’ site might operate on a different register than they do

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in a written text. Liminal spaces—the thresholds between one world and another state of consciousness—are employed within the weird as a device to destabilise our relationship with Euclidean geometry, with the way in which we ‘read” the world. For Fisher, these thresholds are acutely visible in David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), wherein; If the weird is fundamentally about thresholds, then Inland Empire is a film that seems to be primarily composed of gateways. Yet the space involved is ontological, rather than merely physical. (2016, 57)

Each fiction within Lynch’s film gives way to another, such that the whole becomes a ‘hellish rhizome in which any part can potentially collapse into any other’ (2016, 57). This uneasy relationship with the whole object, in which the immediate relationships between parts become foregrounded, is also found within experiential works more generally, and ambient literature specifically. Ambient literature can change each reader’s perception of the space around them—altering their relationship to a site—providing stories that ‘are always there waiting to be found’. The liminal space here is a site remaining physically unchanged, but now carrying an emotional charge: the afterimage of a story whose trace is unique to each reader, furthermore, this afterimage is arguably visible only to its participants. The materiality of a conventional text affords its reader a reminder of their participation in the author/reader interrelationship—the closed book, dog-eared pages or not, signifies a completed work—but such a tangible marker is not present within a work that returns to the background of a space upon completion. Ambient works might leave visible traces—It Must Have Been Dark by Then’s accompanying book, Words We Never Wrote’s installed artworks—but the text itself—Barthes ‘woven fabric’ that is assembled by the interplay between symbol, meaning, and echo, is constitutionally bereft of a foundational element. The experiential text is rendered invisible at the close of the work, and instead of manifesting as an object to be perceived and understood, it effects an imperceptible hypertrophy of story on the space in which each work is staged. An ambient reader’s perception of the site within which their experience was contained, in which they made contact with an ‘other’ experience and were offered the opportunity to be changed as a result; the locked gate which became, momentarily and then forever, the 27’ wall of concrete around New Orleans that closes the first half of It Must Have Been Dark

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by Then; the armchair within which spectral voices haunted your phone in Breathe; these possess, for each reader, a singular significance. This hypertrophic ‘thickening’ of space is something more than the memory of an event; a meeting, or a final goodbye; they are psychogeographically infected with substance beyond what might be considered usual. The truth of Fisher’s liminal spaces, wherein things that do not belong manifest, is that they present all around us, haunting our everyday. The stories we have been told linger in the sites of their telling; accretions of temporal potential; pockets of time we have lost to narrative. Imitation, as Aristotle has it, acts at a remove from the reader. We are witnesses to an imitative act when we read. Knowing the genre of detective novels, a reader of a pulp thriller conjures a world that extends beyond any description of the smoke-filled third floor office of a worn down private eye. The grammars of story impart pages of additional detail into the way that detective’s client is described without the writer having to spell out every nuance of that world. An ambient work, though, occupies a space within the reader’s world. Their presence as a participant requires that they act upon the text. What we see when we read, as Peter Mendelsund’s study of the creative practice employed by every reader of a conventional text, is a series of embodied visualisations drawn from our familiarity with written narrative. He distils this thesis into a thought experiment that perfectly captures the complex relationship between our imaginations and the form of the written word (Mendelsund 2014, 246); 1. Think of the capital letter D. 2. Now imagine it turning ninety degrees counterclockwise 3. Now take it and mentally place it on top of the capital letter J. Now… What is the weather like, in your mind? Mendelsund’s creation of a rainy day inside our imagination directly speaks to a reader’s ability to construct mental images. While, as we will see, The Cartographer’s Confession asks its reader to shift between temporal spaces mediated by a combination of anchored and inferred photographic connections, It Must Have Been Dark by Then deliberately eschews visual documentation of the sites that are being overlaid across the reader’s experience, requiring them instead to be imagined, conjured just as Mendelsund’s umbrella is. In this way, the reader’s experience, their reification of the ambient text, is mediated by the space in which it

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is performed, from which we could propose that the reader is actually an actor in a production for which they are the only cast member, and the principal audience. This aspect of the ambient is further implied by the narrative address frequently employed in ambient works. A second-person address, fixing the reader as ‘you’, the performer of the piece being played out, reinforces the reader as the focal point within the text’s momentum. Within the work, their attention is all that matters is their attention and the mediation of that attention as it is manipulated by the delivery modes employed. Furthermore, as suggested earlier, the deliquescence implicit with regard to an ambient work presents a particular challenge when considering it as a ‘whole’ narrative object, with an equivalent beginning, middle and end. Ambient works might possess such stages, but their reception is better thought of in temporal terms, in that each actor moves through a series of experiential states before the conclusion of a work. These might be controlled or flow more freely across the narrative stage, but nevertheless do comprise a whole, authored experience. Movement through those spaces and the attendant navigation of such coheres the narrative framework within which the ambient work is considered. It is helpful to think of these in architectural terms, as shifting registers between negative and positive space, and being composed dynamically to encourage the participant to explore, in an equivalent manner to the construction of narrative tension in a thriller. A thriller, conventionally, switches narratorial perspective from chapter to chapter, deliberately designing a structure within which the reward for attentive reading is withheld for a period of time, in order that the reader maintain momentum within the text. Ambient works are able to use this technique, but can also employ spatial relationships as a feature of narrative construction. The space through which we move in an ambient work can accordingly offer denial and reward, revealing details and balancing counterpoints much as a written text employs chapter breaks, page-turns (and their accompanying physical design) and an intrinsic relationship between their reader and the material qualities of the work. It is a rare reader who does not consider the investment of time required to read a novel as bound together with the heft of the book itself. ‘One more chapter before I put it down’ is a common refrain at the end of a day. This relationship between object and commitment, between the journey taken and that yet to come, transposes in ambient works to a presentation of story as mediated by, more often than not, time itself. For example;

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– It Must Have Been Dark by Then is presented as two walks, outward and return, and introduced to each participant as being somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half in length. – The scale of The Cartographer’s Confession, in that it comprises a c. four hour walk across London, combined with its primary reading mode as a GPS driven work, presents an accordant temporal commitment on the part of each reader. – Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming is a fixed work, in that pressing ‘play’ engages a story that will conclude twenty minutes and twelve seconds from that moment. Additionally, the result of approaching writing (or indeed, as we argue, composing ) ambient literature as a literary form is that we see more clearly the extent to which the tenor of reception is impacted by the foundational approach adopted by the writer. It Must Have Been Dark by Then asks its audience to behave as actors in a personalised performance of the work, The Cartographer’s Confession, conversely, situates them as participants in an narrative waiting to be discovered; an already-there pattern of material to be sought out, Breathe requires us to be readers, albeit in a manner that places us inside the story, Words We Never Wrote functions as a mystery box—a story that is visible at the outset as a contained space, but who’s exploration reveals layers of story to each reader. Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming asks its participant to occupy a space akin to that of a listener, albeit to a story they themselves are complicit within. These different modes of activity comprise an initial approach to the design of ambient works, and from the perspective of their readers, offer registers within which the difference between conventional reading and reading a work in this form become visible. Significantly, as has been pointed out in preceding chapters, each of these works ‘train’ their reader in the specific manner by which they will be ‘read’. What they have in common, regardless of their approach, is an understanding that the reception of the work itself is impacted by the means of its delivery. In a manner quite unlike the novel, wherein the form of the work has, over time, become invisible to an immersed reader, ambient works are implicitly concerned with their visibility as structure, rendering them more akin to an artist’s book than a novel. The extent of this relationship is illustrated by Johanna Drucker’s conceptualisation of an artist’s book as one that ‘interrogates the conceptual or material form of the book as part of its intention, thematic interests or production qualities’ (Drucker 1995, 2) What Drucker makes visible is

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an attention to form as it relates to intention and content, as it mediates the overarching materiality of a work through paper, print and binding. Ambient works address a similar set of material concerns—the reader, the nature of the digital intervention to the text, the space within which the experience takes place, the nature of the relationship between attention and distraction, the specifics of the temporal experience, the tenor of the work, the manner by which the reader is addressed—doing so within an experiential form, and invoking an imperceptible hypertrophy of story within an apparently unchanged physical environment. What follows in this chapter is an exploration of the manner by which that hypertrophic layering of story over and within physical space is composed, and concretely written as prose. We do not offer these as absolutes, rather a transpositional set of tools by which to pivot our study from a lens to an examination of objects.

Embodied Reading There is an initial distinction to be made between place-based writing and situated narratives, the difference between reading in place, as an immersive act, and being part of a situated narrative, as a form of embodiment. As we have seen, place-based writing includes the work of Teju Cole who, in his novel Open City, positions his reader in Manhattan, Rebecca Solnit who explores the experience of being lost, Iain Sinclair who reveals London to us and every other writer who wants to situate a reader in place. In works of ambient literature, though, the reader is physically present within the work and it responds accordingly. As we have seen, It Must Have Been Dark by Then, The Cartographer’s Confession, Breathe (and Words We Never Wrote and Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming ) each situate readers in physical and temporal spaces. Such embodied literary experiences bring their reader into contact with a physical location as part of a narrative. The work is often told to a reader, who can be seen, in part, as a ‘reader’ as they are asked to ‘read’ a situation, a context rather than just a text. They are part of the real world, walking on physical streets, hearing sounds, encountering smells and sights at the same time as being part of a located narrative. Their comfort, or lack of such, becomes a figure within the overall construction. It Must Have Been Dark by Then asks its reader to stop from time to time, to observe specific details, engage with physical aspects of the space around them (wood, plants, water), that Speakman

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describes as designed ’to increase their engagement with their immediate environment ’. These moments of recognition, of the real world breaking into the work, remind the reader that as much as their participation, their physical presence is key to reading the experience. These apparently unscripted encroachments on the reader’s route through the story acknowledge the central role embodiment plays in ambient works. Kate Pullinger’s Breathe also acknowledges the presence of its reader, albeit in a different register. Pullinger’s work is a ghost story, described as ‘haunting the reader’. The work’s title page (the most significant paratextual element transposed from its ‘bookish’ formal structure) declares that ‘she knows where you are’. The ‘she’ here is identified as the narrator of the work; a young woman called Flo, who can ‘talk to ghosts’. This address, and the genre tropes it drags in its wake, immediately signify an ‘uncanny’ affect. The ‘welcome’ invitation offered by the homescreen (Breathe is contained within a webApp, and as such, no pre-opening signifiers are visible4 ) speaks directly to the reader, however these words are explicitly instructional, and contain a call-and-response mechanism that reinforces the physicality of the phone in your hand. Once begun, Breathe’s dialogic construction resembles that of a conventional print novel. Pages separate blocks of text, which are swiped in a kindle-like manner from right to left. Three pages in, though, Flo addresses the reader personally; My mother won’t speak to me, so I’ll talk to you instead.

This apparent fracturing of the fourth wall is momentarily jarring, although as the reader has been addressed as an individual prior to the story beginning, Flo’s direct address extends this recognition, rather than problematising it. Flo’s dialogue, though, is accompanied by the first ‘incursion’ by one of five ‘ghost’ voices within Breathe’s narrative flow. A red tint to the phone’s screen spreads across the whole surface as the phone is tilted in the reader’s hand, revealing an additional voice interrupting Flo’s communication with the reader (Fig. 1). The fourth wall is well and truly broken. These ghost voices comprise the most visible instances of Breathe’s use of location API data. Each haunts the reader by including location-specific information within their textual interruptions. The names of nearby (to each reader) cafes, streets and parks are inserted into the ‘ghost dialogue’, compounding the uncanny nature of the narrative presented. Less evident though, are

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Fig. 1 Breathe by Kate Pullinger

temporal API triggers within Flo’s dialogue. Her narratorial voice has already addressed the reader directly, and continues to do so throughout the work. Subtly hidden within the text though, are time-contextual API ‘moments. From page 2 of Breathe, prior to the reader’s encounter with the first ‘ghost’ the text is able to create specific conditional text depending on the reader’s time zone; It’s: late/ getting late now/ early / my favourite time of day. Around me, the city:

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sleeps. / begins to slow / wakes/ fizzes with life.

Unlike the visible incursions from Breathe’s ghosts, Flo’s API interruptions are almost unnoticeable by the reader. Only on repeat readings (at different times of day) might these become apparent. The gentleness by which these specificities are handled within Pullinger’s text stand at odds to the angry brutality of the ghost voices. These (especially that referred to in the script as The Furious Ghost) berate both the reader and Flo, situating the narrator and the narratee as equally haunted by Flo’s ghosts. The reader, as such, is perceptually sitting alongside Flo as the narrative unfolds. Unlike It Must Have Been Dark by Then, Breathe is delivered entirely through text on the screen, and forgoes audio as a delivery medium. Flo’s voice and her recollections of unheard stories (hinted at within the work) are solely the result of Pullinger’s writing, and not subject to augmentation through a complicating layer of meaning. The result of this is that the eventual reveal of the true nature of the voice labelled ‘Main Ghost’; the peripeteias of the drama we are complicit in; happens to both Flo and the reader simultaneously. That this is a feature of conventional texts is not in doubt (unless a reader has read ‘ahead’ and cheated themselves out of a narrative surprise), but here, partially as a result of the strict linearity of the text (it is impossible to read the last page without reaching it naturally), and the dual layers of the hauntings, both parties perceive the conclusion, and its emotional impact.

Movement In both Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then and Attlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession, the process of walking is employed as a literary device. A reader, physically located in a location, is asked to walk as a process through which they engage with story. There is a wide history of literary walking that we can draw on to understand this process, including the well worn figures of Walter Benjamin’s Flaneur (2002) and Debord’s (1994) experience of the dérive. However, these are enactments of a particular kind of walking, a celebration of wandering and of moving through space. Psychogeographic writing invites its reader to imagine they are present within a physical environment through the reading process but they are, notably, physically absent. A number of smartphone apps have explored the physical manifestation of the dérive

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in a manner not wholly bound to the conventions of locative media; Mark Shepard’s ‘Serendipitor’, Broken City Lab’s ‘Drift ’ and Cachucho and Fakhamzadeh’s ‘Dérive’ each disrupt the experience of walking within an urban space with the intention of reproducing an uncontrolled wander through the world. Arguably, ambient literature takes this intention to wander a stage further. A reader’s physical situation allows a writer to draw deeper connections to context and time. Walking through a space, a reader is able to connect to the place through movement, through physicality, by actually being there and the story unfolding as they walk. In this way, they embody the narrative and their movement through it is constituent to its manifestation. This experience of moving through space in an ambient work, though, is mediated, authored. Michel De Certeau (1984) writes that ‘walking in the city is an acting out of place. Both walking and language are creative acts, which you can improvise and make connections and make your own decisions’ (97). By walking, the reader is slowed down and there is room for interruption. The reader of The Cartographer’s Confession is asked to move through a physical space and engaged with the world both physically and imaginatively. They make some choices about where they go and each experience of the work is arguably unique. However, the reader is not as free as they think they are. When writing about the dérive, Guy Debord (in Andreotti and Costa 1996) recognises that the city controls wanderings through currents, fixed points and vortexes; In a derive, one or more persons during a certain period drop their usual motives for work and action, their relations, their work and leisure activities, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. The element of chance is less determinant than one might think: from the derive point of view, cities have a psychogeographical relief, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes which strongly discourage entry or exit from certain zones. (22)

Both The Cartographer’s Confession and It Must Have Been Dark by Then unfold through this idea. The reader is asked to navigate a space but boundaries and borders will impede and curtail their movement. Passing entirely freely from one place to the next is partially controlled as the physical city controls movement. As It Must Have Been Dark by Then

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is designed to be experienced in any location, these controls are unpredictable. There are waterways, commercial and business zones, fenced off areas and dangerous, unsafe, places restrict the reader’s ability to access certain areas of a location, as part of a situated narrative, and serve as a metaphor. The reader experiences a work about physical global borders while experiencing borders in front of them. The time of day they choose to experience the work, in daytime or evening, provide different experiences while navigating physical spaces. The Cartographer’s Confession makes use of London, a space familiar to scholars of the psychogeographic, Arguably richer than simply witnessing a psychogeographic layering, this work, while retaining a linear, fixed path, layers past and present in such a palimpsestuous manner to produce a work in which the spaces between fixed points—the reader’s walk from Tate Modern to Borough Market, for example, occupies an uncontrolled element of the experience. Familiarity, or not, with London’s byways imparts an additional layer of significance to the work, one unmediated by the author. In an earlier locative work, Linked (2003), by the artist Graeme Miller, the contours of the M11 in London were explored and stories told about what was there before the road was built. Participants borrowed equipment from the local library and listened to the stories of what was lost told by those residents who once lived here. This work responds to de Certeau’s (1984) Walking in the City and Miller (in Hopkins et al. 2009) explains; Linked requires a different way of thinking about both the city and its stories: it requires me to traverse the line between privacy and publicity; it requires the attention of an actor (where is the next transmitter; where is my next cue?), the creative generosity of an audience member (how do I connect to, feel for, this disembodied voice?), and an affective, whole-body immersion in the spaces of its words. People, birds, cars; take-away curries and diesel exhaust; wrong turns, sore ankles, and relieved discoveries: I’m not just piecing together a story. I’m taking part in the rehearsal of a community, its rebuilding via its collective restaging. (3)

Through the process of walking, the reader unlocks aspects of the narrative and a hidden world is revealed. Ambient works draw on a canon of locative media, and from a technological perspective, make use of manners and delivery systems familiar

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to that form. Whereas, though, a locative work might be defined as principally tied to a location, an ambient work responds to the site it holds as referent. There is, evidently an overlap between the two forms, however the ambition of the Ambient Literature project to reclaim certain bookish practices within a field study of situated digital storytelling reclaims the literary as a foregrounded concern over the locative. Movement, and an ongoing reference to the significance of momentum, becomes a mode inherent to the construction of story, as much as an element of it.

Performance In a consideration of ambient literature as a literary form, we can reflect on it as a type of performance. In particular, we can see how it can operate as a temporal form, where a reader is drawn into a narrative for a specific length of time through interaction with a physical location. D. J. Hopkins, Shelley Orr and Kim Solga (2009) recognise the value of performance in the urban space. They believe that; Performance has been forced to crowd the margins of urban discourse without being fully recognized as essential to the work of the city – why the sometimes vexed, always multi-layered relationship between ‘writing’ the city (a seemingly private, often intensely individualized exercise) and performing (in) the city has been so unevenly represented in urban literature as hierarchy in which writing is always the first term. (6)

This sense of performing the city has a long history of works of locative media. However, it does not always include the use of language to achieve literary qualities. For example, in the artwork Britglyph by Alfie Dennen, which took place between December 2008 and March 2009, participants were asked to travel to specific locations within the UK carrying with them a stone or rock taken from where they lived. Once reaching the requested location, they were instructed to record themselves with the stone or rock and contribute this to the project’s website, leaving the rock at the location. This project, despite not using language as its primary mode, other than through the use of instructions to participants, foregrounds experience through performance. Writing ambient literature does not demand that the author consider performance as an absolute diktat, rather an opportunity to produce an affective moment unique to a literary form that merges technology and

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presence. The narrative in Breathe is responsive to specific aspects of the reader’s situation, but these are delivered passively, from a receptive position. Towards the end of the work though, in addition to the frequent breaking of the fourth wall between text and reader, Flo’s relationship to her reader takes on a new mode, as she asks the reader to; Place your hand against the wall nearest you. I place my hand against the wall nearest me. We’re connected now. We’re touching. Me in my place; you in yours.

This apparently simple act of physical intimacy would appear stranger where it to be requested from a character within a printed novel. No matter now realistically drawn, Anna Karenina as unlikely to make this request of Tolstoy’s reader. The temporal distance between reader and fiction, the role of printed prose, Anna’s narratorial voice; all of these occupy a specific place in the history of the novel, and each asks the reader to imagine Anna’s face, her physical presence in an imagined, albeit historically situated world, but she remains a character in a novel. Pullinger stops short of identifying Flo as anything more than a character as cipher. This short section is the closest she offers as a description; You’ll want to know a bit more about me first. So that you’ll recognise me when we meet. I’m twenty-four years old. My favourite colour is green.

No further detail is imparted. Flo remains, throughout Breathe, a voice lacking contextual information. As Peter Mendelsund observes (2014, 242); Characters have only implied corporeality. And our imaginations grant them unity. But characters are also defined by what they are not.

The omission of any defining characteristics describing Flo allows each reader to imagine her fully. Flo’s ‘unity’ is brought about by her relationship with her reader, by the skin colour, hair, build, height and facial features they decide their interlocutor should possess. We have no clear picture of Flo; Pullinger offers us none; we each build her from scratch. Mendelsund again;

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There is no such thing as a close-up in prose. A detail may be called out in a narrative, but the effect is not the same as that of a camera, zooming in. These events in fiction are not spatial, but semantic. (2014, 280).

This is true of Pullinger’s writing in Breathe, however it is arguable that an ambient work operates in a different register to a prose fiction. When the narrator’s voice in It Must Have Been Dark by Then asks ‘What is the ground like under your feet? Is anything growing there?’ she is explicitly asking the participant to focus on the proposed ground. The camera figuratively zooms into focus on a sliver of green Speakman anticipates as present beneath the participant’s feet. These moments— fragmentary instances that Speakman describes as ‘spaces for the world to happen’—serve to reinforce a sense to which the work is written for you, and you alone. Speakman can be confident that in any urban space there will be an organic presence among the concrete and stone. Nature finds a way, after all. Pullinger’s instruction to place a hand against a wall, as her character does the same, occupies the same affective range. Each reader experiences a connection with Flo, and each does so according their mental image of the character. Alain Robbe Grillet describes the transformation that adaptation invokes as; …The empty chair became only absence or expectation, the hand placed on a shoulder became only the impossibility of leaving… But in the cinema, one sees the chair, the movement of the hand, the shape of the bars. What they signify remains obvious, but instead of monopolizing our attention, it becomes something added, even something in excess, because what affects us, what persists in our memory, what appears as essential and irreducible to vague and intellectual concepts are the gestures themselves, the objects, the movements, and the outlines, to which the image has suddenly (and unintentionally) restored their reality. (Robbe-Grillet 1965, 54)

The gesture Robbe Grillet identifies might be a hand placed against a wall; a fictive act restored to reality and existing in a liminal space between the real and the imagined. It is possible to address the manner by which It Must Have Been Dark by Then proceeds, given this de-grounding, as an extension (or transposition) of Charles Olson’s ‘composition by field’. Olson’s proposition that;

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From the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—puts himself in the open—he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself. (Olson 1950, 2)

And furthermore; …how the principle can be made so to shape the energies that the form is accomplished. And I think it can be boiled down to one statement (first pounded into my head by Edward Dahlberg): ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION. (1950, 2)

Transitioning across an urban space, with referent to a map without visual markers (as seen, only the blue dot indicating your position is retained within the interface; all other information (tiles containing streets, buildings etc.) is removed), one’s journey is guided solely by the instructional voice. That some ‘stops’ are indicated within the software, and others apparently under the aegis of the walker, produces a sequential, emergent journey akin to Olson’s decree regarding perception. In Olson, concerned with the construction of poetry, we find a way to describe the movement through It Must Have Been Dark by Then’s spatial sculpture, from one point of ‘energy’ to the next. Accepting that this interpretation is specific to Speakman’s ambient work, it nevertheless proposes a means by which to consider the construction (at an experiential level) of space within which an ambient work might be composed. Performance within an ambient work also works to free the text from the confines of the (immaterial) page. The reader of an ambient work, as has been suggested earlier, experiences that space as a hypertrophically richer environment than their non-reading counterparts. Their London is suffused with Thomas Andersen’s story of migration and deceit, their imposition of the Louisiana wetlands over the city-space in which they walked It Must Have Been Dark by Then is theirs alone, but is no less tangible for there being no cartographically rendered metaphor for it outside of the ambient work itself. That they have been required to perform the story, even in a minor key, imparts a specific tenor to their reading of the space. The closing beat of the work, the erasure of the map as the reader stands back in the place they began their journey, reveals the affect of the ambient work to have been a specific layering of space

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over space. It Must Have Been Dark by Then’s closing lines erase any permanent presence of the work in the world; I hope you remember being here now They will remember you I hope you remember being here now We will remember you

All that remains is the memory of a walk, and the shifting registers of imagined spaces merging with the real. The experience of performing the work is no less real than reading a book, than watching a film. But with no record made, each remembered gesture serves as a personalised marker, a suite of bookmarks invisibly inscribed across concrete and glass.

Textual Space Ambient literature has the potential to transform physical space into textual space and cities can become sites of narrative and experience through a process of technologically supported literary place making. This proposition draws on the positioning of mobile media and location aware technologies within the history of site-specific storytelling (Farman 2015). The perception and interpretation of space by a reader changes as they are led to ‘read’ context and situation as part of narrative. For urban theorists Reyner Banham (1971) and Kevin Lynch (1960), the city is a ‘legible’ text, for Jason Farman (2015) there is a process of urban markup in operation and for Ben Russell (1999), locative media makes it possible to annotate the world with ‘invisible notes attached to spaces, places, people and things’ (4). Through the process of marking physical space as part of a narrative, it becomes textual space. We can look to early spatial theory for an understanding of how physical spaces can become literary spaces and begin to reach an understanding of how individuals physiologically experience urban spaces. Writing in Metropolis and Mental Life in 1903, Georg Simmel (1971) begins the psychological argument that living in a city space effects an individual. Like Simmel, Henri Lefebvre (1991) is also concerned with the interplay between the spaces of the city and the mental life of the citizens. However, he is less concerned with the impact on mental life and more interested in how mental life is projected outwards and how the citizens display their emotions in urban spaces. Both theorists feel that the key

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to understanding the dynamic between social space and mental life is the ‘transition’; how we act upon the space and how we perceive it, rather than the physicality of the space itself. Lefebvre did not see the city as a form of text to be interpreted or ‘read’. Instead, it is a space to be perceived. It is mapped, calculated, controlled and exploited. Its inhabitants are not passive consumers of the space, rather they create the space. De Certeau (1984) later agrees with this idea but questions the purpose of creating certain urban spaces. Believing that it is inhabitants who place meaning on the city space, adapting the space to fit to their own needs rather than the space altering the individual, he explains that people need to mould the city space to understand it. Whereas Simmel is interested in how the city affects the inner life, Lefebvre and Certeau consider how an individual projects themselves onto the city space. All attempt to address how space is connected to mental life, how the complexities of the inhabitants of the city operate within the urban space. This is relevant for our discussion of ambient literature as we can see the psychological impulse to map physical space as part of the process of interpretation and understanding. Digital literary space in a physical location is a hybrid consisting of the real world augmented with a textual layer (de Souza e Silva 2006). Digital works can play with this idea of overlaying digital space on physical locations to different effects. In Blast Theory and the Mixed Reality Lab’s Can You See Me Now? (2003), online players competed on the street, using handheld computers, tracked by satellites and armed with a map of the city. Physical and online participants competed and, through this act, entered a relationship. This game overlaid a virtual city onto the physical to examine the themes of absence and presence. Blast Theory’s Uncle Roy All Around You (2003) is a game in which online and street players collaborate to explore a mixed reality city and collaborate to find Uncle Roy before being invited to make a year-long commitment to a stranger. Again, this world adds a virtual story through a combination of narrative and technology to a physical place. Such locative works overlay story on place. However, we can question whether this a literary experience. In Missorts (2012), produced by Situations with the writer Tony White, presents Bristol, UK, with a permanent public artwork that engages participants with story. Using a location-triggered smartphone app, ten site-specific stories and a musical soundtrack were revealed as a participant moves through the city. Here, fiction becomes subsumed into the city streets. In contrast, other works

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of locative media can take a heritage approach and focus on revealing an historical understanding of place through overlaying story onto real world locations. For example, The Lost Palace (2016), produced in London by the Historical Royal Places collaborating with Historic Royal Palaces, designers Chomko & Rosier and theatre makers Uninvited Guests, offers a visitor experience to Whitehall Palace. Participants are given bespoke handheld devices and through binaural 3D sound and haptic technology they are guided through modern day Whitehall to experience the past. Participants are embedded in a narrative, which connects them to specific historical details. The Cartographer’s Confession occupies a similar space between fiction and reality. James Attlee’s ambient work is narrated by two voices— Catriona Schilling, a filmmaker and author living in 2014, and Thomas Andersen, the eponymous cartographer—Schilling’s presence on video introduces the piece (Schilling is portrayed on film by the actress Emily Woof), and peppers the content of the work with an annotator’s observations on the tapes Andersen has recorded, alongside a series of oblique remarks on the migratory habits of swallows, the significance of which becomes clearer towards the conclusion of the piece. Woof’s portrayal of Schilling on film presents this as a mixed-media work in a manner distinct from Breathe 5 ; Attlee’s work employs video, audio, photography, text and facsimile radio recording to convey the story of Thomas Andersen’s life in the London of the mid twentieth century. The delivery of this work is ostensibly conventional (within the expected frameworks of mixed media works), however it is in its manipulation of history and place that The Cartographer’s Confession demonstrates the uncanny affect within ambient literature. Standing outside Waterloo Place (photo), listening to Andersen’s recollections of standing in the same spot; Holding the photograph, it wasn’t hard to find the exact spot where Al had set up his camera that day— just to the left of the column at the top of Duke of York Steps, looking up Lower Regent Street from Waterloo Place. I was thinking how tightly he gripped her hand, how he was the one stopping her coming back to me.

The overwhelming sensation is of being haunted by Attlee’s prose (Fig. 2). The reader’s eye finds the spot Andersen is describing, and their eye scans around the streets, taking in statuary, gates, lampposts and trees.

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Fig. 2 The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee

As Attlee has it: ‘It felt uncanny, that’s the word’. This double haunting— Andersen is describing finding the spot the reader is finding in order to recreate a photograph of his mother and a man he thinks might be his father—produces a peculiarly vertiginous affect. We are standing in London, in the present day, simultaneously occupying the same spot in the 1950s, and decades before then. Attlee’s work apparently engages its reader in a familiar manner, but beneath the surface, its relationship with the reader’s perception of time is intertwined with their reading of the world around them. Furthermore, it is useful to consider the ways in which these works relate to their reader’s perception of the real, to how they might be read in concert with broader conceptual frameworks. The chapter “What We Talk About When We Talk About (Ambient Literature) Context” of this book has explored the manner by which a vertical layering produces a synecdochically entangled space. Developing this further we might propose that ambient works operate in a manner similar to Timothy Morton’s

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hyperobjects . For Morton, a hyperobject occupies simultaneous distance and presence. ‘Hyperobjects are here, right in my social and experimental space… global warming burns the skin on the back of my neck’ (Morton 2013, 27). Our perception of hyperobjects is, as Morton has it, of ‘vivid intimacy’ and a ‘sense of unreality’ (2013, 32). Arguably, this distance and presence, this unlayering of the world finds an echo in the ways in which perception is manipulated in an ambient work. We cannot see every element present in these works, not least because many of them are immaterially bound within the larger narrative, but they are present nonetheless. Speakman denies us the opportunity to see the landscapes he is inviting us to share; instead we conjure them from sound, from voices and field recordings. Thomas Andersen’s London is not physically present, but we believe, as we traverse a historiographically mediated landscape that we are walking now, and experiencing an inflated now. The APIs personalising our experience in Breathe are invisible, but we see their effect on Pullinger’s prose. Ambient works here act as agents, permitting story to flow through them, filtered to our fixed position in the temporal and geographic present.

Unpredictability Despite fulfilling many of its conventions, ambient literature challenges core concepts of literary form as it requires its authors to relinquish a sense of authorial control. An author required to write for a physical and temporal space open to often unpredictable elements has to anticipate the manner in which they become a fundamental part of the narrative. The nature of authorial control over a narrative must therefore bereconsidered and techniques from arts and performance practices employed. The writing experience, though, is broadened as the author orchestrates an experience for readers and embraces the potential to develop, or repurpose, literary techniques. Relinquishing a degree of control over the narrative and leaving room for external features has long been a feature of experience design. Here though, the process involves a shift in the understanding of authorship and a recognition of the need for adapted writing practices. As we have seen, an author must leave space for the world to enter the narrative in often surprising ways. Ambient literature requires an author to write for a physical and temporal space open to unpredictability. A reader may be prompted to explore a city street and the urban fabric of this physical

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location becomes an integral part of the narrative but one that the author cannot fully control. There may be interruptions by passersby, they might get lost in a physical space, encounter places that cannot be accessed or unexpected sights that prompt distraction from an otherwise immersive experience. These spaces between the reader and the world, away from the printed page, where the positions of author and reader shift, are of interest for an understanding of how ambient works relate to the literary. The site of reading is an integral part of the story; the reader embodies the narrative and the real world, with its unpredictability, serendipity and potential for interruptions. Unpredictability here can be read as a literary feature, rather than a side-effect of techniques used to produce heritage walks, with factual information about a place tagged by GPS to its location. These technologies and ideas inspired by existing forms can be used to produce literary experiences. Adriana de Souza e Silva and Daniel Sutko (2011) argue that pervasive computing, on which ambient literature relies, offers an opportunity for us to be connected to our environment, not just immersed in a device, such as a smart phone. However, this opens us up to the potential for unpredictability. A reader physically navigating a physical space in a piece of digitally situated literature cannot always be controllable, cannot always be directed by an author in the same way as in a printed book. The narrative is not, like a book, bound by a material form. Without such a framing device, and with its position embedded in the physical world, the boundaries of this narrative form are often in flux and the boundaries between reader and text increasingly porous. In It Must Have Been Dark by Then, the reader is led to find a place in the city where they can find something growing. This could be a shoot of plant peeking through a piece of tarmac or a tree surviving among the concrete. The moment of noticing a piece of nature as the narrative prompts them to, feels coincidental, as though the unseen author knows exactly what you see in front of them. Such affective moments, as have been reported in the chapter “The Cartographer’s Confession: An Artist Interview with James Attlee”, have been ‘read’ as coincidences afforded by the meeting point of software and story, but rather they are designed as serendipitous confluences of the anticipated and expected features of an urban landscape.

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Unpredictability, then, becomes a spanner in the toolkit of ambient authorship. Speakman has spoken of the overlapping modes of engagement required to ‘read’ It Must Have Been Dark by Then, but as an author composing a work of this nature, constructing that series of layered modes is compounded by the difficulty of not knowing the extent to which the world has crept in around the edges of the reader’s experience. Within Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming , this unpredictabilty is compounded by the inclusion of a deliberately random element pivotal to the narrative conclusion. During the work, each participant carries a paper-wrapped package, which they have been instructed (prior to the work beginning) to open ‘when the time feels right ’ (Fig. 3). Inside the wrapping is a paperback book, a single page of which has been redacted to reveal a new sentence from the text printed there. These are distributed to audience members without plan or pattern, their redacted pages similarly selected without pre-ordained structure. The page is revealed (fictively) to have been composed by the reader 24 hours previously, in a moment of fugue the piece recreates narratively.

Fig. 3 Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming by Tom Abba

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The inclusion of this element adds to a deliberately unstable conclusion— the author of the work does not control the moment the package is opened, or read. On one hand, this renders the inclusion of the page an unpredictable element, however that the reveal of the page’s significance and authorship is held until the end of the work; You grasped the pen as if it were a knife and you carved a set of words from the paper. We watched you searching for each word, as you cut the remainder away. When you were done, you dropped the book to the ground, where we found it. We found it yesterday, and we’re giving it back to you today. Giving it back because the only person who knows what those words mean is you.

This results in the page’s presence becoming less unstable, and, instead, the unpredictable moment is anchored to in the personal significance of the words revealed to the reader. The proffered ‘the only person who knows what those words mean is you’ serves to suggest that this page indeed holds some profound message for the reader, regardless of their having had no actual say in its creation. Participants remarked on the synchronicity of opening a page with a personalised note, reporting not confusion, but rather a desire to glean some meaning from the words presented, as if they were indeed complicit in its authorship. The authorial gamble presented within Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming served to reinforce the audience’s presence within the work itself, recognising their presence as central to the shared authorship of the final moment. When a reader experiences an ambient literary form, they are asked to simultaneously navigate both a physical and imaginative world while at the same time experiencing embodiment in a narrative. This involves careful authorship and the rethinking of what we understand as literary and a space for understanding how we can challenge and reshape the act of reading by developing new literary techniques.

Temporality As a situated literary experience, a work of ambient literature does not need to be bound by a material form, such as a book. Without such a framing device, and with its position embedded in the physical world; the boundaries; the narrative edges of this form are potentially in flux. The

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text can shift and respond to the presence of the reader and its beginning and ending can become blurred. It takes on a temporal form with similarities to features of performance art, with a beginning and an end, but the reader may not know what to expect in-between. This lack of expectation, an unfamiliarity with the emerging form, may lead the reader to be more open to the world around them, to read their experience as a form of performance, unsure themselves of the partition between the work and the physical world. What this affords the writer of an ambient work is the opportunity to actively manipulate their reader’s perception of and relationship to temporality. Words We Never Wrote, despite being written with an explicitly non-linear structure, nevertheless is experienced as a composed whole by its reader. Rereadings of the work might reveal the mechanical extent of the reordering of the work, but as the delivery of the non-linear sections is governed by a falling away of the initial complexity (as each ‘section’ is read, it is removed from the work, leaving an inevitable conclusion), the moment of completion always results in a linear experience. The relationship between a temporal description of an ambient work and its reader’s understanding of the overall frame of experience has been discussed already, however more can be said about the accordant relation between time and the form of the works under discussion here. We propose that temporality presents itself in two overlapping manners within these works; – Compositional Temporality—by which form of the work itself can be seen as an extended statement, akin to a musical score. – Experiential Temporality—by which the content of the work reflects temporal subjectivity, displacement, or otherwise exploits immersive behaviour on the part of the participant. With regard to compositional temporality, these works are orchestrated, and often thought of by their readers as movements through the world. Their shape, understood as a coherent whole, is constructed by registers of attention. Malcolm McCullough identifies the relationship between attention and distraction as resulting in ‘bottlenecks’ wherein ‘the brain must engage one cued attention set for another’ (McCullough 2013, 62). Nevertheless, he reflects that ‘tacit knowledge provide(s) a sense of flow,

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in which attention becomes effortless’. We would argue that an attentive compositional temporality is a significant factor in this ‘effortless perception’ of ambient works. It Must Have Been Dark by Then, in particular, possesses a structure attentive to the manner in which attention is consumed within experiential design. While the work itself is composed of staged encounters with stories that thematically build towards a picture of impending environmental and societal catastrophe, each encounter, taken in of itself, commands a particular relationship with the overall temporal composition of the work. As we will see, from the opening moments of language, and a specific register within the work as to who is narrating, to the subversion of learned behaviour in the return journey as the reader is carried into the future of their environment, Dark by Then effects a narrative form best imagined as possessing orchestral qualities, within which each element supports the whole. While apparently secondary to the potential manipulation of temporal narrative progression within a work, it is nevertheless useful to note this feature of ambient work. In that the borders of the container for these experiences is externally invisible—there is no page count or framing object by which to apprehend the text prior to entry—finding a means through which to transpose anticipated narrative form is necessarily useful in order to provide a conceptual bridge for each reader. Temporal disruption is also a feature of the content of an ambient work. While within It Must Have Been Dark by Then, no cue is given as to ‘when’ these events related are taking place. While that the defences around New Orleans have been erected post-Katrina fixes the field recordings and documentary content some years hence, the most powerful temporal moments within the work occur precisely when time is not fixed. During the reader’s return journey, they are displaced from the present moment, and offered a glimpse of the future of not only the landscapes they have experienced through the work, but also their own; You were only in this place minutes ago but things have already shifted and tomorrow the ground will forget you were here now I am 12 and there is more salt in the water now I am 20 and no one tends the oasis now I am 35 and I work in a hotel now I am 70 and the sand is reaching the north.

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None of these ages correspond to fixed points in time. The narratorial voice stands in for the reader, for the inhabitants of (in this instance) Douz, and for any number of unheard voices represented by the concerns of the work. There is, within this short passage, no determined ‘subject’ whose life experience is being referenced. Other than a glimpse of a future within which the desert has encroached further into the inhabited regions of the Sahara, no solid foundation exists for the reader to base their understanding on. Furthermore, if movement is, as we have suggested, a feature of an ambient poetics, then movement and temporality combine here to produce a subtle, but nevertheless singularly uncanny affect. While hearing those words (above), the reader is making their way back across a map they have drawn across their urban landscape; a map that took approaching an hour to compose, as markers were digitally ‘dropped’, and the territory identified and mapped. The return journey, retracing their steps through a map they alone are privileged to see, takes less than half that time. From an objective perspective, nothing has physically changed within the landscape, however from a subjective, narratologically framed point of view, the environment is now suffused with hitherto unnoticed meaning, and becomes one within which temporal certainty is somehow compromised. The Cartographer’s Confession, accordingly, overlays time throughout its structure. The haunting referred to earlier in this chapter is not only a function of textually mediated space, but also a specific result of time being fluid within the work itself. In order to understand how this is a singular function of a digitally mediated work, it is necessary to consider how the work functions at a granular level. Where The Cartographer’s Confession to be presented as a conventional novel, the themes of the work would remain, and arguably be presented in as rich a manner as its instantiation as an ambient work. The layering of photography and text within the work calls to mind WG Sebald’s strategies6 with regard to the relation between seeing and reading, however here the practice is compounded by the reader’s presence within the story as it is unfolded. The reader is aware of the separation of image and text as they walk the same streets as Attlee’s narrator, however, and with regard to the work’s use of ambient poetics, they are denied distance from the encounter. Their experience of the moment is a combination of performance, an enhanced textual space, and the specific temporal affect Attlee produces in that moment. Unable to unsee the connection between past and present, the reader is Thomas Andersen, while remaining themselves. Were this a

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novel, we would be able to put the book down, to step away from the vertiginous edge. As it is presented here, the weather in London, our footsore walk across the city, the sights in front of us and the echo of them there on our phone, this uncanny meeting of technology and prose and presence, all combine to tie us there, to let us see and be simultaneously and, because this is a story being told above all, to use the moment, and the temporal layering, to know something Andersen only suspects. Attlee is a storyteller, and allows his reader to slip between being present in the moment and reading the larger work.

Reflexive Technology A reader of an ambient literary work does not only embody a narrative through place or enact it through walking. The experience is also one built of data, which is experienced through narrative. Pullinger’s Breathe uses APIs as an integral part of the process of authoring the work. This brings the reader into the narrative in an unsettling way. Words We Never Wrote asks the reader to perform their movement within an enclosed space, within which their proximity to fixed beacons not only triggers each fragment of a whole narrative, but amplifies and filters that content according to information gathered by the device during the whole work. Each of these works delivers a story in a traditional sense—a beginning that gives way to a middle, and reaches towards an end, but each does do with due attention to the technological filter provided the smartphone delivering it. The data generated by the reader’s movement in Words We Never Wrote invisibly informs the order in which the non-linear centre of the work is perceived by the reader as possessing a cohesive linear structure. Breathe, as has been noted, is effectively a different story each time it is read. Connections to the reader’s position in time and space afford personalised variance for each reader. The reader may then be brought into an enhanced experience of their subjection to data networks in everyday life. Such an approach to using data in the production of narrative similar ways has been used in other writing projects that may be understood as the literary equivalent of certain kinds of data visualisation. In On your wrist is the universe, N. Adriana Knof (2016) reworks real-time data about satellites, rocket bodies, planets and stars to generate poetry, which is then displayed on a reader’s wrist using a smart watch. J. R. Carpenter’s This Is a Picture of Wind (2018) makes use of data from live wind reports

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for the South West of England to present a poetic response to the winter storms of 2014. Such works could not exist away from their digital form and their handling of data is explicitly literary. Within an ambient work, consideration is also made as to the role of technology as a framing medium. A smartphone is not a neutral carrier of story in the way a printed book is, but rather foregrounds its own existence such that it can interrupt the story itself. Within each of the works commissioned during the project, careful consideration of the role of the phone foregrounded the creative process. Whether the device exists as a map, a container, a stand-in for a conventional book, or a responsive transmitter, that these works are mediated by a digital device is instrumental in their design. Within a work of ambient literature, we can also observe specific manipulations of language and voice, impacted by choices made by the author and considered in light of their transmission as a digitally mediated experience. It is here that the distinct registers that operate within an ambient work manifest. The precise nature of the authorial voice as it is delivered makes the actor receiving it complicit in the construction and interpretation of meaning and significance. By way of example, consider this short extract, from the audio which opens It Must Have Been Dark by Then; The text that you just read, those words on the page, they were not mine. Did you imagine a voice speaking them? What was it like? Whatever it was like, it was not this voice. Not my voice. My voice is just here to guide you, to help you make a kind of map

This immediately follows a reading of the introductory text, written in the first person singular, and composed in a confessional, explanatory manner. This text is uncredited, although, given our reading of the paratextual elements present within and surrounding the work, we assume the work’s author; Duncan Speakman; is the voice identified as ‘I’. That text though, contains no address to the reader. Their presence is assumed, and obliquely referenced in the closing sentences, implying their existence; And at some point these words will be printed on paper

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And a reader will be asked to read one chapter at a time Each interspersed by a journey they make themselves

This printed text—the first element of the work the reader encounters, operates in a manner familiar to any reader conversant with written prose (Figs. 4 and 5). What follows displaces an anticipated reading of the experience to come. The narrator’s voice is feminine, rather than the expected masculine, further complicating these statements. Directly addressing the listener (the voice is delivered through headphones), the narrator’s proposal that ‘this voice’ is ‘not my voice’ destabilises the ground upon which the reader finds themselves. If this is not ‘my voice’, then whose is it, and what is its role? Furthermore, the suggestion that the reader’s ‘imagined voice’ is situated at a position inferior to the spoken voice, that the reader’s imagination is incapable (or is refused the opportunity) of accurately constructing the narrator’s voice, disturbs the conventions of reading a written text, and implicitly proposes that this experience demands a reconstituted understanding of the relationship between author and reader as it is mediated by the technology of delivery. The next sentence re-establishes an equilibrium of sorts. The female voice moves on from her initial act of instability and assumes the role of a guide. While this unstable identity is not referred to at any other point in the whole work, its echo remains present. There is, throughout the whole work, a distance between the transcription within the printed book and the voice in the participants ear. Neither is quite what they were anticipated to be, and that this instability is further confounded by the map-less interface offered, the participant is effectively removed from any degree of familiarity (Fig. 6). With regard to its significance as an element of an ambient poetics, it is necessary to note that none of these techniques would be possible within a conventional documentary work. The specific registers of destabilisation (as voice and map combine to produce this affect) are the result of a reflexive awareness of the technologies of delivery, of the medium impacting on the message. We began this volume by outlining the intentions of the Ambient Literature project. In that it represents the conceptual and practical capital

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Fig. 4 It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman

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Fig. 5 It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman

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Fig. 6 It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman

of a research team of artists, writers and technologists, this project has attempted to sketch the terrain around an emerging field of practice that necessarily demands further attention. At this stage, though, we are confident that our work has resulted in a valuable mapping of that territory (both established and new), and has enabled a series of incursions into the practice of making situated literary works. The poetics explored in this concluding chapter are, as we suggested, not intended to be the final word on the matter, rather a series of markers by which to understand the specific tenors of ambient works. Notably, the works examined and discussed in light of these qualities do not exhibit all of them to a uniform degree—these should be seen as

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aspects of ambient composition that manifest to a varying extent in each work. It Must Have Been Dark by Then, Breathe, and Words We Never Wrote each make more use of Reflexive Technology than their stablemates, The Cartographer’s Confession joins It Must Have Been Dark by Then and Words We Never Wrote in an application of Embodied Reading in excess of that evident in Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming . Each of these works makes a unique use of these poetics in their creation and reception. The creators of these works, it is also necessary to note, did not work with them in mind either. The development of our poetics, and its application to these works, is largely an a posteriori endeavour. As such, we consider these poetics to comprise a set of design dimensions by which to consider the creation of ambient literary works. Writers, designers, technologists and readers of works in this field are encouraged to see the series as a set of guidelines through which to conceptualise the foundations of ambient literature, a series of lenses, as it where, to bring this study full circle and reposition our aim as understanding an emerging field in order to better construct its future (Figs. 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11). What can be seen from this brief mapping is that none of the works under examination attempt to embody all of the poetic qualities we have argued for. All appear to a degree in all each work, but the specific qualities of each work are the result of a focus on three or four qualities over an attempt to feature every tool in our arsenal. In this manner, all five works operate recognisably as ambient literature, but carry their own affordances, specific to the nature, tenor, and purpose of the story being told. These works were composed between 2016–2018, in light of a research project that asked questions about the nature of situated storytelling, pervasive technology and presence. Each began with a desire to explore the potential of a form we understood as foregrounding literariness, as driving towards a formal approach to constructing story in this space. Each work was constructed within the frame of a production budget, writer’s fee and associated, necessary costs in order to bring them to fruition. While none of these budgets approached those associated with some of the headline-grabbing digital literature products seen in the last decade,7 they proved sufficient to produce meaningful, considered works of ambient literature. That competence with digital tools and programming languages is necessary to bring these works to their audience is, as the chapter “Critical Ambience” addresses, politically problematic with regard to its future.

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Fig. 7 It Must Have Been Dark by Then

Nevertheless, as we have seen, approaching the production of ambient works requires a spirit of collaboration amongst a set of stakeholders. Making works of this kind has rarely constituted a solo endeavour, and never more so as a medium matures beyond the purview of an experimental form.8 We have conducted this research project with regard to the tools and platforms available to us as artists and academics, but always, we believed, with an eye to how our work might be transposed as new technological affordances become available. In light of that, we conclude this chapter, and the whole volume, by briefly considering the impact of the Ambient Literature project on an imminent 5G driven, smart mobile internet supporting an extended reality media landscape. The promise offered by each successive technical infrastructure development is faster connectivity, a higher fidelity of data and an apparently

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Fig. 8 Breathe

magical quality by which every legitimate operator finds their consensual hallucination unthinkably more real.9 We have, in many ways, been discussing and exploring the language of immersion and experiential design since the mid 1980s, and before. That the Ambient Literature project considered in some depth the ethics, politics and reception of the work we made, alongside its histories and contexts, provides the broader cultural field with a series of refined research questions to take forward into the future. The legacy of our project is the legacy that every research project attempts to forge—that work undertaken as a result, however indirectly, is mindful of the efforts of others, and while critical of their findings, nevertheless addresses them in turn. Legacy, in this manner, becomes the watchword for the development of a maturing form. Whether 5G or WiFi6, whither immersive, augmented or extended reality, the principal concern for writers and designers in these spaces

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Fig. 9 The Cartographer’s Confession

is, we propose, that the work we make is honest unto itself, that it considers its purpose as a medium-specific form of storytelling. If, as N. Katherine Hayles has it, application of material metaphors to texts offers ‘a kind of criticism that pays attention to the material apparatus producing the literary work’ (Hayles 2002, 29), then accordingly a foundational approach to production demands attention to precise vocabularies of screen, device and presence. In order for that to be the case, manifestos, design dimensions, and poetics must remain relevant for months and years to come. It is, we think, more valuable to describe a set of principles for the creation of immersive experiences that creators working with technologies presently contained in their imaginations will find useful than to pin down and fix absolutely the strictures of designing within a current operating system and technology framework. By attending to the opportunities afforded by

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Fig. 10 Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming

new tools and techniques in light of fundamental design principles that sit at the heart of our work, we believe it is possible to develop these works honestly, rigorously and with integrity. Whether ambient works appear as natively designed, as accompanying another, more primary text, as hybrids between physical and digital experiences or, as we believe possible, completely physical, non-digital works, it is our hope that attending to embodiment, to performance, to the reflexivity of technology, will serve anyone making ambient works, regardless of their budget or technical proficiency. A shared language is, in this light, the aim of this research project. We have attempted in these preceding chapters to map our territory, not, as Borges’ Suárez Miranda (Borges 1975) has it, by striking ‘a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire’, but rather by sketching the boundaries and pointing out the location of our metaphorical rivers,

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Fig. 11 Words We Never Wrote

roads and mountaintops. The object of our inquiry has shifted, and will continue to change over time, its form altering to match the technologies available to its creators, and the demands of its audience. There is no such thing as a fixed form, in print or in ambient literature. We only hope that this has been a useful journey, and that your time with us has been fruitful. We intend to shepherd these works in the coming years, introducing them to new writing voices and audiences for whom they might be surprising, and familiar.

Notes 1. This list is by no means exhaustive and is included here for illustrative purposes. 2. For a more detailed examination of these, see Chapters “Objects, Places, and Entanglements”, “The Politics of Ambient Literature” and “An Aesthetics of Ambient Literature; Experience, Narrative, Design”.

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3. It is not proposed that an ambient work refuses this mode of reading, rather that, to date, those works we have commissioned regard ‘centredness’ within the text as a primary arbiter of experience. 4. Apps, contained within an online ‘store’, arguably possess paratextual cues as to their tone and genre. A webApp, accessed as a url alone, offers a more immediate point of entry, but does so without a digital ’wrapper’. 5. It would be possible to identify It Must Have Been Dark by Then as mixedmedia; however hybrid is a more appropriate term for a work that operates between just two media. 6. Sebald is a particularly notable proponent of this technique, but we note that the practice dates back to the nineteenth century, and comprises a large canon of artistically inclined novelistic examples throughout the twentieth century. 7. Faber’s The Wasteland is the obvious example here, in that despite costs not being made public, the production was estimated to carry a budget of circa £400,000 (2011) 8. Even in light of this statement, we would propose the manufacture of ambient works—as described here—to be inevitably and necessarily experimental. The nature of practice-as-research is to learn by doing. 9. Extracted and adapted from William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984)

References Andreotti, Libero, and Xavier Costa. 1996. Theory of the Derive and Other Situationist Writings on the City. Barcelona: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. Aristotle. 1996. The Poetics. Penguin: London. Banham, Reyner. 1971. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkeley: University of California Press. Benjamin, Walter. 2002. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eiland. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Blast Theory. 2003. Uncle Roy All Around You. Borges, Jorge Luis. 1975. Labyrinths. London: Penguin Books. Broken City Lab. 2012. Drift. Cachucho, Eduardo, and Babak Fakhamzadeh. 2012. Derive. Carpenter, J. R. 2018. This Is a Picture of Wind. Cole, Teju. 2011. Open City: A Novel. New York: Random House. De Certeau, Michel. 1984. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press. de Souza e Silva, Adriana. 2006. “From Cyber to Hybrid: Mobile Technologies as Interfaces of Hybrid Spaces.” Space and Culture 9 (3): 261–278.

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de Souza e Silva, Adriana, and Daniel Sutko. 2011. “Location-Aware Mobile Media and Urban Sociability.” New Media and Society 13 (5): 807–823. Debord, Guy. 1994. Society of the Spectacle. New York: Zone Books. Dennen, Alfie. 2009. Britglyph. Drucker, Johanna. 1995. The Century of Artists’ Books. New York: Granary Books. Farman, Jason. 2015. “The Materiality of Locative Media: On the Invisible Infrastructure of Mobile Networks.” In Theories of the Mobile Internet: Materialities and Imaginaries, edited by A. Herman, J. Hadlaw, and T. Swiss. New York, NY: Routledge Press. Fisher, Mark. 2016. The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books. Genette, Gérard, and Marie Maclean. 1991. “ Introduction to the Paratext.” New Literary History 22 (2): 261–272. Lefebre, Henri. 1991. The Production of Space. Oxford, UK: Blackwell. McCullough, Malcolm. 2013. Ambient Commons: Attention in the Age of Embodied Information. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Mendelsund, Peter. 2014. What We See When We Read. New York: Vintage Books. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2002. Writing Machines. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Hopkins, D. J., Shelley Orr, and Kim Solga. 2009. Performance and the City. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Horowitz, Eli, Kevin Moffett, Matthew Derby, and Russell Quinn. 2012. The Silent History. Knof, N. Adriana. 2016. On Your Wrist Is the Universe. Lynch, Kevin. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Miller, Graeme. 2003. Linked. Accessed June 14, 2019. http://www.linkedm11. net/index2.html. Mixed Reality Lab. 2003. Can You See Me Now? Morton, Timothy. 2013. Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Olson, Charles. 1950. Projective Verse. Accessed June 14, 2019. http://www.ang elfire.com/poetry/jarnot/olson.html. Robbe-Grillet, Alain. 1965. Snapshots & Towards a New Novel. London: Calder & Boyars. Russell, Ben. 1999. Headmap Manifesto. http://technoccult.net/wp-content/ uploads/library/headmap-manifesto.pdf. Shepard, Mark. 2010. Serendipitor. Rotterdam. V2. Accessed February 5, 2019. http://serendipitor.net/site/. Simmel, Georg. 1903. “Metropolis and Mental Life.” In The Blackwell City Reader, edited by Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002. Uninvited Guests. 2016. The Lost Palace. White, Tony and Situations. 2012. Missorts.

Index

0–9 34 North 118 West (Hight et al.);6, 15 3D sound, 18, 195, 251, 296 5G networks, 3, 22, 312–313 A Abba, Tom, 5, 7–8 absent reader, 41–42 absorption, 126 Acconci, 148 Activity Theory, 63 actor-network theory, 21, 60, 61, 70, 200, 205, 207 aesthetic experience balance and unity, 254–255 The Cartographer’s Confession, 243–248, 251–255 Dewey’s aesthetic experience, 236 environment, energy, emotions, 237–242 overview, 233–236, 255–257 participation, 251–254 structure, 243–248

African-American reading, 45 agency, 62, 154 AI (artificial intelligence), 62–63, 66, 71, 72 air travel, 64 Alexander, Thomas M., 234 algorithms ambient attention, 138 anticipatory immersion, 217–219 problem of the unreadable text, 200–203 subjectivity and anticipation, 225–227 Allen, Woody, 145 alternate reality gaming, 65 Always Something Somewhere Else (Speakman), 104–105 Alys, Francis, 13 Amazon, 12, 41 ambience attention, 128–130 critical ambience, 141–143, 149–154 definitions, 4, 121, 151–153

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Abba et al. (eds.), Ambient Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41456-6

319

320

INDEX

immersion, 17–20, 218–219 music, 218–219 Pullinger interview, 268, 270–272 Ambient Commons (McCullough), 120–121 ambient intelligence, 129, 143 ambient literature aesthetic experience, 233–236, 255–257 ambience and immersion, 17–20 ambient poetics, 310–316 attention Breathe, 134 attending to ambience, 128–130 hermeneutics, 130–131 literature, distraction, immersion, 127, 128 messiness and ubiquity, 134–137 moralizing, 122 overview, 115 presence and non-presence, 123–124 context ambient contexts, 70–71 in background, 66 as everything, 69–70 overview, 53–54, 71–73 problem of, 68–69 question of, 58–62 critical ambience, 141–143, 151, 153–154, 156, 158 definitions, 5, 10 everyday mixed realities, 2–5 immersive algorithms anticipatory immersion, 217–220 research challenges, 199–200 research method, 208–211 research overview, 204–208, 227–228

subjectivity and anticipation, 224–225 unreadable text, 200–203 locative media, 14–17, 289–290 overview, 1–2 project overview, 5–10, 20–22 situated readings, 11–14. See also writing ambient literature Ambient Literature Research Project context, 57 critical ambience, 153 literature, 275–276 project overview, 5–10, 200 Pullinger interview, 263–265 reflexive technology, 307–310 Speakman interview, 112–113 website, 8 Ambient Media (Roquet), 151–152 ambient music, 54, 128, 158, 218–221 ambient poetics, 150, 277–284, 304, 307, 310–316 ambient rhetoric, 150–151 Ambient Rhetoric (Rickert), 151–152 ambiguity, 16–17 analytic induction, 207 Anderson, Sarah, 8, 109 animals, 124 Antenna Theatre, 106 Anthropocene, 123 anticipatory immersion, 217–221, 228 APIs (application programming interfaces) Breathe, 132, 157, 201, 263, 269, 270, 285–287, 298, 305 locative media, 14, 16 Apple, 57 apps, 56, 57, 108, 110, 190–192, 317 AR (augmented reality), 3, 18–19 architecture, 59–60, 64, 128 Aristotle, 43, 278, 281

INDEX

art, 142–143, 146–147, 239–241, 295 Art as Experience (Dewey), 234, 235, 257, 258 artificial intelligence (AI), 62–63, 66, 71, 72 art installations, 19, 150 artist’s books, 283 Arts & Humanities Research Council, 5 Arts Council of England, 9 assemblage theory, 228 atmosphere, 152 attention aesthetic experience, 235 attending to ambience, 128–130 Breathe, 131–134 critical ambience, 151, 154–156, 158 everyday mixed realities, 4–5 experience of, 118–119 hermeneutics of, 130–131 immersion, 18, 19 immersive algorithms, 227, 228 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 116–118 literature, distraction, immersion, 125–128 messiness and ubiquity, 134–137 modes, 3 moralizing of, 119–122 overview, 2–3, 21, 22, 115–116 presence and non-presence, 122–125 reading practices, 42, 44–46 Speakman interview, 111 writing ambient literature, 282, 302–303 attention economy, 4, 154, 157 The Attention Economy (Davenport and Beck), 120 attention scarcity, 158

321

attentive will, 226 Attlee, Grace, 194, 258 Attlee, James biography, 187 The Cartographer’s Confession. See The Cartographer’s Confession (Attlee) context, 54–58 interview, 21, 187–197 Isolarion, 188 Nocturne, 188 overview, 6, 10 reading practices, 32 Station to Station, 188, 192 textual space, 296–297 attunement, 152 Auborn, Jay, 195, 259 Audiences of the Future, 144–147 audio attention, 3, 119 Breathe, 267 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 108, 119, 306–307 listening practices, 12 Pullinger interview, 267 reflexive technology, 306–307 sound studies, 14 Speakman interview, 108 technology development, 3 Words We Never Wrote, 8 Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming , 7 audio books, 9, 12, 32 audio tours, 135 audio walks, 113, 157, 278 augmented reality (AR), 3, 18–19 Augustine, St, 31, 33, 37, 45 Austen, Jane, 34 Austin, J.L., 63 authorial control, 298–299, 306 authorship, 60–61, 300–301 autonomy, 62

322

INDEX

B background, 258 background music, 159 Balakrishanan, Bimal, 127 balance, 234, 236, 237, 239, 242, 243, 251, 254–255 Ballard, Thomas, 43 Banham, Reyner, 294 Barad, Karen, 72, 137 Barry, Ian, 288 Barthes, Roland, 125, 242, 280 Bathe, William, 33 beacons, 8, 16, 279, 305 Beck, John, 120 Behrendt, Frauke, 14 Belafonte, Harry, 39 Bell, Genevieve, 68, 135–137 Benedikt, Michael, 145 Benjamin, Walter, 287 Bennett, Tony, 64–65 Bernstein, Charles, 126 Bevis, Matthew, 125, 128, 130, 137 bible, 41, 44, 46 bibliographical codes, 39, 40 bibliomania, 35 BigBang, 259 Birkerts, Sven, 42 Blast Theory, 13, 278, 295 Can You See Me Now?, 295 Uncle Roy All Around You, 295 Bluetooth, 8, 279 body. See embodiment book-as-app, 9 book burning, 40 books ambient poetics, 282, 293 attention, 135 cultural attitudes, 38–39 definitions, 31–32 immersive algorithms, 225 materiality, 32–34, 280, 282, 283, 299

navigational features, 39–40 novel formats, 33 reading practices, 27–29, 31, 36–37 sales, 12 unpredictability, 299–301 Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming , 7 book wheel, 44 borders, 288–289 Borges, Jorge Luis, 315 Botfighters (game), 14 Boyle Family, 189 Braille, 33 Breathe (Pullinger) aesthetic experience, 254 ambient poetics, 279, 280, 283 anticipatory immersion, 221–224 attention, 131–134 context, 61, 65 critical ambience, 149–154, 156–157 embodied reading, 279, 285–287 immersive algorithms, 200–202, 209, 216 overview, 7, 10, 263 performance, 291–292 Pullinger interview, 263–274 reader responses, 149–154 reading practices, 27–30, 32, 33, 45 reflexive technology, 305, 311 textual space, 298 unreadable text, 200, 202 Bremond, Claude, 242 Brennan, Tim, 105 Bringhurst, Robert, 36 Bristol, 15 Bristol Festival of Ideas, 7 Britglyph (Dennen), 290 British Library, 10 Brocklehurst, James, 194, 258 Broken City Lab Drift , 288 Bruce, Jonny, 195

INDEX

Bull, Michael, 152 Burns, Robert, 43

C Cachucho, Eduardo, 288 Cage, John, 189, 221 calendar planning software, 2 calm computing, 67, 68, 129 Calvino, Italo, 34–35, 46 Calvium, 196, 208, 264, 265, 269 Cambridge Analytica, 4 cameras, 7, 157, 200–203, 269–270 canned music, 158 Can You See Me Now? (game), 295 Cardiff, Janet, 106, 252, 278 Forest Walk, 14 Missing Voice (Case Study B), 245 Carpenter, J.R. This is a Picture of Wind, 305–306 Carr, Nicholas The Shallows , 43 The Cartographer’s Confession (Attlee) aesthetic experience balance and unity, 254 overview, 234, 255 participation, 251–254 sound, 259 structure, 243–248 ambient poetics, 279, 281, 283 anticipatory immersion, 223 Attlee interview, 192–197 context, 54, 61, 68, 72 critical ambience, 157 immersive algorithms, 200, 202, 209, 214–216, 220 movement, 287–289 overview, 6, 10, 21 reflexive technology, 311 sound, 32 temporality, 283, 304–305 textual space, 298

323

Carver, Raymond, 53 cave art, 142 Chalmers, Matthew, 68 Chapman, R.W., 34 chat bots, 219–220 cinema, 18, 105, 144–145, 158 citizenship, 294–295 city Breathe, 268 The Cartographer’s Confession, 157 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 104, 299 movement, 288–289 performance, 290 safety, 268 textual space, 294–295 unpredictability, 298–299 climate change, 61, 106–107, 116–118, 155, 156 close reading, 203 Cocteau, Jean Orphée, 145 codex, 31–33, 45 cognition aesthetic experience, 235, 257 cognitive models of interaction, 133, 134 coherence, 251, 256 Cole, Teju, 14 Open City, 284 collaboration, 266–268, 311–312 communication, 240 compositional temporality, 302–303 composition by field, 292–293 computing attention, 42, 120, 129 context, 62–67 immersive algorithms, 206, 223, 228 problem of context, 68–69 concentration, 18, 19 conceptual art, 189

324

INDEX

conditional text, 270, 279, 286 Connor, Josh, 8 consciousness, 14, 21 content, and digital media, 9 context aesthetic experience, 240 as everything, 69–70 attention, 132, 137 cartographer’s context, 54–58 computing, 62–65 computing in background, 65–67 critical ambience, 154 definitions, 69 overview, 21, 53–54, 70–71 problem of, 67–69 question of, 58–62 textual space, 294 contextual computing, 62, 66–67, 70, 73 continuity, 258 counter propaganda, 147 Craigmyle, Bessie, 34 Crary, Jonathan, 120–124, 129–131, 137, 225 critical ambience ambience, 149–154 Breathe, 156–157, 273 critical practices, 147–149 desire for immersion, 144–147 overview, 21, 128, 141–143, 158 praxis, 155–158 Cronenberg, David, 145 Crow, Liz, 247 Csikszentmihalyi, Mikail, 18 cultural studies, 203 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Haddon), 36

D Daniel, George, 34 Dante, 33

Darwin, Charles, 124 data, 305–306 databases, 201 Davenport, Thomas, 120 Day, Ronald, 120, 225, 227 Debord, Guy, 287, 288 de Certeau, Michel, 13, 148–149, 288, 295 Walking in the City, 289 deep attention, 42, 136 deep reading, 43 Delamain, Jacques Why Birds Sing , 245 Delanda, Manuel, 205 De Meyer, Tineke, 103, 105, 107–108, 110 De Michelis, Giorgio, 70 DEMO project, 64 Dennen, Alfie Britglyph, 290 Dérive (Cachucho et al.), 288 derive tradition, 148, 158, 287–288 Derrida, Jacques, 73 Dervin, Brenda, 58, 69 design probes, 206 design work, 63–64, 266, 267, 270, 314–315 de Souza e Silva, Adriana, 299 detective novels, 281 Dewey, John aesthetic experience balance and unity, 255 Dewey’s aesthetic experience, 236, 242–243 embodiment, 257 event of aesthetic experience, 237–242 overview, 22, 233–236, 255 participation, 257 rhythm, 249 structure, 243–244, 258 and James, 234–236, 257, 258

INDEX

Art as Experience, 234, 235, 257 De Witt, Sol, 13 digital devices, 306 digital humanities, 203–205 digital literature, 223, 271, 295, 299, 311 digital media content, 9 digital reading practices, 45 digital storytelling, 290 digital texts, 40–41 disappearance, 106–107 Discreet Music (Eno album), 218–219 disembodied reading practices, 21, 37–38, 42 distant reading, 211 The Distracted Mind (Gazzaley and Rosen), 120 distraction attention, 4, 21, 116, 120–121, 124–125, 128, 130–131, 136 critical ambience, 158 temporality, 302 documentary approach, 112 Donne, John, 137 Dorion, Krysztoff, 109–110 Dourish, Paul, 15, 53, 69, 135 Dovey, Jon, 5, 252, 263–274 Dreyfus, Hubert, 62–63, 66, 72 Drift (Broken City Lab), 288 Drucker, Johanna, 29, 283–284 DVDs, 55–56 dynamic text, 132 dynamism, 243, 248 dyslexia, 36, 46

E Eastgate Press, 9 e-books, 9, 11, 12, 32, 45 ecological writing, 151, 156 Ecology Without Nature (Morton), 150

325

Edison, Edwin S. Porter, 145 Editions at Play, 9, 208, 229, 265, 269 the eerie, 279 Elizabeth I, 44 ELIZA effect, 138, 219–220 embodied perception, 258 embodiment ambient poetics, 277–279 attention, 121 embodied reading, 277–279, 284–287, 311 immersion, 18–19 reading practices, 29–30, 33–34 reflexive technology, 315 silent reading, 37–38 situated readings, 11–14 emotional immersion, 18 emotions, 251 energy, 237–239, 293 Eno, Brian ambient music, 128, 158, 220, 221 describing ambience, 2, 19, 129, 149 environment aesthetic experience, 236, 237, 240, 248–250, 253, 256 atttention, 121 critical ambience, 150–152, 154 embodied reading, 284–285 environmental writing, 151, 156 episteme, 120 equilibrium, 236, 237, 239, 242–243, 255, 258 e-readers, 11, 32, 40, 45 E-READ project, 43 ethnographic inquiry, 206 ethnomethodology, 200, 205–207, 210, 218, 228, 229 everyday mixed realities, 2–5, 12, 143 experience, 234–242 experience of the work, 136

326

INDEX

experiential design, 13, 298, 303, 313 experiential story world model, 249 experiential temporality, 302 experimental critical practice, 147 extended reality (XR), 142 F Facebook, 17 Fadiman, Anne, 11–12, 12 fake news, 4 Fakhamzadeh, Babak, 288 Farman, Jason, 294 Felski, Rita, 54, 59, 60, 61–62, 64–65, 69–70, 71 feminist theory, 18–19, 268 Ferrar family, 40 fiction, 8–9, 192–193 field composition, 292–293 films, 18, 105, 144–145, 194, 267, 280, 306–307 first-person voice (‘I’), 306–307 Fisher, Mark, 281 The Weird and the Eerie, 279–280 flâneur, 13, 287 Fleuriot, Constance, 252 flow, 18 Fluxus, 13, 148 focus, 21 footnotes, 39 Fordyce, James, 38, 42 Forest Walk (Cardiff and Miller), 14 form, 238, 239 Foucault, Michel, 120 Freud, Sigmund, 279–280 full perception, 238 Fulton, Hamish, 13 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 130, 131 Galani, Areti, 68 Gallagher, Shaun, 235

games alternate reality, 65 ambience, 271, 272 attention, 127, 135 Breathe, 271, 272 immersion, 18, 19 locative media, 14 reading and attention, 42 Garfinkel, Harold, 72, 229 Gaskill, Nicolas, 234 Gazzaley, Adam, 120 Genette, Gérard, 46, 242, 278–279 geocaching, 14 geo-location, 104, 105 geostories, 156 Gerbe, Anna, 265 ghost stories, 7, 221, 268, 285–287 Gibson, J.J., 258 Gibson, William Neuromancer, 317 Gilroy-Ware, Marcus, 3 GIS (geographical information systems), 1–2, 2 Godard, Jean-Luc Les Carabiniers , 145 Google, 57, 201–203, 222 Google Creative Labs, 229, 266 Google Creative Labs Sydney, 265 Google Maps, 14, 16, 110, 148–149 GPS (Global Positioning System) aesthetic experience, 246–248 The Cartographer’s Confession, 190, 191, 247 embodied reading, 278 overview, 2–3, 14–17 unpredictability, 299 Grand Theft Auto (game), 42 graphic novels, 271 Grau, Oliver, 146–147 Green, Melanie C., 138 Greimas, A.J., 242 Grillet, Alain Robbe, 292

INDEX

grounded theory, 206–207 Grudin, Jonathan, 228 Grumpy Sailor, 265, 266 Guernica (Attlee), 192–193

H habit, 237 Hacking, Ian, 71, 137 Haddon, Mark The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, 36 haptic interaction, 7, 33–34, 41 Haraway, Donna, 72, 156 Harman, Graham, 73 haunted technology, 273 Hay Festival, 7–8, 10 Hayles, N. Katherine, 39–40, 42, 43, 136, 314 HCI (human-computer interaction), 53–54, 204–205, 206 headphones aesthetic experience, 252 attention, 116 The Cartographer’s Confession, 252 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 116, 307 reflexive technology, 307 Speakman interview, 108, 110, 112 Heft, Harry, 235 Heidegger, Martin, 63–64, 67, 73, 130, 137, 152 heightened vitality, 233, 235, 255, 256 Heim, Michael, 146 heritage experiences, 157, 295–296, 299 hermeneutic phenomenology, 63, 66–67, 130 hermeneutics, 130–131, 134, 203, 210 Herzog, Werner, 106, 107

327

Hewlett Packard, 247 H For Hawk (MacDonald), 12 Hight, Jeremy, 15 historical context, 60–61 historical fiction, 57 Historical Royal Places, 296 Historic Market Street (app), 259 Hopkins, D.J., 290–294 Horowitz, Eli The Silent History, 278 Howsam, Leslie, 29 Hoyte, Ralph, 247 HP Labs, 104 human-computer interaction (HCI), 53–54, 204–205, 206 humanities research, 204 Hunt, Leigh, 34 hybrid media, 315, 317 hyper attention, 42, 136 hyper fiction, 9 hyperobjects, 298 hyper readers, 44 hypertrophy of story, 284

I I (first-person voice), 306–307 If on a winter’s night a traveller (Calvino), 34–35 imagination, 239–242, 258 imitation, 278, 281 immediacy, 56, 121, 124, 272–273 immersion and ambience, 17–20 anticipatory immersion, 217–221, 228 attention, 125–128, 138 critical ambience, 142, 143, 144–147, 149–150, 153–154 definitions, 146 writing ambient literature, 276, 313, 314

328

INDEX

immersive algorithms immersion in work, 217–220 occurrence of the thing, 212–217 overview, 199–200, 227–228 problem of the unreadable text, 200–203 reader experiences, 211–212 research on readers and reading, 203–208 subjectivity and anticipation, 225–227 immersive theatre, 18 impressionism, 120 inattention, 116 Indeterminate Hikes +, 13 indexes, 39–40, 225 industrialization, 120 information, 121 information overload, 158 information systems, 225 Inland Empire (Lynch film), 280 ‘in situ reading’, 12 instruction-based practices, 13–14 instrumental content, 2–3 intellectual property, 39 intelligence, 219 interaction, 133–134, 237–238, 240, 245, 259 interactive fiction, 271 interactive narratives, 233 interactivity, 64, 153, 215, 271 internet, 4, 42 interpretation, 130–131, 241, 249, 250, 257, 258 iPhone, 41 Irani, Lilly, 228 Isolarion (Attlee), 188 It Must Have Been Dark By Then (Speakman) aesthetic experience, 254 ambient poetics, 279, 280, 281, 283

anticipatory immersion, 220–221, 222–223 attention, 116–118, 119, 123–124, 132, 138 context, 60–61, 65, 72 critical ambience, 155–156 embodied reading, 279, 284 immersive algorithms, 200, 202, 209–210, 212–214, 216 mixed-media, 317 movement, 287, 288–289 overview, 5–6 performane, 292, 293 reader experiences, 212–214, 216 reader interviews, 116–118, 123, 138 reflexive technology, 306–307, 311 sound, 32 Speakman interview, 103–112 temporality, 283, 303–304 unpredictability, 299–300 Iversen, Britt, 265 J Jaffe, Saul, 195 Jajdelska, Elspeth, 37–38 James, William aesthetic experience, 249, 256, 258 attention, 22, 115, 118, 119, 123, 125–126, 136 and Dewey, 234, 235–236, 257, 258 event of aesthetic experience, 237, 241 pragmatism, 234, 235, 257 radical pluralism, 258 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 39, 43 Janua Linguarum (Bathe), 33 Japanese novel, 152 Jellybone (Pullinger), 264, 265 Johnson, Mark, 235, 243 Joyce, James, 14

INDEX

K Kalnins, Karlis, 14, 15 Kamppuri, Minna, 228 Kaprow, Alan, 142 Keaton, Buster, 145 Kim-Cohen, Seth, 128–129, 149–150 Kindle, 12, 32, 40, 41 Klencke atlas, 32–34 Knouf, N. Adriana On your wrist is the universe, 305 knowledge, 71, 72 Knowlton, Jeff, 15 Koolhaas, Rem, 59 Kuhn, Thomas, 72 Kuzmiˇcová, Anežka, 12

L Lackie, Kayt, 46 Lamb, Charles, 34, 35 land art, 142 language, 240, 275–277 language of priming, 256 Lanier, Jaron, 145 Las Calles Habladas , 149 Latour, Bruno actor-network theory, 60, 61 context, 58–60, 61, 69, 71, 72 geostories, 156 Reassembling the Social , 58–59 Latvia, 107, 108, 110 Layar software, 259 lectern bible, 46 Lefebvre, Henri, 148, 294–295 Le Guin, Ursula, 156 Lejeune, Phillipe, 278 Les Carabiniers (Godard film), 145 Levin, Thomas Poetics of Transition, 234 libraries, 39 liminal spaces, 280–281, 292 linearity of text, 287, 302, 305

329

Linked (Miller), 289 Lin, Tan, 4 listening, 12, 219 literacy, 37, 38 literary deconstruction, 203 literature attention, 117, 122, 125–128, 130–131, 137 context, 59–61, 64, 68, 69 critical ambience, 154 digital media, 8–9 immersive algorithms, 205 reading practices, 38 writing ambient literature, 275, 283, 299 Literature in the 21st Century report, 8–9 Live Cinema, 18 location data Breathe, 202, 268–269, 285 locative media aesthetic experience, 245 anticipatory immersion, 223 Breathe, 268, 271 critical practice, 147 movement, 288, 289–290 overview, 14–17 performance, 290 textual space, 294, 295–296 locative narrative aesthetic experience, 247–249, 252, 253, 255–256 The Cartographer’s Confession, 247–249, 252, 253, 255–256 embodied reading, 278 London aesthetic experience, 246–247 Attlee interview, 188, 189, 190, 196–197 The Cartographer’s Confession, 6, 54–55, 56, 57–58, 68,

330

INDEX

157–158, 220, 246–247, 289, 296–297, 298 context, 54–55, 56, 57–58, 68 immersive algorithms, 215 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 117–118, 293 writing ambient literature, 289, 293, 296, 298 Long, Richard, 13 The Lost Palace, 296 Louisiana, 106, 107, 110, 112, 293 Luckey, Palmer, 17–20, 144 Lumière brothers, 144 Lupton, Christina, 38 Lynch, David Inland Empire, 280 Lynch, Kevin, 294

M MacDonald, Helen, 12 MacFarlane, Robert, 12 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 34 Mak, Bonnie, 39 Malecki, Wojciech, 234 Manguel, Alberto, 11 mapping ambient poetics, 311 maps The Cartographer’s Confession, 194, 244 instruction-based practices, 13–14 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 110, 293–294, 304, 306, 307 locative media, 16 writing ambient literature, 293–294, 304, 306, 307 Marcinkowski, Michael, 228 Masters, Alexander, 39 materiality of texts, 32–34, 280, 282, 283–284, 299 The Matrix (film), 146–147 matter, 239

McCarthy, John, 228, 234 McCullough, Malcolm attention, 120–124, 128, 302 critical ambience, 153, 158 immersive algorithms, 225 McGhee, Sean, 109 McLuhan, Marshall, 4 meaning, 117, 216–217, 239, 240, 249, 258, 270 Media Lab Europe, 15, 247 medieval manuscripts, 44 medium of work, 241–242 memory attention, 136 Breathe, 272, 273 The Cartographer’s Confession, 255 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 108, 111, 112, 294 reader interviews, 210 memory archives, 32 Mendelsund, Peter, 281, 291–292 mental life, 294–295 The Messiah (Schulz), 8 migration, 61, 116, 156–157, 193, 265 Miller, George Bures, 252 Forest Walk, 14 Miller, Graeme Linked, 289 mimesis, 22 mindfulness, 19 Minsky, Marvin, 71 Missing Voice (Case Study B) (Cardiff), 245 Missorts , 295–296 mixed-media work, 296, 317 mixed reality, 2–5, 12, 18, 143 Mixed Reality Lab, 15, 295 Mobile Bristol, 15, 104, 247 mobile literary experience, 11 mobile phones, 11, 27–30, 32. See also smartphones

INDEX

modernism, 14 mood, 152 Morton, Timothy, 150–151, 297–298 motion capture, 18 movement, 13, 282, 287–290, 302, 304 moving screen images, 144–145 Mscape, 104 [murmur], 148 Murray, Janet, 146 music aesthetic experience, 242, 256 ambient music, 128, 159, 218–219, 220, 221 The Cartographer’s Confession, 195 critical ambience, 142, 155, 159 immersion, 218–219 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 109 Speakman interview, 105–106, 109 Myer, Misha Way from Home, 254

N Nadir & Peppermint (EcoArtTech), 13 Napoleon, 44 narrative reflexive technology, 305 spatial immersion, 127 structural narrative theory, 242 structure, 259 techniques, 1 narrative transportation, 138 narrative turn, 242 narrators, 14, 37, 250, 306 nature, 150, 151, 238, 292, 299 Nature Trailer (Donovan et al.), 247 nature writing, 12 navigational information, 2 neoliberalism, 152

331

nested media, 248, 255 neural networks, 71 neuroaesthetics, 18 Neuromancer (Gibson), 317 Nevola, Fabrizio, 191 Newell, Allen, 71 new historicism, 203 new media studies, 18 New Orleans, 303 The Night Sky (music group), 6, 195, 197 Nocturne (Attlee), 188 nodal narratives, 245, 258 Noë, Alva, 258 non-fiction, 112, 192–193 non-human actors, 69 non-linearity, 302, 305 non-presence, 118, 124 Noone, Nora, 288 novels aesthetic experience, 242 critical ambience, 152 detective novels, 281 materiality, 282 reading practices, 33, 38 writing ambient literature, 282, 283, 291, 304

O object-oriented ontology, 73 objects, 212, 216, 276 Oculus Rift, 17, 144 Oliasson, Olafur, 150 Olson, Charles, 292 omniscience, 37 Ono, Yoko, 13, 148 On your wrist is the universe (Knouf), 305 Oolipo, 264, 274 Open City (Cole), 284 oral history projects, 148

332

INDEX

Orphée (Cocteau film), 145 Orr, Shelley, 290 Oulipo group, 13 P paintings, 120, 131, 225 palimpsestuousness, 289 Papert, Seymour, 71 papyrus, 45 paradigms, 72 paranoia, 222 paratext, 39, 40, 46, 278, 306 participation, 243, 251, 257 participatory critical practice, 147, 148 participatory design, 64, 206 participatory theater, 135 Paul, St, 120 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 234, 235, 258 Penguin paperbacks, 11 Pepys, Samuel, 43 perception attention, 118, 121, 122 Dewey’s aesthetic experience, 234, 237, 240, 249 Olson on, 293 theories, 258 performance, 279, 290, 315 performance art, 142, 302 performance studies, 203 Periphery Songs , 108 personal computing, 120, 206. See also computing pervasive computing, 5, 14, 15, 30, 299 Pew Research Centre, 10 phenomenology, 63, 66, 67, 71, 72 philosophies, 72 phones. See smartphones photographs, 112, 157, 189, 192, 193, 245, 248, 249, 251, 255, 296, 304

Physical Symbol System Hypothesis, 71 Piper, Andrew, 33, 35, 45 place-based experience design, 9 place-based reading, 11 place-based writing, 284 platforms, 273 Plato, 43 plausibility, 250 plots, 242 podcasts, 10, 12, 135 poetry, 293, 305 Pokémon Go, 3 Polanyi, Michael, 72 politics critical ambience, 155 Pope, Simon, 13 portable playlists, 152 positivist theory, 67, 72 postcolonial theory, 228 posthumanism, 150 Pound, Ezra, 117 pragmatism, 234, 257 presence, 118, 124, 276 presence of reader, 62, 277, 278, 281 present tense, 272 priming, 256 The Prince (Machiavelli), 34 print books ambient poetics, 278, 282, 283 Breathe, 291 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 307 materiality, 280, 282, 283, 299 reflexive technology, 306, 307 Speakman interview, 112 privacy, 216 Proboscis Studio, 15, 148 psychogeography, 188, 287, 289 public artwork, 295 publishing industry, 9, 273 Pullinger, Kate

INDEX

Attlee interview, 187 Breathe. See Breathe (Pullinger) interview, 22, 263 Jellybone, 264, 265 performance, 291 project overview, 7, 10 reading practices, 27 Speakman interview, 104 textual space, 298 Punchdrunk, 18 punctuation, 37, 39 The Purple Rose of Cairo (film), 145 Q quest narratives, 189, 244 Qu’ran, 44 R radical empiricism, 237, 257 radical pluralism, 258 Radway, Janice, 204 railway stations, 11 Ramelli, Agostino, 44 REACT, 191 readability, 36 reader experience ambient poetics, 277 attention, 116, 132 critical ambience, 153 embodied reading, 277 immersive algorithms, 208, 211, 212, 220, 227, 227 unpredictability, 298 writing ambient literature, 276 reader presence, 62, 277, 278, 281 reader response theory, 203 readiness of reader, 42, 44 reading formations, 64 reading practices absent reader, 41 attention, 125

333

Augustine’s reading, 31 book design, 36 Breathe, 27 context, 65 cultural attitudes, 38 deep reading, 43 digital technology, 42, 45 digital texts, 40 eye movements, 35 materiality of text, 32 navigational book features, 39 overview, 21, 44 readerly interventions, 40 reading aloud, 37 research on readers and reading, 203 situated readings, 11 valorising, 35 realism, 38, 71 Reassembling the Social (Latour), 58 Rebanks, James, 12 reception of work, 60, 137, 283 reception theory, 203 reflexive technology, 315, 305 religious experience, 241 rhetoric, 151 rhythm, 238, 241–243, 248 Rickert, Thomas, 151 Rider Spoke (Blast Theory), 13 Riot 1831, 15, 247 Rogers, Yvonne, 68, 73 Rohrer, Tim, 235 Roquet, Paul, 151, 152 Rosen, Larry D., 120 Rudy, Kathryn M., 44 Rueb, Teri Trace, 247 Russell, Ben, 294 Ryan, Marie-Laure, 18, 233, 249, 258 S saccades, 35

334

INDEX

sacred reading, 44 safety, 268 sans-serif typefaces, 36, 46 satellites, 56 Sat Nav, 14 Schafer, R. Murray, 14 Schechner, Richard, 143 Schmidt, Ulrik, 4, 129, 130 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 226, 227 Schulz, Bruno, 8 scientific paradigms, 72 Scott, Clive, 60 screen images, 144, 158 scriptura continua, 37 seamful computing, 68 Sebald, W.G., 14, 304, 317 second-person address (you), 14, 154, 282 self-conscious novels, 38 self-reflection, 137 Sellars, Wilfrid, 257 sensors, 13, 14 sensory experience, 137 sensory immersion, 224 Serendipitor (Shepard), 148, 158, 288 serif typefaces, 36 session promise, 272 The Shallows (Carr), 43 Shepard, Mark Serendipitor, 148, 158, 288 The Shepherd’s Life (Rebanks), 12 Shep, Sydney, 32, 33 Sherlock Jr (film), 145 Shusterman, Richard Pragmatist Aesthetics , 234 silence, 221 The Silent History (Horowitz), 278 silent reading, 37, 41, 42, 46 Simmel, Georg, 294 Simon Fraser University, 14 Simon, Herbert, 71 Sinclair, Iain, 284

site-specific storytelling, 294 situated action, 64 situated digital storytelling, 290 situated literature, 200 situated media, 147 situated narratives, 284, 289 situatedness, 272, 273, 276 situated readings, 11, 21 Situationists, 13, 148 Situations, 295 Smart City, 15, 143, 149 smartphones addictiveness of, 273 attention, 120, 133, 134 Breathe, 133, 134, 263, 265, 266, 268, 273 The Cartographer’s Confession, 6, 55, 251 context, 55, 62, 66, 68 immersive algorithms, 211, 223, 224 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 6 location-based media, 14 reading practices, 32, 41, 268 reflexive technology, 305, 306 situated literary experiences, 1 Words We Never Wrote, 8 Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming , 7 smart watches, 305 social media, 3, 9, 120 Social Tapestries , 148 sociological analysis of reading, 203 sociological perspective, 204 Socrates, 43 Solga, Kim, 290 Solnit, Rebecca, 14, 284 sonic archaeology, 142 Sosnoski, James, 44 sound aesthetic experience, 250, 251, 256, 259 attention, 138

INDEX

Breathe, 221, 267 The Cartographer’s Confession, 32, 195, 250, 251, 259 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 32, 109, 138 reading practices, 32 Speakman interview, 105, 109, 112 sound studies, 14 soundwalks, 14, 276 space ambient poetics, 282 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 123, 293 overview, 21 textual space, 294 spatial audio, 252 spatial immersion, 18, 127 spatial sculpture, 293 spatial theory, 295 Speakman, Duncan Always Something Somewhere Else, 104, 105 biography, 103 embodied reading, 284 interview, 21, 103 It Must Have Been Dark By Then. See It Must Have Been Dark By Then (Speakman) performance, 292 project overview, 5, 8 reading practices, 32 reflexive technology, 306 textual space, 298 unpredictability, 300 speech action theory, 63 Spellman, Naomi, 15 Squires, Judith, 19 Station to Station (Attlee), 188, 192 Stein, Gertrude, 35, 125 stimmung, 152 Stone, Allucquere Roseanne, 18 story, 275, 284

335

storytelling, 37, 276 story world aesthetic experience, 249, 250, 252, 256, 259 Breathe, 264, 265, 267, 270 The Cartographer’s Confession, 249, 250, 252 structural narrative theory, 242 structure, 243, 259 subjectivity and anticipation, 225 attention, 117, 123, 129, 131 critical ambience, 150, 153 and environment, 14 Suchman, Lucy, 64, 72 Sundar, S. Shyam, 127 surveillance, 216, 269 Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff), 4, 147 Sutko, Daniel, 299 symbolic systems, 71 synaesthetic confusion, 252

T tablets, 1, 41 tacit knowledge, 72 Tap, 274 technological imaginary, 22, 145 technology haunted technology, 273 project impact, 312 reflexive technology, 305 Tedre, Matti, 228 temporal immersion, 18 temporality, 301–302. See also time text-block, 36 textual interpretation, 130, 203, 210 textual space, 294 text work, 39 Thames river, 196 theatre, 18, 143, 267

336

INDEX

thinking, 137 This is a Picture of Wind (Carpenter), 305 Thon, Jan-Noël, 127, 249 thought, 137 thrillers, 282 time ambient poetics, 279, 282, 289, 302 Breathe, 269, 272, 286 The Cartographer’s Confession, 297 It Must Have Been Dark By Then, 123 Todorov, Tzvetan, 242, 258 Tolstoy, Leo, 273, 291 tool use, 68, 73 Torah, 44 torches, 266 Touch Press, 9 Trace (Rueb), 247 transportation theory, 19 travel writing, 188, 189 treasure hunts, 14 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 38 Tron (film), 145 Tschichold, Jan, 33 Tukiainen, Markku, 228 Tunisia, 107, 112 Turner, Phil, 228 Turrel, James, 150 typefaces, 40, 45, 46 typography, 36, 45, 46

U ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) attention, 129, 135 context, 53, 54, 62, 65–66, 68–69, 73 critical ambience, 143 immersive algorithms, 204 locative media, 15

Uglow, Tea, 265, 266 the uncanny, 285, 296, 297, 304, 305 Uncle Roy All Around You, 295 unheimlich, 279 unity aesthetic experience, 243, 251, 254–256 Breathe, 291 The Cartographer’s Confession, 243, 254–255 Dewey’s aesthetic experience, 234, 236, 238–241, 239, 243 unpredictability, 298–31 unreadable text, 200–203 urban computing, 15–16 urban design, 148 urban mark up, 294 urban space performance, 290 textual space, 294–295 unpredictability, 298, 299 Urban Tapestries , 148 UTOPIA project, 64 V V2, 148 video content, 3, 194 Videodrome (Cronenberg), 145 video games. See games virtual art, 146–147 virtual reality (VR), 18–19, 144, 145 Visual Editions, 229, 265, 266 visual perception, 237, 258 voice narration, 12, 13, 108, 306–307 VPL labs, 145 VR (virtual reality). See virtual reality (VR) Vygotsky, Lev, 63 W walking, 13, 16, 148–149, 287–289

INDEX

Walking in the City (de Certeau), 289 Warde, Beatrice, 36, 46 Wardrip-Fruin, Noah, 138, 219 The Wasteland (Eliot), 317 Wattpad, 274 Way from Home (Myer), 254 weather, 269, 279, 281, 305 webApps, 317 the weird, 279–280 The Weird and the Eerie (Fisher), 279–280 Weiser, Mark, 66, 68, 129 Wesley, John, 43 Whispersync Kindle, 12 Whitehall Palace, 296 White, Tony, 295 Whitman, Walt, 71 Whittaker, Emma, 190, 195–196, 257, 265, 269 WH Smith, 11 WiFi, 3, 313 WiFi6, 313 Wilken, Rowen, 14 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 63 Wolf, Maryanne, 43 women’s reading, 45, 46 Woof, Emily, 195, 296 Woolf, Virginia, 14 Woolley, Benjamin, 145 word spacing, 37, 39 Words We Never Wrote, 7, 8, 279, 280, 283, 302, 305, 311 World Soundscape Project, 14 Wright, Peter, 228, 234

337

‘Writer on the Train’ (Attlee app);writer, 191–192 writing ambient literature ambient poetics, 277–284, 307–310 embodied reading, 284 impact on technology, 312–316 movement, 287–290 overview, 275–277 performance, 290–294 reflexive technology, 305–316 temporality, 302–305 textual space, 294–298 unpredictability, 298–301 writing, value of, 43

X XR (extended reality), 142

Y Yasuma, Yoyoi, 150 Yesterday You’re Still Dreaming , 7–8, 283, 300–301, 311 You Are There (Fadiman), 11 you (second-person address), 14, 154, 282

Z Zahavi, Dan, 235 Zuboff, Shoshana, 4 Zuboff, Shoshana, 147 Zuckerberg, Mark, 144