1.Jon Dovey, Kate Pullinger and Tom Abba, Introduction.- 2.Ian Gadd, Ready Reader One: Recovering Reading as an Ambient Practice.- 3.Michael Marcinkowski, What We Talk About When We Talk About (Ambient Literature) Context.- 4.Matt Hayler, Objects, Places, and Entanglements.- 5.Kate Pullinger and Duncan Speakman, It Must Have Been Dark By Then:An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman.- 6.Michael Marcinkowski, Developing Ambient Attention.- 7.Jon Dovey and Matt Hayler, Critical Ambience.- 8.Matt Hayler, Jon Dovey and Tom Abba, The Politics of Ambient Literature.- 9.Kate Pullinger and James Attlee, The Cartographers Confession:An Artist Interview with James Attlee.- 10.Michael Marcinkowski,Where Im Coming From: Studying the Novelty of Immersive Algorithms.- 11.Emma Whittaker, An Aesthetics of Ambient Literature: Experience, Narrative, Design.- 12.Jon Dovey and Kate Pullinger, Breathe: An Artist Interview with Kate Pullinger.-13.Amy Spencer and Tom Abba, Writing Ambient Literature.
This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and location responsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building on the work done in the Ambient Literature Project (20162018), this books argues that these encounters constitute new literary forms, in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional storytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literary space. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers and readers. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.
Tom Abba is a writer and designer working with the form of digital and physical books. He is Associate Professor of Art& Design at UWE Bristol, UK, and a member of UWEs Digital Cultures Research Centre.
Jon Dovey is Professor of Screen Media at the Faculty of Arts, Creative Industries, and Education at UWE Bristol, UK. Jon works across theory and practice and researches technology and cultural form.
Kate Pullinger is Professor of Creative Writing and Digital Media at Bath Spa University, UK, and the Director of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries. Her novelForest Green will be published in 2020.
