To the approval committee for the Advanced Visualization Lab
The potential of digital texts is increasingly clear,
especially as developers are exploring the potential of interactivity. However,
how do readers engage with such texts? And, tangentially, how can such texts
build on these responses in order to move forward? Considering the potential
for meaning invested in tactile objects, as discussed by Jonathan Gil Harris, I
hypothesize that shifting the book into a new physical medium may affect its
use. I will study the work of education theorists, including Lev Vygotsky, but
I will also review the most popular interactive texts on the market, including
PadWorx version of Dracula.
However, even this version of Dracula is a relatively 2D, textocentric experience. So, once my
preliminary research is complete, I would like leave to work with the team at
the Advanced Visualization Lab, particularly relating to their 3D screen and
haptic technology. Building on the work of theorists including Andrea Witcomb, who explores the ways museums use such technology in order to create freestanding exhibits, I would like to explore texts that are not translated from paper texts; rather, I would focus on a text such as TOC by Steve Tomasula, which was first presented in a planetarium but was designed for the more multidimensional space of the 3D screens.
In trying to make texts increasingly interactive, how can we
blend these two avenues and make virtual, fictional worlds that appear and feel
as though they physically exist? If so, how does that open up or shut down the
role of reader imagination as audience? My final project will include both the
written text of my research and development process, as appropriate for journal
submission, as well as the virtual project created with the team.
3 comments:
I am truly impressed by the way that you have both maintained your commitment to the phenomenon of readerly transport (less stuffily, "getting lost in a book") yet focused it so as to take on the implications of new media. What I see you getting at here is an exploration of what is lost when the ‘touch’ of fiction (which historically has been described as a magical sort of self-loss and immersion) is materialized. When texts are extended into a haptic sphere, do we shut down the co-imaginative work that fiction requires of us? Do we normalize the whole category of the subjective, so that feeling becomes as fixed as the text itself? This sort of exploration would marry well with brain science an cognitive science, insofar as you might be able to map which neurons fire under which circumstances (a useful data pool). But before I get carried away with this line of thought, it’s worth thinking about the compulsion to put digital technology to empiricizing uses. What if your haptic version of Dracula gave readers the means of feeling others’ ways of feeling. That is, what if haptics didn’t offer a one to one correlation between the fictional cue and the readerly reception, but a diversity of possibilities. What if your text could be calibrated so that the reader could adjust the feel of her/his literary adventure? What if the work’s hap tics were linked to the figurative rather than the literal, and the book became a haptic dance—a tactile correlate to Stoker’s metaphors and similes, metonyms and synedoches? All this by way of saying, must the use of haptics necessarily demand the literalization of literature? What might be gained if we imagined it as another field of performance (since, after all, its representations are never real)?
Thank you for your comments. I didn't realize you had left them until Justin mentioned it in class. However, I was rereading Witmore this morning and realized that my abstract could benefit from her process. So, I revised my abstract to be more specific and to reorient the kinds of possible texts. (Perhaps I should have added those changes in this comment box instead. I apologize for any confusion.)
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