Moby Project

Transcription

the contemporary digital age is characterized by states of hybridity and convergence. Virtual and physical domains have become deeply intertwined and the social spaces we occupy increasingly mediate lived experiences, confusing and blurring real vs. performative life-events. Our GPS enabled mobile phone applications allow us to be in physical space but also to mediate the reality of that situatedness In combination with other social media we can further inscribe and broadcast our locations, and we can become actors and agents in our own amateur Web 2.0 and Web 3.0 production practices. Using my handheld device I can stand in one place while holding and surveying my avatar-self in a relocated, dislocated media context. I am inside a map of my own making, and I can redraw the borders and boundaries of my own experience. I am here, and now I am here, and now here. I am abstracted to a digital pinpoint I am geo-located. I'm on my own radar. I can move my bodies through space, and I can watch myself move my bodies through space. I cant touch myself, to watch myself, moving through space. I can read and write my own movements, and you can follow me. I am my own voyeur, my own stalker, and you may also survey me watching, touching, performing myself. The complex politics of this form of tactile surveillance (being subject and other, seeing and touching one's self, and others, while dynamically inscribing our bodies on the move) requires a nuanced attention to technical vs. organic functions. What does it mean to be embodied in an age of mixed realities and to what extent are our affective relationships to the digital media and that dis-play us at the critical center of such concerns? How does one formulate a critical entry point and navigate the maps, landscapes, texts, and bodies that circulate and proliferate in these mixed realities? The (re-)Mapping Moby Project is a creative and critical applied research experiment exploring affective embodiment and tracing its expressive potential in contemporary mixed media/mixed reality experience. The research brings a classic literary text (Herman Melville’s 1851 Moby-Dick) in conversation with contemporary digital mapping and mixed reality media technologies. Using the literary text as an inspirational base text, we are exploring ways to re-map the novel onto a collaboratively-constructed dynamic map interface that allows users to navigate experiences inspired by the text and to perform these narrative negotiations with an attention to new material reading and writing practices. How does one read and write in mixed reality environments? Who and what is a text, a body, a narrative, and how can it/they perform differently in otherly (dis)located contexts? How can we as researchers use our own affective experiences with texts, with locations, to create/share performative and collaborative practices? These are the questions that engage us. Working with research partners at The Augmented Environments Lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology, our research team at the Blekinge Institute of Technology and at Malmö University are adapting the Argon mobile AR tool to construct the (re-)Mapping Moby experience. The AR tool is used in combination with social media tools and practices, particularly those that enable geo-tagging and that foreground location-based documentation and inscription. Our goal is to create an active intervention in the text based on a distributed locative narrative model, one which foregrounds organic bodies in movement as important agents to situate mediated experiences. Re-located to Karlskrona, Sweden, a small naval town in the south eastern archipelago, the re-Mapping Moby experience is purposely far-removed from New Bedford and from Melville’s locations at sea, except by allusion. The connections between physical location and narrative are deliberately intersected via the users personalized interventions in the spaces through which they move. Tracing a series of customized walking routes, a user both follows the path of a previous user’s reading experience, while leaving traces of her own behind for future walkers. Using an iPad touch screen and mobile phones to access audio, video, and other augmented media inspired by the text and the location, the user follows routes mapped to chapters, completes tasks, adds commentary and documents encounters in the physical space. The documentation is circulated via social media and then fed-back into the experience and made available online. Moby-Dick as the base text for the experience is not accidental. Melville’s text overtly navigates among a host of formal structures, deflecting singular narrative perspective and complicating its textual surface in a dizzying rhetorical performative display, set against a backdrop of 19th Century technical innovation and invention. Re-mapping the text (figuratively and literally) in a collaborative digital context continues a tradition of embodied innovation initiated by Melville in his great unwieldy fleshy whale of a text. Now augmented by the principles of new materialism and post human interventions and by the affordances of contemporary mixed media culture, new bodies may also come into play and actively relocate dislocate, circulate, and resituate the expressive experiences engaged by the narrative.