Journal articles on the topic 'Spazio poetico'

L’ideale di santità di Ildegarda di Bingen emerge non soltanto dalle agiografie composte in onore di Disibodo e Ruperto, patroni dei due monasteri in cui l’agiografa visse, ma anche nella Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum, un ciclo poetico-musicale in cui è ricostruita l’intera storia della Chiesa, dalle origini apostoliche fino alla nascita del monachesimo. Un ruolo fondamentale in questa ricostruzione è riservato a Maria e alla sua funzione materna. La Vergine ricongiunge la creazione del mondo veterotestamentaria alla rigenerazione del mondo avvenuta nel giorno dell’Incarnazione. Nel grembo di Maria e, quindi, in Cristo confluiscono tre livelli di lettura del testo del Genesi: la creazione (piano letterale), la Chiesa (piano allegorico) e il monachesimo (piano morale-tropologico). Anche Disibodo e Ruperto partecipano ai tre livelli dell’interpretazione genesiaca, ma in loro trova soprattutto spazio il piano morale. Sono, infatti, espressione dell’ascesa dell’uomo nel cammino di virtù, che ha come meta finale l’unione con Cristo.

Drawing from the corpus of the twenty-four authors anthologised in Poeti italiani nati negli anni ’80 e ’90 (Latiano, Interno Poesia, 2019-2020), this work aims to give an account of the recurring themes and topics of these texts. The first two volumes of this anthology reveal, in spite of a rich formal differentiation and a variety of stylistic solutions, a strong concordance of themes and desire: thematically, these works betray an anxiety concerning the problem of the disintegration of the world, yet they also share in a desire for salvation, achieved by reconstituting oneself in an individual or communal space, through the specific means of poetry. Thus, the images of collapse and epidemic prevail, variously resolved in urban and peripheral contexts, equally opposed by repeated attempts of nostoi and a strong craving for light. This horizontal tendency seems to be the link through which to weave a broader generational discourse which transcends individual authors. A key for interpreting this discourse will be offered, in the second part of the paper, in the function of creative nostalgia. A partire dal corpus dei ventiquattro autori presenti nell’antologia Poeti italiani nati negli anni ’80 e ’90 (Latiano, Interno Poesia, 2019-2020), questo lavoro si propone di focalizzare e mettere in relazione i nodi tematici ricorrenti nei testi. I primi due volumi di quest’antologia rivelano infatti, a dispetto di una ricca differenziazione formale e di soluzioni stilistiche, una forte concordanza tematica e desiderativa, laddove il tema riguarda soprattutto il problema della disgregazione del mondo e il desiderio la capacità di salvarsene, ricostituendosi in uno spazio individuale o comunitario grazie ai mezzi specifici del gesto poetico stesso. Prevalgono allora le immagini del crollo e dell’epidemia, variamente risolte in contesti urbani e periferici, a cui si oppongono altrettanto variamente ripetuti tentativi di nostoi e una fortissima e dilagante ansia di luce. Questa propensione orizzontale sembra a tutti gli effetti la maglia stretta su cui intessere un discorso generazionale più largamente inteso, un discorso che trascenda le singole istanze individuali. Una chiave di lettura per questo discorso verrà individuata, nella seconda parte dell’intervento, nella funzione della nostalgia creativa.

Tra le numerose opere poetiche di Thomas Kinsella, Notes from the Land of the Dead, del 1973, appare quella più legata agli elementi del paesaggio fisico. In questo saggio si provano a percorrere alcune strategie cognitive e percettive che consentono al poeta irlandese di farsi interprete, attraverso di esso, di un immaginario per la rifondazione poetica del mondo, all’interno di quella che ho recentemente definito come world poetry

DALLA CULTURA DEGLISPOLIAAL CULTO DELLE RELIQUIE: L'ARCO DI COSTANTINO E LA GENESI DELLE FORME TARDO ANTICHEQuesto articolo cerca di esaminare il programma dell'arco di Costantino, ed in particolare il suo riuso dispoliadi precedenti edifici, alia luce di cosa possa essere ricostruito dei più tardi progetti monumentali di Costantino a Costantinopoli. Viene ipotizzata la spoliazione di statue classiche (usate per decorare gli spazi pubblici della nuova città) e delle reliquie apostoliche, le quali vennero utilizzate nelle tombe collocate a fianco di quella di Costantino nel mausoleo dei Santi Apostoli, o durante la vita dell'imperatore stesso o di quella del figlio Costanzo. L'uso di arcaismi poetici, nella loro tipica forma poetica del quarto secolo (quale quella di Cento), viene anche dimostrato. Si sostiene che l'arco di Costantino emerge come un monumento chiave nella genesi di una nuova estetica costantiniana in cui l'antico viene incorporato nel moderno, ed in questo modo inevitabilmente trasformato.

The article is devoted to the poetics of the path chronotope in the Yakut heroic epic. The relevance of the topic is due to the need for an in-depth study of the spatio-temporal organization of the path in the olonkho, in particular in the Vilyui epic tradition, to which the olonkho S.N. Karataev “Bogatyr Tong Saar” belongs. The novelty of the article lies in the fact that for the first time the poetics of the path chronotope in the Yakut epic is subjected to systemic analysis, and for the first time the peculiarities of the path chronotope in the Vilyui epic tradition are revealed. The author of the article comes to the conclusion that the chronotope of the path occupies the most important place not only in the chronotope of the olonkho, but in general in its plot-compositional organization. The structure of the path has been determined, consisting of three main parts: the departure of the hero on the path, the process of the path itself, the completion of the path (the return of the hero to his homeland), in which various plot motives are realized. Particular attention is paid to the plot-forming role of the path chronotope in the olonkho, its relationship with the system of characters, poetical and stylistic means. It has been established that the leading links of the poetics of the Yakut heroic epic have inextricable interconnections in solving the main ideological and aesthetic problems.

- The simple preposition "between" has always fuelled the mystic and ontological imagination. In the book Tree of Life compiled by the cabalist Hayyim Vital, a prototype of this tradition is the idea of divine "contraction", the first act of God that left space for the creation of the worlds. Similar concepts can be found in the ontology of Heidegger, where one of the closest words to "being" is "between", the median line marking the difference between "entity" and "being", between "world" and "thing". For Norberg-Schulz, "between" is also the point where Heidegger and Kahn meet. It will be remembered that the latter saw the origin of all inspiration in the "hreshold between silence and ligh"'. However, even the material poetic of Kahn was informed by this archetype, as can be seen from his buildings and from the many "failed masterpieces" from which a paradigm of architectural space emerges. In the Meeting House of the Salk Institute or in the Hurva Synagogue, the space in-between becomes the primary core of meaning. Another theoretician of the in-between hypothesis is Kurokawa, whose "philosophy of symbiosis" unravels in an essentially intermediate cultural and architectural space.

Dino Buzzati offre ne Il deserto dei Tartari una rielaborazione audace del Purgatorio dantesco per atmosfera e stile. L’aspetto temporale del romanzo è ricalcato esattamente sulla prospettiva dantesca, in cui linearità e circolarità poggiano sull’ambientazione desertica. Tempo e spazio si dilatano o restringono a seconda della prospettiva interiore del personaggio, in una perfetta unione di circolarità e linearità; ugualmente, anche lo spazio sembra oscillare tra Fortezza e deserto per poi subire improvvise verticalizzazioni. Il modello dantesco, come “scrittura verticale” e come “retorica della salvezza,” emerge dunque nei nodi più cruciali dell’immaginazione buzzatiana, mettendo in luce una consonanza profonda e radicata.

The bhakti movement is among the most forceful instruments of change in the Indian history.The movement signaled the end of a worn out epoch and did much to subvert hierarchies by substituting the concept of redemption through devotion in place of ritualistic orthodoxy. It carried sublime philosophy, to the common masses, of the so-called lower classes, in vernacular languages and open doors for women poets. The movement continues to inspire our generation and enjoys prominence in terms of its reach, magnitude, popularity and spacio-temporal significance. The poetic tradition of this school is marked by a distinctive proclivity for introspection; out of the two schools:nirguna and saguna; the nirguna school of bhakti poetry shows a greater tendency towards introspection. The nirguna group of poets led by Kabir, promote the technique of introspective reflectionas the key to self-realisation and god-realisation. This approach is significant as it breaks away from the convention of ritualistic orthodoxy, which exhibited a strong propensity for outward modes of realisation. Further, a key element of the movement was the popularisation of the percept of a ‘personal God’, which our mythological-fiction retains till date.

Il saggio propone un modo nuovo di leggere e tradurre la testimonianza letteraria di Primo Levi a partire dalla relazione fra poesia e prosa in Se questo è un uomo. Collegando la poetica della traduzione di Henri Meschonnic con la linguistica dell’enunciazione sviluppata da Émile Benveniste, il saggio cerca di definire e analizzare il “poema dello sterminio” che sottende la scrittura di Levi, mette alla prova i relativi pregiudizi critici della trasparenza della prosa e dell’intraducibilità della poesia, e suggerisce infine una nuova articolazione del “poema sacro” di Dante nello spazio letterario creato dall’impegno etico a portare testimonianza.

This article explores the linguistic worldview of a Ukrainian poet – postmodernist Yuriy Andrukhovytch – realized through the concept of “Christian sacred symbols” analyzed from the perspective of anthropological and cognitive aspects of lingual and cultural studies. It defines the essence and the ways of implementing the concept in the spatio-temporal continuum of poetry collection “India” as well as highlights the role of man in the poet’s imaginary world through the archetypes of the world culture and decodes symbolic meaning of cultural context of the author’s works. Contrary to a generally accepted view that the earth is round, spatial reality for the author turns out to be a planet which resembles a cake, a fl at surface, a desert, a kingdom and a bridge. The sky is seven crystal hemispheres, out lining the heavenly space with stars and planets fixed at each level. The space is represented by such geographical notions as East Asia, India, China, the river Nile. The author of the article supposes that India becomes for the writer the embodiment of our civilization at all times of mankind, another way to present man in the space of eternity, and a kind of life philosophy. The synthesis of pagan, Jewish, Hindu, Muslim and Christian ideas about man’s place in the world and his moral peace, happiness and overall love is represented by such symbols as angels, harpes, gehennr hell hrifony, dragons, percale books, lilies, honey, pythons, fl ags, birds, reptiles, saints, timpani, newts, tulips, furies, devils, Yuri’s sword, Yasmin and others.

The article examines the poetic world of the modern Czech prose writer, poet, translator from several European languages, a participant in the Prague Spring, whose works have not been printed for a long time and were banned, author of poetry collections “Kam letí nebe” (1961), “Zimohrádek” (1965), “Loutky” (1970), “Doupě latinářů” (1992), “Blbecká poezie” (2002), “Penthesilea” (2019), Ivan Wernisch. The writer has a great creative legacy that dates back to the sixties of the last century. During this long time, he managed to publish about thirty poetry books. Surrealism, interweaving of temporal and spatial indicators, interweaving of poetic and prosaic forms, rich poetic world are typical features of I. Wernisch’s poetry. The article explores the spatio-temporal relations of the Ivan Wernisch’s poetic world, the features of the image of the lyrical hero. Some poetry by Ivan Wernisch was used over time as lyrics of songs by Czech rock bands. The Ivan Wernisch’s son Michal Wernisch (also known as Ewald Murrer) followed his father’s footsteps and today is also known as a poet.

The Poetics of Poetry Film provides a comprehensive overview of a history of the form. By outlining models and methods it creates a taxonomy of defining characteristics for identification of a range of possible genres and terminologies. As an academic and a practitioner Sarah Tremlett, the author of this book, clearly enjoys the holistic experience of bringing deeper understanding to creative practice through theory and vice versa. She explores poetry in conjunction with film; how formal characteristics are extended, translated or re-visioned as a way of sharing both a subjective and political voice not only through form but as philosophical practice. Numerous references to her own oeuvre are threaded through the publication, which veers from formal academic analysis to highly subjective and pragmatic reflection on aspects of production. In Constructing Dynamic Spatio-Temporality she argues that the remediation of the page poem becomes theoretically interwoven with the sequential nature of the filmic narrative and the spatial construct of the artist’s and animator’s canvas, to create new ways of interpreting combined audio-visual aesthetics.

The author of the article proves that by means of poetics (at the spatio-temporal, motivic, subject-object, plot-compositional, speech and other levels), the deliberate involvement of physiological (the cry of an infant as a strong stimulus, the lack of description and concretization of the child) and medical data (receptive and cognitive disorders in humans with insufficient sleep) Chekhov “justifies” his heroine. Forcing the severity of the heroine’s emotional state, coupled with a change in the chronotope (night, the owners’ room; day, the owners’ apartment, front door, shop; night, the owners’ room), as a result, demonstrates an affective state (madness) that makes Var’ka insane at the time of the crime. Chronologically, Chekhov pushes the murder event to the very end of the work, gradually arousing in the reader empathy for Var’ka, for example, through a narrator who can see events through her eyes, and the specifics of the speech addressed to the heroine (orders, threats, insults) and of that coming from her (automatic purring lullaby). Within the work, in the course of the plot, the space of the heroine’s dream and reality dwindles the author thickens her emotional state; half-reality stratifies into the reality and dream, takes up more and more space and time and gradually turns into madness. The real, albeit indirect, murderers of the child are his parents.

L’articolo intende mostrare la pervasività della figura della notte nell’opera narrativa di Fleur Jaeggy e segnalare dei percorsi nella sua prosa, partendo dal fascino dell’autrice per la notte, momento elettivo della sua creazione oltre che sfondo costante delle sue opere letterarie. Della rappresentazione della notte in Jaeggy viene posta in primo piano la dimensione perturbante, enigmatica e spiazzante, propria dei personaggi così come della poetica dell’autrice. Ancora, il saggio si propone di mostrare la ricca, originale e multiforme centralità dell’esperienza e dell’immaginario della notte nella prosa di Jaeggy e nel suo mondo letterario, individuando passaggi in cui la notte si manifesta ora quale luogo dell’anima, ora spazio di incontro con fantasmi e doppi, ora punto di congiunzione fra dimensione spirituale e spettrale. Si indagano infine gli scenari tenebrosi in cui i protagonisti di Jaeggy trovano una forma di apparente distacco o, addirittura, di preparazione alla morte.

The article studies miniatures in Kaija Saariaho's Lichtbogen for nine musicians and live electronics (1985-86). The research material consists of records, the score and composer's interviews and articles. Methodologically, the article is based on Gaston Bachelard 's phenomenology (The Poetics of Space) and Denis Smalley's "Spectromorphology." Miniatures are subtle spatio-temporal constellations, which require a non-global listening strategy, or an "aural magnification glass" in order to be perceived. In Saariaho's case, these miniatures are often imbued with musical tension, which reverberates across the material borders of music and texts. By working on the borderline between music and language, they challenge the notion that a hard separation exists between the purely musical and the extra-musical.

The article examines the features of magical realism as a direction of literature, as well as some of the characteristic features of American drama. The history of performances of the play “The Clean House” by the American playwright Sarah Ruhl is presented in the paper, and also a brief overview of critical articles about these theatrical performances is offered. The study proves that the play "The Clean House" can be viewed in the context of magical realism, based on a number of characteristic features, such as metaphysics, conventionality, rejection of psychological explanations of the characters’ actions, the presence of two realities, distortion of space and time, existential problems. It is noted that these features are manifested at the level of compositional construction, speech organization of the play, chronotope, content. It is shown that a metaphysically closed space is materially open, and time in the play is leveled, stopped and determined by the subjective experiences of the characters. Laughter is nominated as the key concept of the play, linking the spatio-temporal organization of the text with its ontological content since through laughter the idea of the immortality of the heroes’ love, which acquires a sacred meaning is affirmed in the play. It is emphasized that the poetics of the “magical” makes it possible to realize the ontological or existential meaning of the play, to show the coexistence of the miraculous and the ordinary.

Abstract Exploring Jen Bervin’s 2004 revision of the Shakespearean sonnets, this essay situates her project Nets within a visual and verbal tradition of erasure art past and contemporary and underscores her work’s queer potential. Through Bervin’s creative-critical intervention, Nets reorients the spatio-temporal boundaries of the Bard’s infamous sequence, unsettling its most entrenched assumptions of subjectivity and form. Her erasure not only unearths disparate meanings in but imagines alternative possibilities for Shakespeare’s sonnets, cultivating new pleasures and beauties therein. Doing so, Nets begins to reveal how erasure can function as a powerful poetic mode for those whose subjectivities and voices have long been excluded from official literary and cultural histories: how erasure becomes a bold act of will.

AbstractChallenging the established poetic idea of Ireland as a unified whole, new Irish poetry encourages a perspective toward homeland alongside with a corresponding revision of Irish subjectivity as liminality. Introduced by Homi Bhabha as a postcolonial cultural term, the idea privileges hybrid cultures and challenges solid or authentic ones. Moreover, this liminal rationale entails a corresponding chronotopic rendition, as Bakhtin intends to theorize it, whereby the notion of spatio-temporality assists the poet in rethinking the Irish identity. An archeologist shrouded as a poet, Heaney’s early work, North (1975), is an attempt to reterritorialize the Motherland while Station Island (1984) represents the deterritorialization of the land, a collection in which Heaney proposes an alternative notion of Irish identity. The present study seeks to show how Heaney’s aforementioned poetry collections manifest a transition from a patently nationalist reception of land to a tendency to liminal spaces. Hence, a critical juxtaposition of these two works bears witness to an endeavor to move beyond the solid, reductionist perspective of the unified Ireland into a state of liminality with respect to Bhabha’s idea of hybridity. Furthermore, it is argued how Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope can accommodate to the accomplishment of such a poetic project.

Con la poesia moderna l’immagine onirica e il sogno di un’unità nuova, fortemente presenti nel Romanticismo, sfociano spesso nel quadro della lacerazione e dell’impossibilità della notte. Dal punto di vista filosofico tale tendenza viene rappresentata da Maurice Blanchot che nel saggio Lo spazio letterario propone una distinzione tra prima e altra notte. Il suo modello risulta direttamente applicabile all’opera di Stéphane Mallarmé, considerando soprattutto l’ottica di Igitur. L’articolo si propone di esaminare tale aspetto, mettendolo in contrasto con la poesia contemporanea di Milo De Angelis, l’autore che esordisce nel 1976 con Somiglianze, opponendosi in modo esplicito al mallarmeano “sogno” della purezza. Nelle sue raccolte, la notte viene tendenzialmente riscoperta attraverso la dimensione lirico-tragica. Un’analisi contrastiva di questi approcci permette di definire il senso profondo delle immagini notturne, ma anche i prerequisiti necessari perché esse si realizzino, indipendentemente dalle distanze poetiche.

Drawing upon previous theoretical and practical work in historical and qualitative applications of Geographical Information Systems (GIS), this paper, in Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's terminology, conceptualizes GIS as ‘an abstract machine’ which plays a ‘piloting role’ which does not ‘function to represent’ something real, but rather ‘constructs a real which is yet to come.’ To illustrate this digital humanities mapping methodology, the essay examines Irish writer Patrick Kavanagh's novel The Green Fool (1938) and epic poem The Great Hunger (1946) and their respective contrasting topophilic and topophobic renderings of landscape, identity and sense of place under the lens M.M. Bakhtin's ‘Historical Poetics’ (chronotope) to illuminate GIS's ability to engage in spatio-discursive visualization and analysis. The conceptualizations and practices discussed in this paper reconsider GIS software/hardware/techniques as a means to engage subjects of concern to literary and cultural studies commensurate with the recent strong interest in the geographical and spatial dimensions of these cognate areas.

L'intento di questo lavoro è di dialogare tramite un linguaggio im-maginativo e metaforico intorno al concetto di sublimazione e attraver-so alcune delle sue possibili estensioni: la poesia, la narrazione e la creatività letteraria. Metafora, immaginazione, poesia, linguaggio, so-gno. Connessioni tra fenomeni sublimatori ed esperienza di scrittura. Arte come curiosità mai del tutto compiuta, in cui il legame tra subli-mazione e simbolizzazione trova espressione profonda nella poetica di Emily Dickinson e nell'esistenza tormentata del personaggio di Violette Toussaint nel romanzo "Cambiare l'acqua ai fiori". Un mondo al femminile che ricerca nel proprio desiderio e nella propria mancanza affettiva, di spodestare quella umana e amara disillusione che la vita impone. Così la scrittura, come forma d'arte, può rappresentare la creatività e permettere la sublimazione per ciò che è stato vissuto come un trauma. In questo scritto vengono interrogate alcune delle concettualizzazioni teoriche riguardanti l'origine e i destini della sublimazione, lasciando spazi insaturi, aree aperte e contigue tra desiderio, mancanza e creatività.

In the period between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, Bosniak literary science found itself, like its literature a century earlier, in proving its own identity. The recent generation of Bosnian-Herzegovinian theorists confirms in numerous studies the validity of the application of different literary-theoretical concepts in the study of the Bosniak literary past, with identity issues in literature being among the most important. In this regard, the paper will focus on two important issues. The first is the decades-long neglect of Bosniak literature and, consequently, the scientific exploration of its structural-poetic features. The second question, which the paper will attempt to answer, was raised in the study 'Literature and the Identities' by Vedad Spahić. This theorist believes that the most significant moments of literary science are when it reveals the deep structures of the whole culture while talking about literature. Apart from Spahić, the corpus of literature includes the studies by Enes Duraković, Sanjin Kodrić, and other theorists of the 21st century. Their works confirm that Bosniak literary identity today exists in areas distorted borders strict autonomy of literary science.

Questo studio è un’analisi testuale di Fantasmi romani (2006) che mira ad illustrare come sia avvenuto un mutamento ideologico nella poetica di Luigi Malerba, che da autore di romanzi divertente e divertito, si presenta ora come un commentatore amareggiato dell’epoca contemporanea. Avvalendomi delle teorie di Remo Cesarani e di Fredric Jameson, secondo cui in conseguenza del tramonto delle “grandi metanarrazioni”, sono apparse nuove forme dello spazio cittadino e nuove tendenze architettoniche, analizzo come i protagonisti di Fantasmi romani vivano in uno stato di disagio e “smarrimento esistenziale” all’interno della metropoli romana. Laddove il personaggio di Clarissa cercherà di orientarsi leggendo i segni magici che la città le offre, l’architetto Giano prima porterà avanti il suo progetto architettonico di distruggere e ricostruire una nuova Roma; poi, attraverso il suo romanzo, cercherà invano di riordinare e dunque, cambiare, la società in cui vive. La consapevolezza del fallimento del progetto utopistico (l’architettura) e della creazione di un romanzo (la scrittura), è il segno di una preoccupazione radicata da parte dell’autore per lo stato attuale delle cose. Se inizialmente la cognizione della crisi ecologica, culturale, relazionale che percorre le pagine degli scritti malerbiani era mitigata da divertissement filologico, gioco linguistico e coinvolgente comicità in romanzi come ad esempio Il serpente, Salto mortale, il Protagonista, essa affiora invece nel testo dell’ultimo romanzo attraverso un sentimento di sfiducia e rassegnazione.

This is a text derivated from the presentation “La fijeza: tiempo y espacio insulares”, in the 38th Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association, on June 4th, 2013 at Grenada Grand Beach Resort, Grand Anse, Grenada.Lezama Lima was a Cuban poet, essayist, and novelist considered as well as Alejo Carpentier, one of the greatest figures of the Caribbean island literature. His detailed knowledge of the baroque literature specially Góngora’s poetry, and also his necessity of fixing a Cuban identity, allowed him to propose a very innovative esthetic which goes beyond the disenchantment proper of the baroque. The verses of “La fijeza” are some examples of this vision. In this order of ideas, the purpose of this work in to present the analysis of some poems of “La fijeza” in order to explain the manner in which Lezama distances himself from the baroque disenchantment conception of the world and how, at the same time, he presents verses of hope, identity and universalism by means of presenting the poetic image of the Caribbean scenery and its spatio-temporal relationships in a way to explain a vision of the poetry as privileged way to re-create the world.

Sant’Efrem il Siro, vissuto nel IV secolo, é il rappresentante di una delle tradizioni della cristianità, tradizione molto sconosciuta. É famoso come poeta, considerato il massimo dell’era patristica, perchè autore di tanti inni liturgici che sono in uso nelle comunitá della tradizione siriaca ancora oggi. Il suo valore teologico è spesso disprezzato. Nella sua bellezza poetica é trattato come poeta con una teologia non tanto originale. Ma le ricerche lo presentano invece come un teologo molto raffinato, con una metodologia completamente diversa e per questo difficile da comprendere. Sant’Efrem é difensore della realtá umana; la nostra incapacitá di comprendere Dio deriva non soltanto dalla nostra debolezza, ma anzitutto da questo: che Dio nella sua natura é invisibile e noi non possiamo con le nostre conoscenze e con la nostra lingua capire chi é veramente e descriverlo. Egli si é fatto uomo e nella creazione ha ideato lo strumento della comunicazione. Il mondo con tutte le creature é pieno di simboli e soltanto con i simboli possiamo avvicinarci a Lui. La nostra conoscenza avviene sempre attraverso i simboli che preparano lo spazio dell’incontro ma mai descrivendoLo! La metafora diventa una realtá non soltanto tecnica, ma una realtà voluta dal Signore. Così, afferma, Lui rimane Dio, assolutamente libero, Dio che si é vestito da uomo anche per farci capire. L’intervento vorrebbe presentare questa dimensione della teologia di Sant’Efrem il Siro basandosi sul suo inno di fede (31), uno di questi brani nei quali santo Diacono Siro spiega la sua motodologia.

Ciaran Carson is a renowned Northern Irish poet with a distinguished record of translating poetry from Irish, Italian and French. This article focuses on his translation practice as evidenced in his three volumes of French poetry in translation: sonnets by Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud; prose poems by Rimbaud; and poems by Jean Follain. Guided by the music, the matter, and the linguistic and ontological going-beyond of the originals, Carson variously ‘adapts’ prose poems to a rhyming alexandrine format, makes explicit use of derivation, shifts spatio-temporal perspective, and ‘doubles’ his French translations with English originals. Carson’s approach of ‘fetching’ poems from ‘elsewhere’ is assessed in the light of Meschonnic’s poetics of translation, which would define the overarching objective as producing new poems in English which do in English what the originals do in French. The analysis of Carson’s new poems is also informed by conceptualizations of creativity and originality arising from research in cognitive science, literary studies and critical theory. Carson’s practice of working under constraints suggested by the original poems and exploiting possibilities offered by and between the two languages leads to an expressive plurality that unsettles notions of source and target language. His translation artefacts and commentaries are examined for the light they shed on originality and derivation; writing and translating; the subjectivity of the translator; and the relationship between original poem and new poem.

The figure of the tracée is significant for Ménil’s understanding of spatio-temporality, an understanding upon which rest, so this essay argues, his concepts of critique, poetic knowledge, and literary form. The argument takes as its starting point the work Ménil did to conceptualize history as the poesis of recuperation. In doing so, the essay argues for a renewed understanding of Ménil’s contribution to Caribbean philosophy as a whole. One of the most important components of this contribution, the essay claims, is the manner in which Ménil shifts the focus from how linguistic and cultural identity forms in the Antilles to how history appears. What this means is that Ménil works to displace the centrality of folklore and orality to the construction of Antillean identity in order to imagine how Antillean culture comes also to be expressed non-discursively. In Ménil’s work, this displacement occurs primarily by his re-thinking the relationship of architecture to literature. Re-thinking this relationship entails for Ménil recuperating the traces of an Antillean “past passed over,” which unexpectedly appear in both architectural structures and literary works. Paying attention to this particular and peculiar intellectual focus in Ménil’s work, this essay ultimately reconsiders the roles played by both discursive and non-discursive arts in the constitution of a decolonized aesthetics in the Antilles.

Abstract This short methods paper emerges out of the AHRC-funded ‘Chronotopic Cartographies’ project for the digital mapping of place and space as represented in works of literature. The primary aim of that project was to find a way of mapping and visualizing represented literary worlds for which there is no corresponding real ‘ground’. A solution was found in the form of topological graphs which allow for relative rather than absolute mapping (but also permit a relative imaginary map to be lain on top of a pre-existing cartesian form). Using a spatial schema to chunk out the text in terms of chronotopic (time-space) zones enables the generation of a series of visualizations that show different kinds of spatio-temporal constructions in texts. The visualizations are centred upon nodes that consist of chronotopes (e.g. ‘the road’) as well as locations (e.g. ‘road to Geneva’); connections between them of different kinds and toporefs within them (references to other places from this one). The paper will articulate core methods from the project, outlining the stages involved in the process, from marking up the text, using a custom-made schema, through graph generation and into the implications for analysis. This will be illustrated in relation to two Victorian texts: the realist space of Dickens’s Oliver Twist; and the abstract poetic space of Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’.

This article discusses the functioning of proper names in a literary text. The primary attention is paid to the study of the essential functions of anthroponyms. This work will focus on studying the origin of anthroponyms and their use in a poetic text. The features of each functional style have long made it possible to contrast the literary and artistic style with everyone else in the presence of exceptional semantic complexity in the literary texts, a multi-tiered composition, and the aesthetic function of the word that organises the entire context of the work. Onomastic units are integral components of the space of a literary text; they are a connecting, constructive element of the meaningful and semantic space and structure of the text. Proper names participate in the creation of semantic multidimensionality of the text, are a means of translating the author's intention and the artistic idea of the work. The article uses descriptive and comparative linguistic methods. It is noted here that the creation of proper names is a practical process and is directly related to the mental-national thinking of the people. The scientific and methodological study of names is theoretical. The proper name in a work of art performs some artistic functions. They include identification, ensuring unity of perception, characterising a character, shaping his image and plot of work, forming subject-object relationships, spatio-temporal and compositional organisation of work, and implementing intertextual connections.

Semantic fixity is a transcendental signified. One of the touted aims of literary theory was to topple it. The Indian semantic concept of Vyañjana attempted to do this millennia before. But canonical theories of Rasa established Rasananda as an attainment of absolute coherence and harmony. What this paper calls trans-epistemic praxis is a viable methodology to reclaim the long-lost rupturality (if structurality is resisted, rupturality must be embraced, at least as a neologism) inherent to aesthetics. This is done in a Post-theory context. “Bhanga” (rupturing) leads to “bhangi”, aesthetic charm. It is an aporetic textual disruption that leads to the most fertile indeterminacy of meaning. Modern literary theory set out on a debunking and destabilizing mission of liberal humanist tenets, but got hardened into “doxa”, crystallized structures and hierarchies. This necessitated a theorizing of theory itself. The chronotope of Post-theory gets foregrounded. A crossing of spatio-temporal boundaries gives us the freedom to site Rasa Theory and Indian Poetics as Post-theoretical. Inter-spaces and inter-times are engendered. Deconstruction and Rasa become heterodoxic knowledges to each other, subverting each other honouring the alterity of the other. This exercise liberates Theory from becoming sclerotic. Orthodoxics and monologisms get flouted. Theory is a story. Story is built on the figurality of language. The tropology of language is built on a never-ending desire for signification. This desire never meets with satiation. The concept of “Rati” can be seen as this interminable desire of language. Post-theory is a call to wake up from amnesia, the terrible oblivion regarding the fact that Deconstruction and Rasa are ceaseless streams of reading processes and not rigid and straitjacketed end products. This ruptural aesthetics leads to the rapture of poeisis, the indeterminate significatory process.

The paper is devoted to the reconstruction in historical retrospection of the images of the space-time continuum, expressed through the material world of the Mansis ethnic culture and concentrated in the folklore sphere. The methodology is set by the postulates about the specificity of mythological thinking, refracted in relation to time and space. The source base was made up of the Mansis folklore texts collected from the beginning of the 20th century. Following his predecessors, the author distinguishes three periods in the mythological and poetic history of the Mansis. The classification is based on the principle of generational affiliation of the main characters. The first period is associated with the era of primordial creation and the “old couple” or the supreme deity Num-Torum. Time and space in it are substantial and are expressed through the images of water and earth. Infinity, as the initial state of space, is replaced by a measurement through time, which emphasizes its finiteness and limitation. The principle of trinity dominates in the reckoning of time. The second period is set by the acts of the sons of the supreme deity - Taryg-peshch-nimal'-sova and the bear. The space is desribed multidimensional: the earth and near-earth spheres -the sky, the underground, the water and the southern land of Mortim-maa, as well as the underworld or the dead world. Particular attention is paid to the “bark soil”, which is characterized by landscape: first of all, rivers, but also swamps, thickets, mountains, manes. The idea of “one's own land” as a personal form of connection with space is fixed. The culture of the space is emphasized, the signs of which are villages, fortresses, barns, plague, and the sacred part - “sacred place” - stands out. The perception of time is also distinguished by multidimensionality. On the one hand, relativity is attributed to it due to the opposition “far -close”, correlated with movement, on the other hand, there is time reckoning with the help of the light and dark parts of the day, accentuation of morning and evening as the prologue and epilogue of the day. The third period becomes the arena of human action, and in various folklore forms of manifestation of human nature - Ekva-pyris, people-heroes, the progenitors of the phratries Por and Mos. The main thing here is activities and actions through which the feeling of timespace is transmitted. Space is thought of locally, although the degree of local concretization is different: on the one hand, an indefinitely distant territory, and on the other, a topographically verified reference to real settlements and geographical objects. The interpretation of time, and above all in the heroic epic, is as close as possible to the linear historical. During this period, there is the most developed system of calculating time, in which astronomical units dominate - the year as the sum of winter and summer, day and night. At the same time, the day is interpreted both as the time of human life and life itself. The presence of spatio-temporal portals intersperses the specifics of the expression of space and time, inherent in periods, in the general picture of the Mansis world.

Il saggio presenta il lavoro di un giovane fotografo del Nord Est italiano, Giovanni Pasinato (Venezia 1974-), attraverso l’analisi della sua opera e un’intervista all’autore, impegnato in un’attività dalle consistenti valenze cognitive ed etiche, ascrivibile alla Scuola italiana di fotografia del paesaggio (Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, Giovanni Chiaramonte), ma dotata di tratti originali in forte sviluppo. Il contributo intende mostrare come la fotografia di Pasinato—dalle esplorazioni del “terzo paesaggio” lungo strade e autostrade, alla ricerca condotta sulle scene urbane di Treviso e Venezia Mestre, fino alla più recente perlustrazione dell’antico bosco del Montello (sulla cui esistenza minacciata si era levato altissimo anche il canto poetico di Andrea Zanzotto, scomparso nel 2011)—sia tutta incentrata sulla funzione fondamentale dello “sguardo,” grazie alla quale il suo lavoro si caratterizza come indagine e strumento di consapevolezza, in senso lato “politica,” sul rapporto fra l’essere umano e i luoghi. Le immagini di Pasinato, sommesse, limpide e allo stesso tempo avvolte da vaghezza, interrogano l’osservatore, proponendogli un dialogo con gli spazi fotografati ed evidenziando l’inscindibilità stilistica fra forma e contenuto; si distinguono per l’assenza di ogni compiacimento soggettivistico ed estetico, a favore della riscoperta, realizzata per mezzo di una essenziale valorizzazione della “visione,” dello stretto nesso fra cultura e natura, fra l’essere umano e gli altri viventi. Proprio mentre sollecitano il senso della nostra responsabilità collettiva, tralasciando ogni cedimento sentimentalistico e nostalgico, queste fotografie invitano ad avere coscienza e perciò, in ultima analisi, speranza. Pasinato rivendica così alla fotografia un’alta funzione artistica e civile, spesso misconosciuta proprio da quegli enti e istituzioni che dovrebbero avere a cuore il bene comune. Abstract The analysis and the interview of the author contained in this essay portray the work of a young Italian photographer, Giovanni Pasinato (Venice 1974-), who lives in the North East of Italy and who devotes himself to an activity encompassing important cognitive and ethical aspects. His work can be included within the Italian School of Landscape Photography (Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, Giovanni Chiaramonte), but has original features in robust development. This essay will show how Pasinato’s photography—from his explorations of the “third landscape” along roads and highways, through his research in the urban scenes of Treviso and Venice Mestre, up to the latest reconnaissance of the Montello’s ancient wood (on whose endangered existence, Andrea Zanzotto, who died in 2011, wrote wonderful poems)—is entirely focused on the fundamental function of the “look,” thanks to which his work characterizes itself as an investigation, an instrument of the awareness, in the broad sense “political,” of the relationship between human being and place. Pasinato’s whispered, limpid yet at the same time ambiguous images, question their beholders, offering them a dialogue with the photographed spaces, underlining the stylistic indivisibility between form and content. In comparison to other landscape photography experiences, Pasinato’s works stand out, thanks to the absence of any subjective and aesthetic self-gratification and by favouring, through an essential enhancement of the “vision,” the revival of the close relationship between culture and nature and between human beings and other living beings. Just as his photographs stress the importance of our collective responsibility, ignoring any sentimental or nostalgic concession, they are an exhortation to raise awareness and, ultimately, hope. Thus, Pasinato ascribes to photography a highly artistic and civil function, which is often disregarded by those organizations and those authorities that should really care for the common good. Resumen El análisis y la entrevista del autor en que se centra este ensayo presentan la obra de un joven fotógrafo del noreste de Italia, Giovanni Pasinato (Venecia, 1974-), que se dedica a un actividad que abarca importantes aspectos cognitivos y éticos. Su trabajo puede incluirse en la Escuela Italiana de Fotografía del paisaje (Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, Giovanni Chiaramonte), pero tiene rasgos originales en fuerte desarrollo. Este ensayo mostrará como la fotografía de Pasinato—desde sus exploraciones del "tercer paisaje" en el camino de carreteras y autopistas, la investigación en las escenas urbanas de las ciudades de Treviso y Venecia Mestre, hasta la más reciente exploración del antiguo bosque de la colina llamada Montello (sobre el riesgo de su desaparición, también el poeta Andrea Zanzotto, fallecido en 2011, escribió algunas de sus mejores obras)—está completamente enfocada en la función fundamental de la observación, gracias al que su trabajo se caracteriza como una investigación, un instrumento de la concienciación, en el amplio sentido “político”, de la relación entre ser humano y lugar. Las imágenes de Pasinato, suaves, claras y al mismo tiempo envueltas en vaguedad, questionan a quien observa, le proponen un dialogo con los espacios fotografiados y subrayan la inseparabilidad estilística entre forma y contenido. En comparación con otras experiencias de fotografía del paisaje, las representaciones de Pasinato destacan gracias a la ausencia de autocomplacencia subjetivista y estética, tratando de descubrir nuevamente la estrecha interrelación entre naturaleza y cultura, entre los seres humanos y otros seres vivientes. En cuanto instan nuestro sentido de la responsabilidad colectiva, dejando de poner la atención en sentimentalismos y nostalgias, estas fotografías invitan a adquirir conciencia y, además, esperanza. Pasinato reclama para la fotografía una importante función artística y civil, muchas veces ignorada por las instituciones que deberían preocuparse por el bien común.

The first, theoretical part of this essay engages a recent publication by Maria Borio, dedicated to Italian poetry from the 1970s to the 1990s. Borio’s volume analyzes some methodological issues, and while she attempts to establish a poetical canon, she also deals with its correlation to a form of ethical and lyrical knowledge. The second part of the essay analyzes the ethical dimension of some choice poetic collections published between the late 1990s and the early 2000s; here, Brancati explores poetry by Antonella Anedda, Franco Buffoni, and Mario Benedetti, in which the need of the lyrical subject to foster a genuine representation of a given experience determines a reformulation of the author’s style.

The Demarco Archive is a cultural institution characterized by a complex profile. The unstoppable dynamism of its founder, Richard Demarco, and the dense network of artistic events he organized against the backdrop of the historic Edinburgh International Festival make slippery any attempt at a definition; placing it within precise geographical and disciplinary limits would in fact risk offering a partial idea of it. The objective of this article is therefore to propose a possible reading through two conceptual nodes: the journey, intended as the discovery of the 'spirit of the place' (genius loci), and the role of the artist as explorer. Both are the points on which Demarco for over fifty years has oriented his career as a teacher, impresario, curator and artist. Undertaking this direction will allow us to touch some of the main initiatives of the archive, such as Strategy-Get Arts and Edinburgh Arts Journey, and to retrace the political, aesthetic, philosophical and pedagogical credo of its founder, whose goal is to re-establish a relationship between ethics and aesthetics as well as restoring the original regenerative function of art.

This article provides an analysis of the background, processes, and functions of mythological transformations found in the poem “The Tyger” by William Blake and the cycle of poems “There Was a Tiger Here” (“Tu je bil tiger”) by Gregor Strniša. It elaborates on the various levels of analogies between the poetic and semantic aspects on the creation of mythopoetic world, along with the specificities revealed in the relations between Blake’s romantic visions and Strniša’s modern perspectives, in the domains for the following aspects: 1. General poetic features; 2. The analysis of symbolic systems; 3. The nature and functions of spatio-temporal relations; 4. The significance of an image of a tiger in the quest for gaining knowledge of divine thought, eternity, transience and death. Therefore, apart from placing emphasis on the significance of Blake’s mystical tendencies, the purpose of this work is to demonstrate that the poetry of Gregor Strniša is ranked among the world’s greatest literature, considering the fact that it is perceived as an original poetic vision which has contributed to the creation of innovations in the context of modern mythological transformations.

La poesia di Amelia Rosselli si rivela di stampo profondamente fenomenologico e prende le mosse da una realtà tumultuosa, in costante divenire. Il caos della realtà esterna viene interiorizzato in un processo di filtrazione deformante, indispensabile per raggiungere uno stato di appropriazione del reale. Il presente saggio indaga da principio le implicazioni fenomenologiche nella poetica rosselliana, in linea con simili approcci sia in Italia, nelle teorizzazioni del Gruppo 63, che all’estero, nel saggio di Charles Olson. L’arte perde una volta per tutte il suo statuto di veridicità e diventa piuttosto un processo in fieri, un cauto accostamento al reale. In particolare, nella ricerca rosselliana il meccanismo deformante diventa imprescindibile per interiorizzare e “domare” il mondo esterno. Il reale viene sottoposto a curvature e deformazioni spazio-temporali secondo le leggi delle geometrie non euclidee e delle trasformazioni topologiche. Il risultato ottenuto, seppure distorto, si rivela concettualmente equivalente alla materia di partenza. La rappresentazione deformante corrisponde dunque a un processo di filtrazione fenomenologico che restituisce una versione della realtà analoga, nonostante le sue forme siano stravolte. Alcune brevi analisi testuali mostrano come la tensione deformante da una parte venga utilizzata per appropriarsi e superare definitivamente l’esperienza traumatica passata, dall’altra divenga strumento per inserirsi nel canone letterario patriarcale. Il padre si offre come figura emblematica di superamento: il padre biologico che origina il trauma infantile, ma anche i padri della tradizione letteraria (Rimbaud, Scipione, Dante, Montale) i cui versi vengono rubati e turbati, deformati in un discorso finalmente a misura di donna.

Nel 1920 Ada Negri annuncia la pubblicazione di "Stella mattutina" con le seguenti parole: «"Stella mattutina" è la storia interiore della mia vita dai sette ai diciassette anni, in terza persona. Vi ho scolpito la figura di mia madre». Avvalendosi delle conclusioni teoriche sul semeotico formulate da Julia Kristeva in "Revolution in Poetic Language" (1984) e in "Language – the Unknown: an Initiation into Linguistics" (1989), nonché del concetto di 'espace' pittorico delineato da Johanna Drucker in "Theorizing Modernism: Visual Art and the Critical Tradition" (1994), il presente saggio intende esaminare come Negri ricostruisca la storia del nucleo familiare tutto al femminile in cui crebbe e si formò attraverso l’impiego di un originale impasto linguistico che fonde prosa e poesia. Questo peculiare stile permette alla scrittrice di sfondare i tradizionali concetti di spazio e tempo e creare un 'espace' lirico nel quale ella, da un lato, rappresenta la storia della classe operaia italiana alla fine del diciannovesimo secolo; dall’altro, rivendica il ruolo delle scrittrici nell’Italia pre-fascista, dominata dai 'diktat' di una società essenzialmente patriarcale. Inoltre si dimostra che, travalicando i confini di quello che Gregory Castle in "Reading the Modernist Bildungsroman" definisce «a genre in crisis», il concetto di un 'espace' letterario virtuale, che caratterizza la modernità e il modernismo di questo romanzo di formazione, ha la funzione di creare uno spazio ‘altro’, una patria riscoperta e, in ultima istanza, «una stanza tutta per sé» nell’opera di una scrittrice di spicco qual è Ada Negri, forse ancora non del tutto consacrata dal canone ufficiale.

This article examines the peculiar spatio-temporal ambivalence of Hanif Kureishi’s 2008 novel, Something to Tell You. Building on Doreen Massey’s (2005) understanding of space and place, I put forth a new framework of spatial production and experience, comprising the cartographical and the phenomenological. Through these terms, I argue that we can engage with both the particularity and the plurality of the novel’s representation of London. Geographic Information System (GIS) software is employed both to make explicit the novel’s relationship to cartography, and to cartographic London, but, equally, to conceptualise Something to Tell You’s reconstellation of the city. By way of conclusion, I suggest that Something to Tell You bears a political and poetic ambivalence that is symptomatic of a wider hesitancy toward representing the capital (as representation relates to stultification). And whilst this unsettledness and non-surety as to the ‘where’ and the ‘when’ of London experience is, for protagonist, Jamal, a cause of great anxiety, is it nonetheless true to the ‘reality’, in Wolfreys’ (1999) sense of the term, of living, of doing, and of being in London.

RiassuntoIl saggio esamina le analogie e le differenze che sussistono fra la rappresentazione del paesaggio nei pittori italiani della prima metà del Trecento e la letteratura dell’epoca. Giotto, il grande innovatore, continua a essere ligio alla tradizione medievale del paesaggio roccioso, ma le colline nude dei suoi sfondi si riferiscono così strettamente al racconto rappresentato da poter parlare di un paesaggio ›simpatetico‹. I primi illustratori della Commedia non riescono a tenere dietro alle descrizioni poetiche dei regni dell’aldilà. Fenomeni ottici descritti in maniera precisa da Dante (riflessi, sbattimento, cielo atmosferico) superavano le possibilità che la pittura aveva all’epoca. Entro questi limiti, però, i miniatori propongono delle soluzioni originali, come si mostra sull’esempio del Codice Egerton 943 della British Library (intorno al 1335/40). La descrizione dell’ascesa al monte Ventoux di Petrarca e Il Dittamondo di Fazio degli Uberti aprono sul paesaggio uno sguardo che viene dall’alto e spazia lontano, simile a quello dell’affresco sugli effetti del ›Buon Governo‹ di Ambrogio Lorenzetti nel Palazzo Pubblico di Siena (1338/39). L’affresco è caratterizzato da una combinazione di concretezza empirica e di ordine allegorico paragonabile ai paesaggi di Dante e di Petrarca.

In this paper, I focus on disclosures by one participant as enabled by a kind of artistic practice that I term “participation cartography.” By using “participation cartography” as a framework for the analysis of Running Stitch (2006), a piece by Jen Southern (U.K.) and Jen Hamilton (Canada), I demonstrate that disclosures by participants in this practice are to be seen as a form of self-mapping that positions the self in relation to a given performance space. These self-positionings present the self in spatio-temporal terms and by means of performative narratives that re-define the subject from an isolated individual into a participant within an unfolding live process.It is my argument here that most of the participation performances to which the term “participation cartography” may be applied don’t have a mechanism for participants to share reflections about their participation experience embedded in the framework the artists provide. By discussing Running Stitch from some participant’s perspectives—mine included—I demonstrate that if such a sharing mechanism was provided, the participant’s disclosures would enact a poetics of sharing that at once reveals and conceals aspects of the self. “Participation cartography” performances hold the power to generate autobiographical conversations and exchanges. Without these (collective) conversations and exchanges, the disclosures made by participants in and through “participation performances” such as Running Stitch conceal more than what they reveal, shattering thereby the cartographic (self-mapping) power of these practices.Running Stitch (2006)This piece is a performative installation that involves the use of Global Positioning Technology and walking performances by participants in order to produce collaboratively a new kind of “map” or visual-art object, more concretely a tapestry. I experienced it in 2006 in Brighton (UK). It was commissioned by Fabrica, “a gallery promoting the understanding of contemporary art” (see: http://www.fabrica.org.uk/).The following is the description made by the artists of the work on their Website (see: http://www.satellitebureau.net/p8.php):Running Stitch is a 5m x 5m tapestry map, created live during the exhibition by charting the journeys of participants through the city...Visitors to the exhibition took a GPS-enabled mobile phone to track their journeys through the city centre. These walks resulted in individual GPS ‘drawings’ of the visitor’s movements that were then projected live in the exhibition to disclose hidden aspects of the city. Each individual route was sewn, as it happened, into a hanging canvas to form an evolving tapestry that revealed a sense of place and interconnection (see also fig. 1). Figure 1. Image: Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Running Stitch and audience members. Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.As the vocabulary used by the artists shows, the work was conceived at that time (2006) as a kind of collaborative map-making process by which previously “hidden aspects of the city” can be disclosed. My interrogation of this practice starts by questioning the assumption that cartography, as illustrated by cases such as this, refers to a physical or geographical space—the city. Through the lens of “participation cartography” I mean to show that that what is being mapped in and through practices such as Running Stitch is not (physical) space but the being-who-moves in space. Rather than the city, it is the multiple subjects-who-move in Brighton’s town centre on a particular day in 2006 and within the frame of this event what is the theme and content of the resulting tapestry and of the disclosures it may contain. Accordingly, the resulting visualisation (the map) is to be seen as a documentation of past performances by concrete individuals rather than as a visual representation of urban space or as an autonomous visual-art object. Practices such as this are a particular form of “spatial auto-bio-graphical” performance art. In these practices, the boundaries between notions of cartography and autobiography are blurred and need to be critically addressed.More established critical vocabularies such as locative media (Hemment), psychogeography (Kanarinka), collaborative mapping (Sant), map-art (Wood), or counter-cartographies (Holmes), with which similar works have been discussed typically focus on studying the relationships between the resulting visual-art objects and notions of space, as well as on issues of representation. Similarly, the term site-specific performance, as articulated for instance by Nick Kaye, draws attention primarily to the physical location in which the meaning of a given artwork may be defined (1), rather than on the participation experience by the subject who engages with the artistic process. In my view, a participants-centred approach is needed in order to adequately understand the power of participation performances such as Running Stitch (2006) and its connections with ‘auto-bio-graphical’ performance. Participation Cartography: A New Vocabulary“Participation cartography” introduces an ontological shift in what is typically considered performance art. From live gestures, or more precisely, “live art by artists,” as art historian Rose Lee Goldberg (9) has defined it, performance is re-defined by these practices into live art by participants in response to a spatio-temporal interaction framework provided by artists.Running Stitch illustrates a kind of practice in which the artists’s creation is not a finished artwork or arrangement of actions and conditions (a conventional performance). Rather, the artists’s creation is a kind of “open work” in the sense that the active role of the participant is envisaged by the artist at the very moment of conceiving the work (Eco 3). The participant is, moreover, conceived of by the artist as an individual who collaborates with the artist or group of artists in the very production of the artwork. From an ontological point of view, I conceptualise more specifically practices such as Running Stitch as what Allan Kaprow termed “participation performances,” that is, performances in which those who take part are literally, the ingredients of the performances (Kaprow 184). These were lifelike pieces in which normal routines by non-actors became the performance of a routine. In participation performances or activities every day life “performances” or “presentations of self” (Goffman) are framed as art, and more concretely, as a happening or a new form of theatre or performance art. For instance, by means of instructions to be enacted by non professional performers, in Kaprow’s participation performance Maneuvers the daily routine of the courtesy shown another person when passing through a doorway becomes the artistic performance of that routine (191).I conceptualise practices such as Running Stitch as a particular form of “participation performance,” namely as “participation cartography.” The cartographic power of such practices needs to be studied from the participant’s perspective. Let me illustrate this idea by discussing Running Stitch more in detail.Over a four weeks period, more than hundred participants collaborated in the production of the object called by the artists “the tapestry map”. Each walk was represented by a line of stitches on the canvas, and each walk was stitched with a different colour. At the end of the process, the tapestry was a colourful and intertwined collection of threads stitched onto the same surface (see fig. 2). Figure 2. Image: Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Running Stitch and audience members. Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.But, what did each thread disclose about each participant? Who are they? What exactly is disclosed to whom?On DisclosureIn Running Stitch it is possible to speak of two moments of disclosure, each moment illustrating a different scope of the verb “to disclose.” First, there is the disclosure in real time of the physical location of each walker. Second, there is the disclosure of the sense of purpose of the journey and of all what happened to the participant during the walk and after when confronted with the visualisation of her personal walk. It is this second disclosure what can infuse the “map” with personal meaning.In the first case, disclosure is associated with surveillance. Positioning, as used within the framework of Global Positioning Systems, refers to the computational process whereby the geographical location of the carrier of the GPS device can be pinpointed, usually on a conventional digital map. “To disclose” means here to make visible and, more precisely, to “draw” by means of technology the whereabouts of someone—an anonymous other—who is outside of the gallery walking about Brighton’s city centre. This first moment of disclosure happens for all to be seen in the gallery. It is framed by the artists as the core of what constitutes Running Stitch as an artwork.However, the technology-aided map-making that takes place here conceals the mental processes and the autobiographical stories that go with the actual walk—where did the participants go and why, what made them be there in the first place? This can only be known if the participant is given a voice for him or her to “map” herself by presenting the Self in spatio-temporal terms within the public arena of the ongoing artistic event. This would require an additional sharing mechanism to be embedded within the framework provided by the artists. As organised by the artists, two participants at a time were walking during one hour outside in Brighton’s town centre in the area surrounding the Fabrica Gallery. While this was happening, other members of the public could witness the unfolding journeys live on the canvas inside the gallery. While one was watching, there were of course random and casual opportunities to engage in conversations with other onlookers. However, the artists did not devise more formal opportunities for the public to engage in conversations with previous participants or with other onlookers. After the two walkers in turn had returned to the gallery and finished their walks, the next set of walkers would depart. Typically, the previous walkers would stay for some minutes watching at the resulting visualisation of their walk—the running stitches—on the canvas. The framework provided by the artists placed these previous walkers as onlookers rather than as ‘official’ commentators of their own walks. Their comments and their thoughts on the running stitches representing their walk remained secret—concealed, unless spontaneous conversations would randomly communicate (reveal) them.Fortunately, the artists did ask participants-walkers to fill anonymously a feedback sheet before leaving the gallery. In that sheet, participants had an opportunity to share their comments and thoughts about their participation experience with the artists in writing. These responses provide the evidence that, in practices such as this, a second disclosure moment can take place and, indeed, needs to be seen as integral to the cartographic process. Disclosure, in this second moment, is not associated with surveillance but with the ideas of sharing, self-reflexion, subjective positioning, and self-mapping.“My walk was an act of love…”One Running Stitch participant wrote anonymously in the above mentioned feedback sheet:My walk was for a friend of mine –Sandra- who’s very ill. I wanted to go past various landmarks that had meaning for us both and end up in Prestor Park where I could make a large S shape. There was another park where we used to meet where I wanted to make an ‘X’ shape. Sandra signed her e-mails SX. (“My walk was an act of love”).This testimony, which was not shared with others during the cartographic process called Running Stitch but framed by the artists as private participants’s feedback, not only comments about the walk but constitutes it. This story explains what makes the participant ‘be there’, go to Prestor Park, and walk/draw an “X” shape on the canvas. Rather than a statement about place in itself, it is a “spatial auto-bio-graphical” presentation of Self as a friend of Sandra. Within the framework of “participation cartography,” a “spatial auto-bio-graphical presentation” is a presentation of Self in spatio-temporal terms that involves an act of self-reading. By means of reflexive language, the participant gives an account of his walk as represented by his running stitches on the canvas. Literarily, by drawing his walk on the canvas via the Running Stitch framework, the participant made his Self legible. However, nobody but the walker himself is in the position to make an authoritative reading of his walk. The terms “reading” and “legibility” refer in this context to the ability to both remember and make sense of one’s own steps. In this sense, the drawing—the trace of the walk—must be seen as a mnemonic device enabling the subject who walked to perform self-reading, hermeneutic acts. Disclosure, as illustrated by this case, is then linked with a self-reading process in terms of a walk—a spatio-temporal live process—as documented on the canvas.Certainly, the Self of the participant emerges as the theme of his map as drawn on the canvas: “I wanted to go past various landmarks…” Rather than space, it is the being-who-moves in space what is being read and mapped through self-reflexive language.According to Ervin Goffman’s dramaturgical approach to social interaction, the notion of presentation of Self takes relevance whenever an individual “enters the presence of others” (14). To be in the presence of others, whether wittingly or unwittingly, involves a presentation of Self. Goffman’s influential The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) is primarily concerned with arguing that the ways in which one presents the Self may direct the interlocutors’s attention towards those aspects of the Self one chooses to highlight (14). A premise underlying Goffman’s work is that a presentation of Self generates impressions and that one can manage the impressions one makes of oneself. A crucial concept in his theory is the notion of control: one can control and guide the other’s impressions of oneself, and a number of techniques can be employed to do so. It is crucial to understand that in practices such as Running Stitch, participants are enabled to occupy a dual position as “writers” and “readers” of the Self, as positioners and as the ones positioned. As “writers,” participants position themselves physically, graphically and literally both in the city and “on the map.” This takes place by means of a walking-drawing performance via GPS technology. As “readers”, participants position themselves linguistically (by means of autobiographical stories) and in their mind in relation with the performed space in question.By presenting his walk with words as ‘a walk for a friend of mine—Sandra—who’s very ill’, this participant positions himself subjectively in relation to his performed walk. His auto-biographical narrative infuses his walk with meaning. There is a relatively new approach in social psychology called “positioning theory” (Harre and Slocum). Drawing on Goffman’s work on social interaction, the issue that this theory investigates is the dynamics of creation of patterns of meaning. How can these dynamics be brought to light?Positioning theory analyses the emergence of meaning in terms of story lines. It is concerned exclusively with analysis at the level of acts; that is, of the meaning of actions as expressed through story lines that infuse those actions with meaning. A positioning is not a theoretical knowledge about one’s relationship with a given space. Rather, it is a practised knowledge. Moreover, it is an act of freedom. It is a choice. And it is an ethical choice in the sense that the one who positions himself claims responsibility for his own acts and decisions. The “I” of the one who positions himself emerges as the actor, author, and theme of the narratives that go with that decision. Such an act writes subjectivity (biography). Paraphrasing philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, a reflexive positioning is a disclosure and opening of being that takes place for others and with others and where being manifests, loses, and finds itself again “so as to possess itself by showing itself, proposing itself as a theme, exposing itself in truth” (99). A reflexive positioning is a moment of truth. However, and still with Lévinas, truth, “before characterizing a statement or a judgment, consists in the exhibition of being” (23). In other words, by presenting the self in public and in spatio-temporal terms, the subject who presents herself produces truth about herself as a relational and spatial being.Positioning, or the Enactment of a Poetics of SharingI use the term sharing as the act of presenting private, subjective, everyday life, and autobiographical material in public contexts. My notion of the term sharing is inspired by Deirdre Heddon’s (21) account of how consciousness-raising events in which women shared personal concerns with each other was tied with the emergence of feminist, autobiographical live performances. In the context of such feminist events, according to Heddon, sharing and consciousness-raising processes were linked.My argument is that, in a similar fashion to feminist’s consciousness-raising events, the “knowledge” that the representations (maps) claim to represent in practices such as Running Stitch cannot be achieved if the voices behind the trajectories are not activated. The transformation of the represented trajectory into self-mapping knowledge cannot be achieved if the individual who took part does not “read” herself by sharing her spatial autobiographical narrative with others. For such a self-mapping to take place, artists need to devise a mechanism for participants to share reflections about their participation experience and embed it in the framework they provide. I use the word poetics as synonymous with the notion of “technology” as articulated by Martin Heidegger in his 1955 lecture on the question of technology. A poetics is “a way of revealing truth” (qtd. in McKenzie 156). In this sense, “participation cartography” is a technology that enables participants to bring forth “truth” (rather than simply disclose truth) about their self as a being-in-motion. However, it is a way of revealing that also conceals. This is precisely what makes this way of revealing a poiesis: it reveals and conceals at once. For instance, the uniqueness of my Running Stitch walk was concealed to me. I walked with my wife, our son, and a couple of friends who lived in Brighton at that time. Our walk was a means for us to spend some time together. In a way, it was a means for building our relationship. The meaning of our walk became conscious to me after I had read the story of Sandra’s friend and the other ninety or so stories. Without these (collective) conversations and exchanges, the disclosures made by participants in and through ‘participation performances’ such as Running Stitch conceal more than what they reveal, shattering thereby the cartographic (self-mapping) power of these practices.The act of validating the sequence of stitches as his is a crucial performative element of this process. It completes the disclosure process: it is the moment in which the voiceless walker on the canvas becomes a speaking subject who authors himself by recognising himself in the uniqueness of his auto-bio-graphical stitch. His spatial autobiographical narrative is a crucial self-positioning performance. By not framing moments of sharing such as this as integral to the cartographic process, I suggest that the artist may scatter the self-mapping and self-positioning agency of this practice. In consequence, the representation loses sight of what it claims to seek and represent. ReferencesEco, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. London: Hutchinson, 1981.Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery. 2009. Fabrica Gallery. 6 Dec. 2009 < http://www.fabrica.org.uk/ >.Goffman, Ervin. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin, 1990.Goldberg, Rose Lee. Performance Art: from Futurism to the Present. London: Thames and Hudson, 2001.Hamilton, Jen, and Southern, Jen. Running Stitch. 2006. 20 Oct. 2009 ‹http://www.satellitebureau.net/p8.php›.Harre, Rom, and Nikki Slocum. “Disputes as Complex Social Events: On the Uses of Positioning Theory”. Common Knowledge 9.1 (2003): 100–118.Heddon, Deirdre. Autobiography and Performance. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Trans. William Lovitt. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.Hemment, Drew. “Locative Arts.” Leonardo 39.4 (2006): 348–355,Holmes, Brian. “Counter Cartographies.” Else/where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories. Eds. Janet Abrams and Peter Hall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Design Institute, 2006.Kanarinka, “Art-Machines, Body-Ovens and Map-Recipes: Entries for a Psychogeographic Dictionary.” Cartographic Perspectives 53 (2006): 24–40.Kaprow, Allan. “Participation Performance.” Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Ed. J. Kelley.. Berkeley, Los Angeles, New York: University of California Press, 2003.Kaye, Nick. Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place, and Documentation. London: Routledge, 2000.Lévinas, Emmanuel. Otherwise than Being, or, Beyond Essence. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2006.McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge, 2001.“My walk was an act of love.” Unpublished anonymous participant's feedback sheet. Running Stitch. Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Brighton, U.K.: Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006.Running Stitch. Jen Southern and Jen Hamilton. Brighton, UK.: Fabrica Contemporary Art Gallery, 2006. Sant, Alison. “Redefining the Basemap.” TCM Locative Reader (2004). 16 Jan. 2007 < http://locative.net/tcmreader/index.php?mapping;sant >.Wood, Denis. “Map Art.” Cartographic Perspectives: Journal of the North American Cartographic Information Society 53 (2006): 5–14.

"Interactivity implies two agencies in conversation, playfully and spontaneously developing a mutual discourse" -- Sandy Stone (11) I. On Interactivity The difference between interactivity as it is performed across the page and the screen, maintains Sandy Stone, is that virtual texts and virtual communities can embody a play ethic (14). Inserted like a mutation into the corporate genome, play ruptures the encyclopaedic desire to follow seamless links to a buried 'meaning' and draws us back to the surface, back into real-time conversation with the machine. Hypertext theorists see this as a tactic of resistance to homogenisation. As we move across a hypertextual reading space, we produce the text in this unfolding now, choosing pathways which form a map in the space of our own memories: where we have been, where we are, where we might yet be. Play is occupying oneself with diversions. II. Space, Time and Composition Reading in time, we create the text in the space of our own memories. Hypertext theorists maintain that the choices we make around every corner, the spontaneity and contingency involved in these choices, are the bringing into being of a (constantly replaced) electronic palimpsest, a virtual geography. The dislocation which occurs as we engage in nodal leaps draws us back to the surface, rupturing our experience of the narrative and bringing us into a blissful experience of possibility. III. War against the Line There is the danger, on the one hand, of being subsumed by the passive subject position demanded by infotainment culture and the desire it encourages to seek the satisfaction of closure by following seamless links to a buried 'meaning'. On the other hand, we risk losing efficiency and control over the unfolding interaction by entering into an exchange which disorientates us with infinite potential. We cannot wildly destratify. The questions we ask must seek to keep the conversation open. In order to establish a new discursive territory within which to understand this relationship, we should view the interface not simply as a transparency which enables interaction with the machine as 'other', but as a text, a finely-wrought behavioural map which "exists at the intersection of political and ideological boundary lands" (Selfe & Selfe 1). As we write, so are we written by the linguistic contact zones of this terrain. Hypertext is thus a process involving the active translation of modes of being into possible becomings across the interface. The geographic 'space' we translate into a hypertext "is imaginational... . We momentarily extend the linear reading act into a third dimension when we travel a link" (Tolva 4). A literal spatial representation would break from the realm of hypertext and become a virtual reality. Thus, the geographic aspect is not inherent to the system itself but is partially translated into the geometry of the medium via our experience and perception (the 'map'), a process describing our 'line of flight' as we evolve in space. Directional flows between time and its traditional subordination to space in representation implode across the present-tense of the screen and time literally surfaces. Our experience of the constantly-replaced electronic palimpsest is one of temporal surrender: "we give in to time, we give way to time, we give in with time"(Joyce 219). In other words, the subject of hypertext subverts the traditional hierarchy and writes for space, producing the 'terrain' in the unfolding now in the Deleuzian sense, not in space as desired by the State. Johnson-Eilola aligns the experience of hypertext with the Deleuzian War Machine, a way of describing the speed and range of virtual movement created when the animal body splices into the realm of technology and opens an active plane of conflict.. The War Machine was invented by the nomads -- it operates by continual deterritorialisation in a tension-limit with State science, what we might call the command-control drive associated with geometric, dynamic thought and the sedentary culture of the Line. It "exemplifies" the avant-garde mentality that hypertext theorists have been associating with the electronic writing space (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 1). Playing outside. The State desires an end to the resistance to totalisation promulgated by contingent thought and its thermodynamic relationship to space: the speed which assumes a probabilistic, vortical motion, actually drawing smooth space itself. The war machine is thus an open system opposed to classical mechanics via its grounding in active contingencies and spatio-temporal production. The nomad reads and writes for space, creating the temporal text in the space of her own memory, giving way to time and allowing existent points to lapse before the trajectory of flight. Nomad thought is not dependent on any given theory of relationship with the medium, but works via disruption and (re)distribution, the gaps, stutterings and gasp-like expressions experienced when we enter into conversation with the hypertext. The danger is that the war machine might be appropriated by the State, at which point this light-speed communication becomes of the utmost importance in the war against space and time. As speed and efficient retrieval replace real-space across the instantaneity and immediacy of the terminal, the present-time sensory faculties of the individual are marginalised as incidental and she becomes "the virtual equivalent of the well-equipped invalid" (Virilio 5). In other words, as the frame of real-space and present-time disappears, the text of the reader/writer becomes "sutured" into the discourse of the State, the only goal to gain "complete speed, to cover territory in order for the State to subdivide and hold it through force, legislation or consent" (Virilio, qtd. in Johnson-Eilola). This is when the predetermined geometry of hypertext becomes explicit. The progressive subsumption (or "suturing") of the multiple, nomadic self into the discourse of the computer occurs when "the terms of the narrative are heightened, as each 'node' in the hypertext points outwards to other nodes [and] readers must compulsively follow links to arrive at the 'promised plenitude' at the other end of the link" (Johnson-Eilola 391). When we no longer reflect on the frame and move towards complete speed and efficiency, when we stop playing on the surface and no longer concern ourselves with diversion, the war machine has been appropriated by the State. In this case, there is no revolutionary 'outside' to confront in interaction, as all has been marshalled towards closure. Keeping the conversation open means continuously reflecting on the frame. We cannot wildly destratify and lose control entirely by moving in perpetual bewilderment, but we can see the incompleteness of the story, recognising the importance of local gaps and spaces. We can work with the idea that the "dyad of smooth/striated represents not a dialectic but a continuum" (Moulthrop, "Rhizome" 317) that can be turned more complex in its course. Contingency and play reside in the intermezzo, the "dangerous edges, fleeting, attempting to write across the boundaries between in-control and out-of-control" (Johnson-Eilola 393). The war machine exists as at once process and product, the translation between smooth-striated moving in potentia: the nomadic consciousness can recognise this process and live flux as reality itself, or consistency. In sum, we avoid subsumption and appropriation by holding open the function of the text as process in our theorising, in our teaching, in our reading and writing across the hypertextual environment. We can either view hypertext as a tool or product which lends itself to efficient, functional use (to organise information, to control and consume in an encyclopaedic fashion), or we can view it as a process which lends itself to nomadic thought and resistance to totalisation in syncopated flows, in cybernetic fits and starts. This is our much-needed rhetoric of activity. IV. An Alternative Story No matter their theoretical articulation, such claims made for hypertext are fundamentally concerned with escaping the logocentric geometry of regulated time and space. Recent explorations deploying the Deleuzian smooth/striated continuum make explicit the fact that the enemy in this literary 'war' has never been the Line or linearity per se, but "the nonlinear perspective of geometry; not the prison-house of time but the fiction of transcendence implied by the indifferent epistemological stance toward time" (Rosenberg 276). Although the rhizome, the war machine, the cyborg and the nomad differ in their particularities and composition, they all explicitly play on the dislocated, time-irreversible processes of chaos theory, thermodynamics and associated 'liberatory' topological perspectives. Rosenberg's essay makes what I consider to be a very disruptive point: hypertext merely simulates the 'smooth', contingent thought seen to be antithetical to regulated space-time and precise causality due to its fundamental investment in a regulated, controlled and (pre)determined geometry. Such a deceptively smooth landscape is technonarcissistic in that its apparent multiplicity actually prescribes to a totality of command-control. Hypertext theorists have borrowed the terms 'multilinear', 'nonlinear' and 'contingency' from physics to articulate hypertext's resistance to the dominant determinist episteme, a framework exemplified by the term 'dynamics', opposing it to "the irreversible laws characteristic of statistical approximations that govern complex events, exemplified by the term, 'thermodynamics'" (Rosenberg 269). This resistance to the time-reversible, non-contingent and totalised worldview has its ideological origins in the work of the avant-garde. Hypertext theorists are fixated with quasi-hypertextual works that were precursors to the more 'explicitly' revolutionary texts in the electronic writing space. In the works of the avant-garde, contingency is associated with creative freedom and subversive, organic logic. It is obsessively celebrated by the likes of Pynchon, Joyce, Duchamp and Cage. Hypertext theorists have reasoned from this that 'nonlinear' or 'multilinear' access to information is isomorphic with such playful freedom and its contingent, associative leaps. Theorists align this nonsequential reasoning with a certain rogue logic: the 'fluid nature of thought itself' exemplified by the explicitly geographic relationship to space-time of the Deleuzian rhizome and the notion of contingent, probabilistic 'becomings'. Hypertext participates fully in the spatio-temporal dialectic of the avant-garde. As Moulthrop observes, the problem with this is that from a topological perspective, 'linear' and 'multilinear' are identical: "lines are still lines, logos and not nomos, even when they are embedded in a hypertextual matrix" ("Rhizome" 310). The spatio-temporal dislocations which enable contingent thought and 'subversive' logic are simply not sustained through the reading/writing experience. Hypertextual links are not only reversible in time and space, but trace a detached path through functional code, each new node comprising a carefully articulated behavioural 'grammar' that the reader adjusts to. To assume that by following 'links' and engaging in disruptive nodal leaps a reader night be resisting the framework of regulated space-time and determinism is "to ignore how, once the dislocation occurs, a normalcy emerges ... as the hypertext reader acclimates to the new geometry or new sequence of lexias" (Rosenberg 283). Moreover, the searchpath maps which earlier theorists had sensed were antithetical to smooth space actually exemplify the element of transcendent control readers have over the text as a whole. "A reader who can freeze the text, a reader who is aware of a Home button, a reader who can gain an instant, transcendent perspective of the reading experience, domesticates contingencies" (Rosenberg 275). The visual and behavioural grammar of hypertext is one of transcendent control and determined response. Lines are still lines -- regulated, causal and not contingent -- even when they are 'constructed' by an empowered reader. Hypertext is thus invested (at least in part) in a framework of regularity, control and precise function. It is inextricably a part of State apparatus. The problem with this is that the War Machine, which best exemplifies the avant-garde's insurgency against sedentary culture, must be exterior to the State apparatus and its regulated grid at all times. "If we acknowledge this line of critique (which I think we must), then we must seriously reconsider any claims about hypertext fiction as War Machine, or indeed as anything en avant" (Moulthrop, "No War Machine" 5). Although hypertext is not revolutionary, it would be the goal of any avant-garde use of hypertext to find a way to sustain the experience of dislocation that would indicate liberation from the hegemony of geometry. I would like to begin to sketch the possibility of 'contingent interaction' through the dislocations inherent to alternative interfaces later in this story. For the time being, however, we must reassess all our liberation claims. If linearity and multilinearity are identical in terms of geometric relations to space-time, "why should they be any different in terms of ideology", asks Moulthrop ("Rhizome" 310). V. On Interactivity Given Rosenberg's critique against any inherently revolutionary qualities, we must acknowledge that hypermedia "marks not a terminus but a transition," Moulthrop writes ("Rhizome" 317). As a medium of exchange it is neither smooth nor striated, sophist nor socratic, 'work' nor 'text': it is undergoing an increasingly complex phase transition between such states. This landscape also gives rise to stray flows and intensities, 'Unspecified Enemies' which exist at the dangerous fissures and edges. We must accept that we will never escape the system, but we are presented with opportunities to rock the sedentary order from within. As a group of emerging electronic artists see it, the dis-articulation of the point'n'click interface is where interaction becomes reflection on the frame in fits and starts. "We believe that the computer, like everything else, is composed in conflict," explain the editors of electronic magazine I/O/D. "If we are locked in with the military and with Disney, they are locked in not just with us, but with every other stray will-to-power" (Fuller, Interview 2). Along with Adelaide-based group Mindflux, these artists produce hypertext interfaces that involve sensory apparatus and navigational skills that have been marginalised as incidental in the disabling interactive technologies of mainstream multimedia. Sound, movement, proprioception, an element of randomness and assorted other sensory circuits become central to the navigational experience. By enlisting marginalised senses, "we are not proposing to formulate a new paradigm of multimedial correctness," stresses Fuller, "but simply exploring the possibility of more complicated feedback arrangements between the user and the machine" (Fuller, qtd. in Barnet 48). The reader must encounter the 'lexias' contained in the system via the stray flows, intensities, movements, stratas and organs that are not proper to the system but shift across the interface and the surface of her body. In Fuller's electronic magazine, the reader is called upon to converse with the technology outside of the domesticated circuits of sight, dislocating the rigorous hierarchy of feedback devices which privilege the sight-machine and disable contingent interaction in a technonarcissistic fashion. The written information is mapped across a 'fuzzy' sound-based interface, sensitive at every moment to the smallest movements of the reader's fingers on the keys and mouse: the screen itself is black, its swarm of links and hotspots dead to the eye. The reader's movements produce different bleeps and beats, each new track opening different entrances and exits through the information in dependence upon the fluctuating pitch and tempo of her music. Without the aid of searchpaths and bright links, she must move in a state of perpetual readjustment to the technology, attuned not to the information stored behind the interface, but to the real-time sounds her movements produce. What we are calling play, Fuller explains, "is the difference between something that has a fixed grammar on the one hand and something that is continually and openly inventing its own logic on the other" (Fuller & Pope 4). The electronic writing space is not inherently liberatory, and the perpetual process of playing with process across the interface works to widen the 'fissures across the imperium' only for a moment. According to Fuller and Joyce, the 'process of playing with process' simply means complicating the feedback arrangements between the user's body and the machine. "We need to find a way of reading sensually ... rather than, as the interactive artist Graham Weinbren puts it, descending 'into the pit of so-called multimedia, with its scenes of unpleasant 'hotspots,' and 'menus' [that] leaves no room for the possibility of a loss of self, of desire in relation to the unfolding'" remarks Joyce (11). Interactivity which calls upon a mind folded everywhere within the body dislocates the encyclopaedic organisation of data that "preserves a point of privilege from where the eye can frame objects" by enlisting itinerant, diffuse desires in an extended period of readjustment to technology (Fuller & Pope 3). There are no pre-ordained or privileged feedback circuits as the body is seen to comprise a myriad possible elements or fragments of a desiring-machine with the potential to disrupt the flow, to proliferate. Mainstream multimedia's desire for 'informational hygiene' would have us transcend this embodied flux and bureaucratise the body into organs. Information is fed through the circuits of sight in a Pavlovian field of buttons and bright links: interactivity is misconceived as choice-making, when 'response' is a more appropriate concept. When the diffuse desire which thrives on disruption and alternative paradigms is written out in favour of informational hygiene, speed and efficient retrieval replace embodied conversation. "Disembodied [interaction] of this kind is always a con... . The entropic, troublesome flesh that is sloughed off in these fantasies of strongly male essentialism is interwoven with the dynamics of self-processing cognition and intentionality. We see computers as embodied culture, hardwired epistemology" (Fuller 2). Avant-garde hypertext deepens the subjective experience of the human-computer interface: it inscribes itself across the diffuse, disruptive desires of the flesh. Alternative interfaces are not an ideological overhaul enabled by the realm of technê, but a space for localised break-outs across the body. Bifurcations are enacted on the micro level by desiring-machines, across an interface which seeks to dislocate intentionality in conjunction with the marginalised sensory apparatus of the reader, drawing other minds, other organs into localised conversation with command-control. "The user learns kinesthetically and proprioceptively that the boundaries of self are defined less by the skin than by the [local] feedback loops connecting body and simulation in a techno-bio-integrated circuit" (Hayles 72). She oscillates between communication and control, play and restraint: not a nomad but a "human Deserter assuming the most diverse forms" (ATP, 422). VI. Desire Working from across the territory we have covered, we might say that electronic interaction 'liberates' us from neither the Line nor the flesh: at its most experimental, it is nothing less than reading embodied. References Barnet, Belinda. "Storming the Interface: Mindvirus, I/O/D and Deceptive Interaction." Artlink: Australian Contemporary Art Quarterly 17:4 (1997). Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Fuller, Matt and Simon Pope. "Warning: This Computer Has Multiple Personality Disorder." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.altx.com/wordbombs/popefuller.php>. ---, eds. I/O/D2. Undated. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.pHreak.co.uk/i_o_d/>. Hayles, Katherine N. "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers" October Magazine 66 (Fall 1993): 69-91. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. "Control and the Cyborg: Writing and Being Written in Hypertext." Journal of Advanced Composition 13:2 (1993): 381-99. Joyce, Michael. Of Two Minds: Hypertext, Pedagogy and Poetics. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. Moulthrop, Stuart. "No War Machine." 1997. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/essays/war_machine.php>. ---. "Rhizome and Resistance: Hypertext and the Dreams of a New Culture." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George P. Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 299-319. Rosenberg, Martin E. "Physics and Hypertext: Liberation and Complicity in Art and Pedagogy." Hyper/Text/Theory. Ed. George Landow. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994. 268-298. Selfe, Cynthia L., and Richard J. Selfe. "The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones." College Composition and Communication 45.4: 480-504. Stone, Allucquére Roseanne. The War of Desire and Technology. London: MIT Press, 1996. Tolva, John. "Ut Pictura Hyperpoesis: Spatial Form, Visuality, and the Digital Word." 1993. 11 Dec. 1998 <http://www.cs.unc.edu/~barman/HT96/P43/pictura.htm>. Virilio, Paul. "The Third Interval: A Critical Transition." Rethinking Technologies. Ed. Verena Conley. London: U of Minnesota P, 1993. 3-12. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Belinda Barnet. "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.5 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php>. Chicago style: Belinda Barnet, "In the Garden of Forking Paths: Contingency, Interactivity and Play in Hypertext," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 5 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Belinda Barnet. (1998) In the garden of forking paths: contingency, interactivity and play in hypertext. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(5). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9812/garden.php> ([your date of access]).

Perhaps nothing in media culture today makes clearer the connection between people’s bodies and their homes than the Emmy-winning reality TV program Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Home Edition is a spin-off from the original Extreme Makeover, and that fact provides in fundamental form the strong connection that the show demonstrates between bodies and houses. The first EM, initially popular for its focus on cosmetic surgery, laser skin and hair treatments, dental work, cosmetics and wardrobe for mainly middle-aged and self-described unattractive participants, lagged after two full seasons and was finally cancelled entirely, whereas EMHE has continued to accrue viewers and sponsors, as well as accolades (Paulsen, Poniewozik, EMHE Website, Wilhelm). That viewers and the ABC network shifted their attention to the reconstruction of houses over the original version’s direct intervention in problematic bodies indicates that sites of personal transformation are not necessarily within our own physical or emotional beings, but in the larger surround of our environments and in our cultural ideals of home and body. One effect of this shift in the Extreme Makeover format is that a seemingly wider range of narrative problems can be solved relating to houses than to the particular bodies featured on the original show. Although Extreme Makeover featured a few people who’d had previously botched cleft palate surgeries or mastectomies, as Cressida Heyes points out, “the only kind of disability that interests the show is one that can be corrected to conform to able-bodied norms” (22). Most of the recipients were simply middle-aged folks who were ordinary or aged in appearance; many of them seemed self-obsessed and vain, and their children often seemed disturbed by the transformation (Heyes 24). However, children are happy to have a brand new TV and a toy-filled room decorated like their latest fantasy, and they thereby can be drawn into the process of identity transformation in the Home Edition version; in fact, children are required of virtually all recipients of the show’s largess. Because EMHE can do “major surgery” or simply bulldoze an old structure and start with a new building, it is also able to incorporate more variety in its stories—floods, fires, hurricanes, propane explosions, war, crime, immigration, car accidents, unscrupulous contractors, insurance problems, terrorist attacks—the list of traumas is seemingly endless. Home Edition can solve any problem, small or large. Houses are much easier things to repair or reconstruct than bodies. Perhaps partly for this reason, EMHE uses disability as one of its major tropes. Until Season 4, Episode 22, 46.9 percent of the episodes have had some content related to disability or illness of a disabling sort, and this number rises to 76.4 percent if the count includes families that have been traumatised by the (usually recent) death of a family member in childhood or the prime of life by illness, accident or violence. Considering that the percentage of people living with disabilities in the U.S. is defined at 18.1 percent (Steinmetz), EMHE obviously favours them considerably in the selection process. Even the disproportionate numbers of people with disabilities living in poverty and who therefore might be more likely to need help—20.9 percent as opposed to 7.7 percent of the able-bodied population (Steinmetz)—does not fully explain their dominance on the program. In fact, the program seeks out people with new and different physical disabilities and illnesses, sending out emails to local news stations looking for “Extraordinary Mom / Dad recently diagnosed with ALS,” “Family who has a child with PROGERIA (aka ‘little old man’s disease’)” and other particular situations (Simonian). A total of sixty-five ill or disabled people have been featured on the show over the past four years, and, even if one considers its methods maudlin or exploitive, the presence of that much disability and illness is very unusual for reality TV and for TV in general. What the show purports to do is to radically transform multiple aspects of individuals’ lives—and especially lives marred by what are perceived as physical setbacks—via the provision of a luxurious new house, albeit sometimes with the addition of automobiles, mortgage payments or college scholarships. In some ways the assumptions underpinning EMHE fit with a social constructionist body theory that posits an almost infinitely flexible physical matter, of which the definitions and capabilities are largely determined by social concepts and institutions. The social model within the disability studies field has used this theoretical perspective to emphasise the distinction between an impairment, “the physical fact of lacking an arm or a leg,” and disability, “the social process that turns an impairment into a negative by creating barriers to access” (Davis, Bending 12). Accessible housing has certainly been one emphasis of disability rights activists, and many of them have focused on how “design conceptions, in relation to floor plans and allocation of functions to specific spaces, do not conceive of impairment, disease and illness as part of domestic habitation or being” (Imrie 91). In this regard, EMHE appears as a paragon. In one of its most challenging and dramatic Season 1 episodes, the “Design Team” worked on the home of the Ziteks, whose twenty-two-year-old son had been restricted to a sub-floor of the three-level structure since a car accident had paralyzed him. The show refitted the house with an elevator, roll-in bathroom and shower, and wheelchair-accessible doors. Robert Zitek was also provided with sophisticated computer equipment that would help him produce music, a life-long interest that had been halted by his upper-vertebra paralysis. Such examples abound in the new EMHE houses, which have been constructed for families featuring situations such as both blind and deaf members, a child prone to bone breaks due to osteogenesis imperfecta, legs lost in Iraq warfare, allergies that make mold life-threatening, sun sensitivity due to melanoma or polymorphic light eruption or migraines, fragile immune systems (often due to organ transplants or chemotherapy), cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, Krabbe disease and autism. EMHE tries to set these lives right via the latest in technology and treatment—computer communication software and hardware, lock systems, wheelchair-friendly design, ventilation and air purification set-ups, the latest in care and mental health approaches for various disabilities and occasional consultations with disabled celebrities like Marlee Matlin. Even when individuals or familes are “[d]iscriminated against on a daily basis by ignorance and physical challenges,” as the program website notes, they “deserve to have a home that doesn’t discriminate against them” (EMHE website, Season 3, Episode 4). The relief that they will be able to inhabit accessible and pleasant environments is evident on the faces of many of these recipients. That physical ease, that ability to move and perform the intimate acts of domestic life, seems according to the show’s narrative to be the most basic element of home. Nonetheless, as Robert Imrie has pointed out, superficial accessibility may still veil “a static, singular conception of the body” (201) that prevents broader change in attitudes about people with disabilities, their activities and their spaces. Starting with the story of the child singing in an attempt at self-comforting from Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, J. MacGregor Wise defines home as a process of territorialisation through specific behaviours. “The markers of home … are not simply inanimate objects (a place with stuff),” he notes, “but the presence, habits, and effects of spouses, children, parents, and companions” (299). While Ty Pennington, EMHE’s boisterous host, implies changes for these families along the lines of access to higher education, creative possibilities provided by musical instruments and disability-appropriate art materials, help with home businesses in the way of equipment and licenses and so on, the families’ identity-producing habits are just as likely to be significantly changed by the structural and decorative arrangements made for them by the Design Team. The homes that are created for these families are highly conventional in their structure, layout, decoration, and expectations of use. More specifically, certain behavioural patterns are encouraged and others discouraged by the Design Team’s assumptions. Several themes run through the show’s episodes: Large dining rooms provide for the most common of Pennington’s comments: “You can finally sit down and eat meals together as a family.” A nostalgic value in an era where most families have schedules full of conflicts that prevent such Ozzie-and-Harriet scenarios, it nonetheless predominates. Large kitchens allow for cooking and eating at home, though featured food is usually frozen and instant. In addition, kitchens are not designed for the families’ disabled members; for wheelchair users, for instance, counters need to be lower than usual with open space underneath, so that a wheelchair can roll underneath the counter. Thus, all the wheelchair inhabitants depicted will still be dependent on family members, primarily mothers, to prepare food and clean up after them. (See Imrie, 95-96, for examples of adapted kitchens.) Pets, perhaps because they are inherently “dirty,” are downplayed or absent, even when the family has them when EMHE arrives (except one family that is featured for their animal rescue efforts); interestingly, there are no service dogs, which might obviate the need for some of the high-tech solutions for the disabled offered by the show. The previous example is one element of an emphasis on clutter-free cleanliness and tastefulness combined with a rampant consumerism. While “cultural” elements may be salvaged from exotic immigrant families, most of the houses are very similar and assume a certain kind of commodified style based on new furniture (not humble family hand-me-downs), appliances, toys and expensive, prefab yard gear. Sears is a sponsor of the program, and shopping trips for furniture and appliances form a regular part of the program. Most or all of the houses have large garages, and the families are often given large vehicles by Ford, maintaining a positive take on a reliance on private transportation and gas-guzzling vehicles, but rarely handicap-adapted vans. Living spaces are open, with high ceilings and arches rather than doorways, so that family members will have visual and aural contact. Bedrooms are by contrast presented as private domains of retreat, especially for parents who have demanding (often ill or disabled) children, from which they are considered to need an occasional break. All living and bedrooms are dominated by TVs and other electronica, sometimes presented as an aid to the disabled, but also dominating to the point of excluding other ways of being and interacting. As already mentioned, childless couples and elderly people without children are completely absent. Friends buying houses together and gay couples are also not represented. The ideal of the heterosexual nuclear family is thus perpetuated, even though some of the show’s craftspeople are gay. Likewise, even though “independence” is mentioned frequently in the context of families with disabled members, there are no recipients who are disabled adults living on their own without family caretakers. “Independence” is spoken of mostly in terms of bathing, dressing, using the bathroom and other bodily aspects of life, not in terms of work, friendship, community or self-concept. Perhaps most salient, the EMHE houses are usually created as though nothing about the family will ever again change. While a few of the projects have featured terminally ill parents seeking to leave their children secure after their death, for the most part the families are considered oddly in stasis. Single mothers will stay single mothers, even children with conditions with severe prognoses will continue to live, the five-year-old will sleep forever in a fire-truck bed or dollhouse room, the occasional grandparent installed in his or her own suite will never pass away, and teenagers and young adults (especially the disabled) will never grow up, marry, discover their homosexuality, have a falling out with their parents or leave home. A kind of timeless nostalgia, hearkening back to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, pervades the show. Like the body-modifying Extreme Makeover, the Home Edition version is haunted by the issue of normalisation. The word ‘normal’, in fact, floats through the program’s dialogue frequently, and it is made clear that the goal of the show is to restore, as much as possible, a somewhat glamourised, but status quo existence. The website, in describing the work of one deserving couple notes that “Camp Barnabas is a non-profit organisation that caters to the needs of critically and chronically ill children and gives them the opportunity to be ‘normal’ for one week” (EMHE website, Season 3, Episode 7). Someone at the network is sophisticated enough to put ‘normal’ in quotation marks, and the show demonstrates a relatively inclusive concept of ‘normal’, but the word dominates the show itself, and the concept remains largely unquestioned (See Canguilhem; Davis, Enforcing Normalcy; and Snyder and Mitchell, Narrative, for critiques of the process of normalization in regard to disability). In EMHE there is no sense that disability or illness ever produces anything positive, even though the show also notes repeatedly the inspirational attitudes that people have developed through their disability and illness experiences. Similarly, there is no sense that a little messiness can be creatively productive or even necessary. Wise makes a distinction between “home and the home, home and house, home and domus,” the latter of each pair being normative concepts, whereas the former “is a space of comfort (a never-ending process)” antithetical to oppressive norms, such as the association of the home with the enforced domesticity of women. In cases where the house or domus becomes a place of violence and discomfort, home becomes the process of coping with or resisting the negative aspects of the place (300). Certainly the disabled have experienced this in inaccessible homes, but they may also come to experience a different version in a new EMHE house. For, as Wise puts it, “home can also mean a process of rationalization or submission, a break with the reality of the situation, self-delusion, or falling under the delusion of others” (300). The show’s assumption that the construction of these new houses will to a great extent solve these families’ problems (and that disability itself is the problem, not the failure of our culture to accommodate its many forms) may in fact be a delusional spell under which the recipient families fall. In fact, the show demonstrates a triumphalist narrative prevalent today, in which individual happenstance and extreme circumstances are given responsibility for social ills. In this regard, EMHE acts out an ancient morality play, where the recipients of the show’s largesse are assessed and judged based on what they “deserve,” and the opening of each show, when the Design Team reviews the application video tape of the family, strongly emphasises what good people these are (they work with charities, they love each other, they help out their neighbours) and how their situation is caused by natural disaster, act of God or undeserved tragedy, not their own bad behaviour. Disabilities are viewed as terrible tragedies that befall the young and innocent—there is no lung cancer or emphysema from a former smoking habit, and the recipients paralyzed by gunshots have received them in drive-by shootings or in the line of duty as police officers and soldiers. In addition, one of the functions of large families is that the children veil any selfish motivation the adults may have—they are always seeking the show’s assistance on behalf of the children, not themselves. While the Design Team always notes that there are “so many other deserving people out there,” the implication is that some people’s poverty and need may be their own fault. (See Snyder and Mitchell, Locations 41-67; Blunt and Dowling 116-25; and Holliday.) In addition, the structure of the show—with the opening view of the family’s undeserved problems, their joyous greeting at the arrival of the Team, their departure for the first vacation they may ever have had and then the final exuberance when they return to the new house—creates a sense of complete, almost religious salvation. Such narratives fail to point out social support systems that fail large numbers of people who live in poverty and who struggle with issues of accessibility in terms of not only domestic spaces, but public buildings, educational opportunities and social acceptance. In this way, it echoes elements of the medical model, long criticised in disability studies, where each and every disabled body is conceptualised as a site of individual aberration in need of correction, not as something disabled by an ableist society. In fact, “the house does not shelter us from cosmic forces; at most it filters and selects them” (Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, qtd. in Frichot 61), and those outside forces will still apply to all these families. The normative assumptions inherent in the houses may also become oppressive in spite of their being accessible in a technical sense (a thing necessary but perhaps not sufficient for a sense of home). As Tobin Siebers points out, “[t]he debate in architecture has so far focused more on the fundamental problem of whether buildings and landscapes should be universally accessible than on the aesthetic symbolism by which the built environment mirrors its potential inhabitants” (“Culture” 183). Siebers argues that the Jamesonian “political unconscious” is a “social imaginary” based on a concept of perfection (186) that “enforces a mutual identification between forms of appearance, whether organic, aesthetic, or architectural, and ideal images of the body politic” (185). Able-bodied people are fearful of the disabled’s incurability and refusal of normalisation, and do not accept the statistical fact that, at least through the process of aging, most people will end up dependent, ill and/or disabled at some point in life. Mainstream society “prefers to think of people with disabilities as a small population, a stable population, that nevertheless makes enormous claims on the resources of everyone else” (“Theory” 742). Siebers notes that the use of euphemism and strategies of covering eventually harm efforts to create a society that is home to able-bodied and disabled alike (“Theory” 747) and calls for an exploration of “new modes of beauty that attack aesthetic and political standards that insist on uniformity, balance, hygiene, and formal integrity” (Culture 210). What such an architecture, particularly of an actually livable domestic nature, might look like is an open question, though there are already some examples of people trying to reframe many of the assumptions about housing design. For instance, cohousing, where families and individuals share communal space, yet have private accommodations, too, makes available a larger social group than the nuclear family for social and caretaking activities (Blunt and Dowling, 262-65). But how does one define a beauty-less aesthetic or a pleasant home that is not hygienic? Post-structuralist architects, working on different grounds and usually in a highly theoretical, imaginary framework, however, may offer another clue, as they have also tried to ‘liberate’ architecture from the nostalgic dictates of the aesthetic. Ironically, one of the most famous of these, Peter Eisenman, is well known for producing, in a strange reversal, buildings that render the able-bodied uncomfortable and even sometimes ill (see, in particular, Frank and Eisenman). Of several house designs he produced over the years, Eisenman notes that his intention was to dislocate the house from that comforting metaphysic and symbolism of shelter in order to initiate a search for those possibilities of dwelling that may have been repressed by that metaphysic. The house may once have been a true locus and symbol of nurturing shelter, but in a world of irresolvable anxiety, the meaning and form of shelter must be different. (Eisenman 172) Although Eisenman’s starting point is very different from that of Siebers, it nonetheless resonates with the latter’s desire for an aesthetic that incorporates the “ragged edge” of disabled bodies. Yet few would want to live in a home made less attractive or less comfortable, and the “illusion” of permanence is one of the things that provide rest within our homes. Could there be an architecture, or an aesthetic, of home that could create a new and different kind of comfort and beauty, one that is neither based on a denial of the importance of bodily comfort and pleasure nor based on an oppressively narrow and commercialised set of aesthetic values that implicitly value some people over others? For one thing, instead of viewing home as a place of (false) stasis and permanence, we might see it as a place of continual change and renewal, which any home always becomes in practice anyway. As architect Hélène Frichot suggests, “we must look toward the immanent conditions of architecture, the processes it employs, the serial deformations of its built forms, together with our quotidian spatio-temporal practices” (63) instead of settling into a deadening nostalgia like that seen on EMHE. If we define home as a process of continual territorialisation, if we understand that “[t]here is no fixed self, only the process of looking for one,” and likewise that “there is no home, only the process of forming one” (Wise 303), perhaps we can begin to imagine a different, yet lovely conception of “house” and its relation to the experience of “home.” Extreme Makeover: Home Edition should be lauded for its attempts to include families of a wide variety of ethnic and racial backgrounds, various religions, from different regions around the U.S., both rural and suburban, even occasionally urban, and especially for its bringing to the fore how, indeed, structures can be as disabling as any individual impairment. That it shows designers and builders working with the families of the disabled to create accessible homes may help to change wider attitudes and break down resistance to the building of inclusive housing. However, it so far has missed the opportunity to help viewers think about the ways that our ideal homes may conflict with our constantly evolving social needs and bodily realities. References Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Tr. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Canguilhem, Georges. The Normal and the Pathological. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Davis, Lennard. Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism & Other Difficult Positions. New York: NYUP, 2002. ———. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso, 1995. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Tr. B. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. ———. What Is Philosophy? Tr. G. Burchell and H. Tomlinson. London and New York: Verso, 1994. Eisenman, Peter Eisenman. “Misreading” in House of Cards. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 21 Aug. 2007 http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/eisenman/biblio.html#cards>. Peter Eisenman Texts Anthology at the Stanford Presidential Lectures and Symposia in the Humanities and Arts site. 5 June 2007 http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/eisenman/texts.html#misread>. “Extreme Makeover: Home Edition” Website. 18 May 2007 http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/index.html>; http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/show.html>; http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/bios/101.html>; http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/bios/301.html>; and http://abc.go.com/primetime/xtremehome/bios/401.html>. Frank, Suzanne Sulof, and Peter Eisenman. House VI: The Client’s Response. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1994. Frichot, Hélène. “Stealing into Gilles Deleuze’s Baroque House.” In Deleuze and Space, eds. Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert. Deleuze Connections Series. Toronto: University of Toronto P, 2005. 61-79. Heyes, Cressida J. “Cosmetic Surgery and the Televisual Makeover: A Foucauldian feminist reading.” Feminist Media Studies 7.1 (2007): 17-32. Holliday, Ruth. “Home Truths?” In Ordinary Lifestyles: Popular Media, Consumption and Taste. Ed. David Bell and Joanne Hollows. Maidenhead, Berkshire, England: Open UP, 2005. 65-81. Imrie, Rob. Accessible Housing: Quality, Disability and Design. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Paulsen, Wade. “‘Extreme Makeover: Home Edition’ surges in ratings and adds Ford as auto partner.” Reality TV World. 14 October 2004. 27 March 2005 http://www.realitytvworld.com/index/articles/story.php?s=2981>. Poniewozik, James, with Jeanne McDowell. “Charity Begins at Home: Extreme Makeover: Home Edition renovates its way into the Top 10 one heart-wrenching story at a time.” Time 20 Dec. 2004: i25 p159. Siebers, Tobin. “Disability in Theory: From Social Constructionism to the New Realism of the Body.” American Literary History 13.4 (2001): 737-754. ———. “What Can Disability Studies Learn from the Culture Wars?” Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 182-216. Simonian, Charisse. Email to network affiliates, 10 March 2006. 18 May 2007 http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0327062extreme1.html>. Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell. Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2006. ———. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Steinmetz, Erika. Americans with Disabilities: 2002. U.S. Department of Commerce, Economics, and Statistics Administration, U.S. Census Bureau, 2006. 15 May 2007 http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/p70-107.pdf>. Wilhelm, Ian. “The Rise of Charity TV (Reality Television Shows).” Chronicle of Philanthropy 19.8 (8 Feb. 2007): n.p. Wise, J. Macgregor. “Home: Territory and Identity.” Cultural Studies 14.2 (2000): 295-310. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Roney, Lisa. "The Extreme Connection Between Bodies and Houses." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/03-roney.php>. APA Style Roney, L. (Aug. 2007) "The Extreme Connection Between Bodies and Houses," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/03-roney.php>.

Augmented Reality—The Liminal Zone Within the larger context of the post-desktop technological philosophy and practice, an increasing number of efforts are directed towards finding solutions for integrating as close as possible virtual information into specific real environments; a short list of such endeavors include Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS-driven navigation, mobile phones, GIS (Geographic Information System), and various technological systems associated with what is loosely called locative, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Augmented Reality (AR) is directly related to these technologies, although its visualization capabilities and the experience it provides assure it a particular place within this general trend. Indeed, AR stands out for its unique capacity (or ambition) to offer a seamless combination—or what I call here an effect of convergence—of the real scene perceived by the user with virtual information overlaid on that scene interactively and in real time. The augmented scene is perceived by the viewer through the use of different displays, the most common being the AR glasses (head-mounted display), video projections or monitors, and hand-held mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, increasingly popular nowadays. One typical example of AR application is Layar, a browser that layers information of public interest—delivered through an open-source content management system—over the actual image of a real space, streamed live on the mobile phone display. An increasing number of artists employ this type of mobile AR apps to create artworks that consist in perceptually combining material reality and virtual data: as the user points the smartphone or tablet to a specific place, virtual 3D-modelled graphics or videos appear in real time, seamlessly inserted in the image of that location, according to the user’s position and orientation. In the engineering and IT design fields, one of the first researchers to articulate a coherent conceptualization of AR and to underlie its specific capabilities is Ronald Azuma. He writes that, unlike Virtual Reality (VR) which completely immerses the user inside a synthetic environment, AR supplements reality, therefore enhancing “a user’s perception of and interaction with the real world” (355-385). Another important contributor to the foundation of AR as a concept and as a research field is industrial engineer Paul Milgram. He proposes a comprehensive and frequently cited definition of “Mixed Reality” (MR) via a schema that includes the entire spectrum of situations that span the “continuum” between actual reality and virtual reality, with “augmented reality” and “augmented virtuality” between the two poles (283). Important to remark with regard to terminology (MR or AR) is that especially in the non-scientific literature, authors do not always explain a preference for either MR or AR. This suggests that the two terms are understood as synonymous, but it also provides evidence for my argument that, outside of the technical literature, AR is considered a concept rather than a technology. Here, I use the term AR instead of MR considering that the phrase AR (and the integrated idea of augmentation) is better suited to capturing the convergence effect. As I will demonstrate in the following lines, the process of augmentation (i.e. the convergence effect) is the result of an enhancement of the possibilities to perceive and understand the world—through adding data that augment the perception of reality—and not simply the product of a mix. Nevertheless, there is surely something “mixed” about this experience, at least for the fact that it combines reality and virtuality. The experiential result of combining reality and virtuality in the AR process is what media theorist Lev Manovich calls an “augmented space,” a perceptual liminal zone which he defines as “the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information, multimedia in form and localized for each user” (219). The author derives the term “augmented space” from the term AR (already established in the scientific literature), but he sees AR, and implicitly augmented space, not as a strictly defined technology, but as a model of visuality concerned with the intertwining of the real and virtual: “it is crucial to see this as a conceptual rather than just a technological issue – and therefore as something that in part has already been an element of other architectural and artistic paradigms” (225-6). Surely, it is hard to believe that AR has appeared in a void or that its emergence is strictly related to certain advances in technological research. AR—as an artistic manifestation—is informed by other attempts (not necessarily digital) to merge real and fictional in a unitary perceptual entity, particularly by installation art and Virtual Reality (VR) environments. With installation art, AR shares the same spatial strategy and scenographic approach—they both construct “fictional” areas within material reality, that is, a sort of mise-en-scène that are aesthetically and socially produced and centered on the active viewer. From the media installationist practice of the previous decades, AR inherited the way of establishing a closer spatio-temporal interaction between the setting, the body and the electronic image (see for example Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor [1970], Peter Campus’s Interface [1972], Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Pasts(s) [1974], Jeffrey Shaw’s Viewpoint [1975], or Jim Campbell’s Hallucination [1988]). On the other hand, VR plays an important role in the genealogy of AR for sharing the same preoccupation for illusionist imagery and—at least in some AR projects—for providing immersive interactions in “expanded image spaces experienced polysensorily and interactively” (Grau 9). VR artworks such as Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming (1992), Char Davies’ Osmose (1995), Michael Naimark’s Be Now Here (1995-97), Maurice Benayoun’s World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War (1997), Luc Courchesne’s Where Are You? (2007-10), are significant examples for the way in which the viewer can be immersed in “expanded image-spaces.” Offering no view of the exterior world, the works try instead to reduce as much as possible the critical distance the viewer might have to the image he/she experiences. Indeed, AR emerged in great part from the artistic and scientific research efforts dedicated to VR, but also from the technological and artistic investigations of the possibilities of blending reality and virtuality, conducted in the previous decades. For example, in the 1960s, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland played a crucial role in the history of AR contributing to the development of display solutions and tracking systems that permit a better immersion within the digital image. Another important figure in the history of AR is computer artist Myron Krueger whose experiments with “responsive environments” are fundamental as they proposed a closer interaction between participant’s body and the digital object. More recently, architect and theorist Marcos Novak contributed to the development of the idea of AR by introducing the concept of “eversion”, “the counter-vector of the virtual leaking out into the actual”. Today, AR technological research and the applications made available by various developers and artists are focused more and more on mobility and ubiquitous access to information instead of immersivity and illusionist effects. A few examples of mobile AR include applications such as Layar, Wikitude—“world browsers” that overlay site-specific information in real-time on a real view (video stream) of a place, Streetmuseum (launched in 2010) and Historypin (launched in 2011)—applications that insert archive images into the street-view of a specific location where the old images were taken, or Google Glass (launched in 2012)—a device that provides the wearer access to Google’s key Cloud features, in situ and in real time. Recognizing the importance of various technological developments and of the artistic manifestations such as installation art and VR as predecessors of AR, we should emphasize that AR moves forward from these artistic and technological models. AR extends the installationist precedent by proposing a consistent and seamless integration of informational elements with the very physical space of the spectator, and at the same time rejects the idea of segregating the viewer into a complete artificial environment like in VR systems by opening the perceptual field to the surrounding environment. Instead of leaving the viewer in a sort of epistemological “lust” within the closed limits of the immersive virtual systems, AR sees virtuality rather as a “component of experiencing the real” (Farman 22). Thus, the questions that arise—and which this essay aims to answer—are: Do we have a specific spatial dimension in AR? If yes, can we distinguish it as a different—if not new—spatial and aesthetic paradigm? Is AR’s intricate topology able to be the place not only of convergence, but also of possible tensions between its real and virtual components, between the ideal of obtaining a perceptual continuity and the inherent (technical) limitations that undermine that ideal? Converging Spaces in the Artistic Mode: Between Continuum and Discontinuum As key examples of the way in which AR creates a specific spatial experience—in which convergence appears as a fluctuation between continuity and discontinuity—I mention three of the most accomplished works in the field that, significantly, expose also the essential role played by the interface in providing this experience: Living-Room 2 (2007) by Jan Torpus, Under Scan (2005-2008) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Hans RichtAR (2013) by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The works illustrate the three main categories of interfaces used for AR experience: head-attached, spatial displays, and hand-held (Bimber 2005). These types of interface—together with all the array of adjacent devices, software and tracking systems—play a central role in determining the forms and outcomes of the user’s experience and consequently inform in a certain measure the aesthetic and socio-cultural interpretative discourse surrounding AR. Indeed, it is not the same to have an immersive but solitary experience, or a mobile and public experience of an AR artwork or application. The first example is Living-Room 2 an immersive AR installation realized by a collective coordinated by Jan Torpus in 2007 at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts FHNW, Basel, Switzerland. The work consists of a built “living-room” with pieces of furniture and domestic objects that are perceptually augmented by means of a “see-through” Head Mounted Display. The viewer perceives at the same time the real room and a series of virtual graphics superimposed on it such as illusionist natural vistas that “erase” the walls, or strange creatures that “invade” the living-room. The user can select different augmenting “scenarios” by interacting with both the physical interfaces (the real furniture and objects) and the graphical interfaces (provided as virtual images in the visual field of the viewer, and activated via a handheld device). For example, in one of the scenarios proposed, the user is prompted to design his/her own extended living room, by augmenting the content and the context of the given real space with different “spatial dramaturgies” or “AR décors.” Another scenario offers the possibility of creating an “Ecosystem”—a real-digital world perceived through the HMD in which strange creatures virtually occupy the living-room intertwining with the physical configuration of the set design and with the user’s viewing direction, body movement, and gestures. Particular attention is paid to the participant’s position in the room: a tracking device measures the coordinates of the participant’s location and direction of view and effectuates occlusions of real space and then congruent superimpositions of 3D images upon it. Figure 1: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (Ecosystems), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist. Figure 2: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (AR decors), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist.In this sense, the title of the work acquires a double meaning: “living” is both descriptive and metaphoric. As Torpus explains, Living-Room is an ambiguous phrase: it can be both a living-room and a room that actually lives, an observation that suggests the idea of a continuum and of immersion in an environment where there are no apparent ruptures between reality and virtuality. Of course, immersion is in these circumstances not about the creation of a purely artificial secluded space of experience like that of the VR environments, but rather about a dialogical exercise that unifies two different phenomenal levels, real and virtual, within a (dis)continuous environment (with the prefix “dis” as a necessary provision). Media theorist Ron Burnett’s observations about the instability of the dividing line between different levels of experience—more exactly, of the real-virtual continuum—in what he calls immersive “image-worlds” have a particular relevance in this context: Viewing or being immersed in images extend the control humans have over mediated spaces and is part of a perceptual and psychological continuum of struggle for meaning within image-worlds. Thinking in terms of continuums lessens the distinctions between subjects and objects and makes it possible to examine modes of influence among a variety of connected experiences. (113) It is precisely this preoccupation to lessen any (or most) distinctions between subjects and objects, and between real and virtual spaces, that lays at the core of every artistic experiment under the AR rubric. The fact that this distinction is never entirely erased—as Living-Room 2 proves—is part of the very condition of AR. The ambition to create a continuum is after all not about producing perfectly homogenous spaces, but, as Ron Burnett points out (113), “about modalities of interaction and dialogue” between real worlds and virtual images. Another way to frame the same problematic of creating a provisional spatial continuum between reality and virtuality, but this time in a non-immersive fashion (i.e. with projective interface means), occurs in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Under Scan (2005-2008). The work, part of the larger series Relational Architecture, is an interactive video installation conceived for outdoor and indoor environments and presented in various public spaces. It is a complex system comprised of a powerful light source, video projectors, computers, and a tracking device. The powerful light casts shadows of passers-by within the dark environment of the work’s setting. A tracking device indicates where viewers are positioned and permits the system to project different video sequences onto their shadows. Shot in advance by local videographers and producers, the filmed sequences show full images of ordinary people moving freely, but also watching the camera. As they appear within pedestrians’ shadows, the figurants interact with the viewers, moving and establishing eye contact. Figure 3: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 4: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. One of the most interesting attributes of this work with respect to the question of AR’s (im)possible perceptual spatial continuity is its ability to create an experientially stimulating and conceptually sophisticated play between illusion and subversion of illusion. In Under Scan, the integration of video projections into the real environment via the active body of the viewer is aimed at tempering as much as possible any disparities or dialectical tensions—that is, any successive or alternative reading—between real and virtual. Although non-immersive, the work fuses the two levels by provoking an intimate but mute dialogue between the real, present body of the viewer and the virtual, absent body of the figurant via the ambiguous entity of the shadow. The latter is an illusion (it marks the presence of a body) that is transcended by another illusion (video projection). Moreover, being “under scan,” the viewer inhabits both the “here” of the immediate space and the “there” of virtual information: “the body” is equally a presence in flesh and bones and an occurrence in bits and bytes. But, however convincing this reality-virtuality pseudo-continuum would be, the spatial and temporal fragmentations inevitably persist: there is always a certain break at the phenomenological level between the experience of real space, the bodily absence/presence in the shadow, and the displacements and delays of the video image projection. Figure 5: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. Figure 6: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. The third example of an AR artwork that engages the problem of real-virtual spatial convergence as a play between perceptual continuity and discontinuity, this time with the use of hand-held mobile interface is Hans RichtAR by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The work is an AR installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2013. The project recreates the spirit of the 1929 exhibition held in Stuttgart entitled Film und Foto (“FiFo”) for which avant-garde artist Hans Richter served as film curator. Featured in the augmented reality is a re-imaging of the FiFo Russian Room designed by El Lissitzky where a selection of Russian photographs, film stills and actual film footage was presented. The users access the work through tablets made available at the exhibition entrance. Pointing the tablet at the exhibition and moving around the room, the viewer discovers that a new, complex installation is superimposed on the screen over the existing installation and gallery space at LACMA. The work effectively recreates and interprets the original design of the Russian Room, with its scaffoldings and surfaces at various heights while virtually juxtaposing photography and moving images, to which the authors have added some creative elements of their own. Manipulating and converging real space and the virtual forms in an illusionist way, AR is able—as one of the artists maintains—to destabilize the way we construct representation. Indeed, the work makes a statement about visuality that complicates the relationship between the visible object and its representation and interpretation in the virtual realm. One that actually shows the fragility of establishing an illusionist continuum, of a perfect convergence between reality and represented virtuality, whatever the means employed. AR: A Different Spatial Practice Regardless the degree of “perfection” the convergence process would entail, what we can safely assume—following the examples above—is that the complex nature of AR operations permits a closer integration of virtual images within real space, one that, I argue, constitutes a new spatial paradigm. This is the perceptual outcome of the convergence effect, that is, the process and the product of consolidating different—and differently situated—elements in real and virtual worlds into a single space-image. Of course, illusion plays a crucial role as it makes permeable the perceptual limit between the represented objects and the material spaces we inhabit. Making the interface transparent—in both proper and figurative senses—and integrating it into the surrounding space, AR “erases” the medium with the effect of suspending—at least for a limited time—the perceptual (but not ontological!) differences between what is real and what is represented. These aspects are what distinguish AR from other technological and artistic endeavors that aim at creating more inclusive spaces of interaction. However, unlike the CAVE experience (a display solution frequently used in VR applications) that isolates the viewer within the image-space, in AR virtual information is coextensive with reality. As the example of the Living-Room 2 shows, regardless the degree of immersivity, in AR there is no such thing as dismissing the real in favor of an ideal view of a perfect and completely controllable artificial environment like in VR. The “redemptive” vision of a total virtual environment is replaced in AR with the open solution of sharing physical and digital realities in the same sensorial and spatial configuration. In AR the real is not denounced but reflected; it is not excluded, but integrated. Yet, AR distinguishes itself also from other projects that presuppose a real-world environment overlaid with data, such as urban surfaces covered with screens, Wi-Fi enabled areas, or video installations that are not site-specific and viewer inclusive. Although closely related to these types of projects, AR remains different, its spatiality is not simply a “space of interaction” that connects, but instead it integrates real and virtual elements. Unlike other non-AR media installations, AR does not only place the real and virtual spaces in an adjacent position (or replace one with another), but makes them perceptually convergent in an—ideally—seamless way (and here Hans RichtAR is a relevant example). Moreover, as Lev Manovich notes, “electronically augmented space is unique – since the information is personalized for every user, it can change dynamically over time, and it is delivered through an interactive multimedia interface” (225-6). Nevertheless, as our examples show, any AR experience is negotiated in the user-machine encounter with various degrees of success and sustainability. Indeed, the realization of the convergence effect is sometimes problematic since AR is never perfectly continuous, spatially or temporally. The convergence effect is the momentary appearance of continuity that will never take full effect for the viewer, given the internal (perhaps inherent?) tensions between the ideal of seamlessness and the mostly technical inconsistencies in the visual construction of the pieces (such as real-time inadequacy or real-virtual registration errors). We should note that many criticisms of the AR visualization systems (being them practical applications or artworks) are directed to this particular aspect related to the imperfect alignment between reality and digital information in the augmented space-image. However, not only AR applications can function when having an estimated (and acceptable) registration error, but, I would state, such visual imperfections testify a distinctive aesthetic aspect of AR. The alleged flaws can be assumed—especially in the artistic AR projects—as the “trace,” as the “tool’s stroke” that can reflect the unique play between illusion and its subversion, between transparency of the medium and its reflexive strategy. 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