Marie-Laure Ryan: Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media (2001)

Is there a significant difference in attitude between immersion in a game and immersion in a movie or novel? What are the new possibilities for representation offered by the emerging technology of virtual reality? As Marie—Laure Ryan demonstrates in Narrative as Virtual Reality, the questions raised by new, interactive technologies have their precursors and echoes in pre—electronic literary and artistic traditions. Formerly a culture of immersive ideals — getting lost in a good book, for example — we are becoming, Ryan claims, a culture more concerned with interactivity. Approaching the idea of virtual reality as a metaphor for total art, Narrative as Virtual Reality applies the concepts of immersion and interactivity to develop a phenomenology of reading.

Ryan’s analysis encompasses both traditional literary narratives and the new textual genres made possible by the electronic revolution of the past few years, such as hypertext, interactive movies and drama, digital installation art, and computer role—playing games. Interspersed among the book’s chapters are several “interludes” that focus exclusively on either key literary texts that foreshadow what we now call “virtual reality,” including those of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Ignatius de Loyola, Calvino, and science—fiction author Neal Stephenson, or recent efforts to produce interactive art forms, like the hypertext “novel” Twelve Blue, by Michael Joyce, and I’m Your Man, an interactive movie. As Ryan considers the fate of traditional narrative patterns in digital culture, she revisits one of the central issues in modern literary theory — the opposition between a presumably passive reading that is taken over by the world a text represents and an active, deconstructive reading that imaginatively participates in the text’s creation.

Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001
ISBN 0801864879, 9780801864872
399 pages

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Roy Ascott (ed.): Reframing Consciousness: Art, Mind and Technology (1999)

We are in the middle of a process of complex cultural transformation, but to what extent is this matched by the transformation in the way we see ourselves? This book covers a wide-ranging discussion on the interaction between Art, Science and Technology, and goes on to challenge assumptions about ‘reality’.

Loosely themed around four key elements of Mind, Body, Art and Values, the editor leads the investigation through the familiar territories of interactive media and artificial life, combining them with new and ancient ideas about creativity and personal identity.The contributing authors number over sixty highly respected practitioners and theorists in art and science, bringing to the subject a stimulating diversity of approach and a rich background of knowledge.

Art has long been preoccupied with questions involving the mind and consciousness. But it is fast finding that new technology, creatively applied, brings new possibilities to bear. This volume provides a strong foundation for the debates that are sure to follow in this field.

Publisher Intellect Books, 1999
ISBN 1841500135, 9781841500133
314 pages

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PDF (updated on 2012-7-24)

Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, Ollie O. Oviedo (eds.): Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools (2008)

Experts examine the ways digital tools affect social and cultural experience.

The essays in Small Tech investigate the cultural impact of digital tools and provide fresh perspectives on mobile technologies such as iPods, digital cameras, and PDAs and software functions like cut, copy, and paste and WYSIWYG. Together they advance new thinking about digital environments.

Contributors: Wendy Warren Austin, Jim Bizzocchi, Collin Gifford Brooke, Paul Cesarini, Veronique Chance, Johanna Drucker, Jenny Edbauer, Robert A. Emmons Jr., Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Richard Kahn, Douglas Kellner, Karla Saari Kitalong, Steve Mann, Lev Manovich, Adrian Miles, Jason Nolan, Julian Oliver, Mark Paterson, Isabel Pedersen, Michael Pennell, Joanna Castner Post, Teri Rueb, James J. Sosnoski, Lance Strate, Jason Swarts, Barry Wellman, Sean D. Williams, Jeremy Yuille.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2008
ISBN 0816649782, 9780816649785
236 pages

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