The Digital Imaginary: Literature and Cinema of the Database(Electronic Literature)

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Over the past half century, computing has profoundly altered the ways stories are imagined and told. Immersive, narrative, and database technologies transform creative practices and hybrid spaces revealing and concealing the most fundamental acts of human invention: making stories. The Digital Imaginary illuminates these changes by bringing leading North American and European writers, artists and scholars, like Sharon Daniel, Stuart Moulthrop, Nick Montfort, Kate Pullinger and Geof Bowker, to engage in discussion about how new forms and structures change the creative process. Through interviews, commentaries and meta-commentaries, this book brings fresh insight into the creative process from differing, disciplinary perspectives, provoking questions for makers and readers about meaning, interpretation and utterance. The Digital Imaginary will be an indispensable volume for anyone seeking to understand the impact of digital technology on contemporary culture, including storymakers, educators, curators, critics, readers and artists, alike.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Introduction The Digital Imaginary Part One: Database Interviews Connections And Coincidences In The End: Death In Seven Colors: A Conversation With David Clark Emotional Proximity Through Inside The Distance: A Conversation With Sharon Daniel Commentaries Stuart Moulthrop: Now What: Sharon Daniel And David Clark On The Digital Imaginary. Judith Aston: The Readerly And The Cinematic: Hybrid Reconfigurations Through Digital Media Practice. Part Two: Archive Interviews Pry As A Cinematic Novel: A Conversation With Samantha Gorman The Generative Archive Of Encyclopedia: A Conversation With Håkan Jonson And Johannes Heldén. Commentaries Lisa Swanstrom: The Taxonomy Is Imprecise. Geoffrey C. Bowker: Reading The Endless Archive Part Three: Multimodality Interviews Authorship In Inanimate Alice and Letter To An Unknown Soldier: A Conversation With Kate Pullinger The Metamorphoses Of Front As A Narrative Told Through Social Media Interface: A Conversation With Donna Leishman. Commentaries Anastasia Salter: Collaborative Voices: Kate Pullinger's Digital Authorial Voice. Mark C. Marino: What Holds Electronic Literature Together? Metacommentaries Illya Szilak: Do Cyborgs Dream Of Iphone Apps? The Body And Storytelling In The Digital Imaginary. Nick Montfort: Computational Literary Practices And Processes And Imagination. Afterword Steve Tomasula: Haunting The Digital Imaginary. Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Roderick Coover is Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University, USA, and author or coauthor of numerous award-winning creative works featured in international arts venues, festivals and public institutions as well as scholarly works spanning fields of the arts, humanities and social sciences.

Review :
The Digital Imaginary remains a unique text ... Its interviews, commentaries and metacommentaries offer fresh insights on familiar concepts from new media studies ... It is this willingness to bear the unflattering marks of its experiments that makes the book an exhilarating and worthwhile exploration into electronic literature and digital art, one that opens exciting new avenues for academic edited collections. The Digital Imaginary figures vital, and some of the best, aspects of an emergent world of Electronic Literature by creating just the kind of “discursive community” that its collection of interviews and essays – recursively, self-reflexively – celebrates. Artists who make meaning from computational media and new forms, from multimodality, from digitally-enabled collaboration, and from the transactional choices of their readers are placed in explicit, exploratory dialog with a number of these very readers. A further, generative layer of metacommentary from two widely differing perspectives adds voiceover – from visceral theory (Szilak) and code-level computation (Montfort) – to what is, in particular, an entanglement of cinematic, literary, and computational world-lines. And the whole is haunted by the cosmologically distancing vision of Steve Tomasula, a maker in these multimodal forms for whom the digital imaginary scales, ethically, beyond the horizons of received human culture and technology. Digitality has erupted the ambit of narratives with which we invent and interpret our being in the world, as well as the forms in which these narratives are expressed and experienced. The Digital Imaginary is an invaluable and elucidative analysis of the current 'state of this art' by authors and artists who are thinking and working at its leading edge. Its penetrating case studies and conversations map best current practices and beguiling future possibilities.