“The stories that we tell matter because they indicate how we see the world, and whether we believe we have the power and capacity to shape it for the better. Stories are one of the main ways that we make sense of the world, and understand and interpret our lives and experiences.“
(The Dreaming City: Glasgow 2020 and the Power of Mass Imagination, Demos)
“The contemporary convergence of mobile phone, camera, wireless Internet and satellite communication — the key ingredients of the digital handheld — accelerates the reconstitution of place from real, occupied space to a collage of here and there, past and present. But digital technology’s effects do not only blast us out of place; they also bore us into the sights right in front of us — those in our viewfinder. Our sense of place is augmented by information wired from the World Wide Web.” (Mitchell Schwarzer, A Sense of Place, A World of Augmented Reality)
image: Bruce Berrien
Where is the horizon when you’re online? What is the relationship between the physical world we inhabit and the online world we ‘surf’? Are we different people in each space, and if so, what happens if these two worlds aren’t as separate as we might have imagined?
Found Materials, a network of four professionals interested in how arts and creativity impact on places and ideas, wants to explore this relationship between the online and the offline through the prism of place and poetry/narrative. A recorded round-table debate will take place as part of the South Bank Centre’s International Poetry Festival on 3rd November, with an invited audience, and the opportunity for anyone to pose questions beforehand or live through Twitter.
We want to provoke a conversation about how story | poetry | literature | language impacts upon our relationship with place. How might a story make sense of a place? How might poetry change a place? Where does language sit, and what role does it play, in the world of architecture, construction, and landscape? And then, in this ‘digital age’, how might we redefine, or complicate, our idea of place to include the digital, not as a separate place, but as an additional dimension that has a direct impact on our physical world?
Global Poetry System, initiated by poet Lemn Sissay and the South Bank Centre, is just one example of an online map-based poetry project that looks to articulate the connection between place and language. A global map of found and place-specific poetry, it spans the physical and the digital world, enabling connections, journeys, and explorations. This is a participatory digital project initiated by a physical venue. What is the relationship between the two? What is the value of one to the other and vice versa?
The digital world is a ‘text heavy’ place, constructed through language and image. It faces similar issues and possibilities to physical public space: safety, community, participation, communication. Increasingly our understanding of place is influenced by our online investigations and communications. Map and post-code based online projects give us stories and information about physical places. Augmented Reality enables us to occupy multiple places at the same time – past, present, future, digital, physical. Multi-platform story-telling is a rapidly developing field of artistic endeavour. We are interested in this collision between the online and the offline, what its impact is on the places we are connected to, the way we operate within them, and the stories we tell from them.
The Conversation:
Before the event we are inviting participants to ask and respond to each other’s questions on this theme. The question for the first respondent is:
What do you think is the relationship/correlation between public space and digital space?
As a start, two more questions immediately come to mind:
- Can public space exist without digital space?
- Can digital space exist without public space?
It’s almost hard to imagine one without the other when you’re immersed in an online world, but then have to remember that public space existed for a LONG time without digital! Now it seems a shame (and waste) to not use one to enhance the other – particularly in terms of connections and communication. I’m certainly not sure that online will ever completely replace offline, but know that digital narrative can greatly enhance our offline experiences. It seems natural that when we interact with something or someone in the physical world, that we can use online sources to develop our knowledge and interact further. And, the ‘digital footprint’ of a thing or place becomes more engaging when you attach other people’s experiences and views to it too.
When we planned RewireLondon (an unconference for creative freelancers,www.rewirelondon.org), it began online – through a blog and other social media. But the intention was always to bring attendees into a physical space to create their own stories together. Connections were made and ideas were generated at the event, and afterwards attendees used online tools to continue those conversations (through Twitter, blogs etc). That pattern even mirrors the title of this project – online, offline, then online again. Encouraging them to interact through narrative enabled them to reflect on their experience, and RewireLondon’s story is also much richer as a result of their contributions.
For me there is no longer any meaningful seperation between the public and the digital space and I often – usually – occupy both spaces simultaneously. For instance, most public discussions in which I participate are simultaneously augmented by companion online discussions with people who are either in the same room or hundreds, sometimes thousands, of miles away. But it will always be the case that most relationships are enriched by physical meetings; we inhabit our bodies much more profoundly than we inhabit digital space.
In fiction, as in life, place is an incredibly important aspect of creating strong and compelling narratives. Many of our favourite writers are strongly identified with a place or region. Page-based fiction has been slow to harness the notion of digital space, but there’s a new and emerging wealth of digital fiction that occupies, explores, and augments the digital realm and the vast potential therein for new forms of storytelling, new modes of interaction between writer and reader.
The digital realm is a writer’s paradise, but one that is fraught with potential failure as well.
I agree with Kate Pullinger as regards place and narrative. However, if what you are trying to do is appreciate the historical significance of a public space – or even its literary, fictional mythology – then I do not believe that any digital representation, no matter how immersive, can yet approach the immediate, emotional, visceral response of physically being there – of bodily inhabiting a space and sensing it. This is a huge gulf, which is as wide as the one between pornography and sex.
Yet the role of digital space, as Alison says, can be to inform the participant, in a diverse, multi-sensory way – to enrich that being-there. It can educate those senses, so that before you are there (or while you are there, in the case of digital audio guides, or GPS-linked phones, for example) you are an informed spectator – and, hopefully, it can push you towards being an intelligent participant.
Put yourself in an unfamiliar space in an unfamiliar city. Your senses cannot translate what you experience into thought without applying reference points. If you have no reference points, then this is urban alienation. But instant digital knowledge can engender a richer understanding. Dereliction, for example, is disorienting unless you have an awareness of the history of a space, and have an aspiration for its future.
Next question: is my point of view still valid when digital space does become perfectly immersive?
If and when digital space becomes perfectly immersive, then by definition, people will not be able to distinguish between virtually being in a location, and physically being there. We’ll probably see a generational divide in which people who grow up with the technology will believe that it is no less valid a way of experiencing the world, and people who won’t believe that virtual experiences have the same weight as real ones (similar to arguments about virtual/physical communication today).
Of course, perfectly immersive digital spaces are a few decades out at the very least, so it’s not a pressing question – but increasingly accurate simulacra will become more widespread. At the same time, we’ll see the digital become more enmeshed with the physical – so it’s not just a question of digital ‘copying’ the physical, it’s the physical becoming more digital itself, with sensors and displays and other technologies that allow physical spaces the ability to adapt.
When the wall of a building can become a window into any where in the world, when robots can reconfigure spaces within seconds, then you’re beginning to see a world in which you cannot tease apart the physical and digital. And both of those things are possible right now.
I think Dan answered Robert’s question well, and no-one else has asked one! So in response to Alison: digital space is comprised of both digital content and its enabling platforms / technologies, and physical (or public, cognitive) experience – one doesn’t exist without the other. But while digital content may be (sometimes) immersive, (sometimes) persistent, and (sometimes) retrievable after the fact, digital is also brittle and fragile is different ways from public / physical space and we’re already losing huge chunks of it while we’re playing catch-up.
Websites and other digital content come and go, often on commercial cycles, technical trends and other social contingencies (eg. the recent snowballing by Yahoo of the original DIY homepage community GeoCities) and we struggle with this. Look at the Internet Archive and its ‘Wayback Machine’ service which set out to archive all public websites but is lately challenged in keeping it’s old archive intact and storing everything new that exists.
Differing strategies are being tested in order to minimise this loss of our current digital culture (including the culture of participation and documentation so many people now have access to) to future generations.
One route to tackling this may be the open source approach, which aims to make the internet an ever more collectively expanded and hence improved (and accurate?) information pool. Another is the adoption of semantic web principles: whereby better, standardised description of information (or “meta information”) safeguards or at least prolongs the longevity of current digital content for upgrading, storage and understanding by future computing systems.
A further option is private or public-funded initiatives (such as the new British Library’s UK newspaper digitisation project or the American Library Of Congress’s archiving of all public tweets) to store and archive pre and post-internet sources of information so they can be referenced and brought into play (though not always for free) by future online and offline denizens.
It appears there are various options but seem to be no guarantees, so my question is twofold:
Are there new “contextual” markers that online content creation and experience can or should adopt / invent (and by inference the population at large should be able to avail of these) which will support accessibility and immersion in a rich context for future users and generations? And if not, how can the online world ever match offline for adding context to current online/offline immersive culture now – and in the future – when the “information of bits” dimension is subject to differing contingency factors that (comparative to physical archiving) we haven’t got a grip of yet?
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PS. Yep, I confess to gratuitously mourning the digital death of *just some* of the stuff I created on pre-historic Amstrad and ancient Mac floppy disks, expired laptop hard-drives, and now defunct websites
To briefly address some of Deidre’s questions about the incompleteness of our digital records: in terms of archiving our digital heritage, some substantial steps are already being taken by the International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC), most notably the British Library’s ambitious and ever-expanding web-archiving project (info at http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/digi/webarch/index.html). Conservators and archivists face huge challenges when dealing with both digital and physical records, but there is a fundamental similarity between the two. Whether you talk about archiving the Guardian’s web-only Poetry Workshops or conserving a shard from a Roman sculpture found buried in Devon, you’re talking about the preservation of culture, which I think is already being seriously addressed by various bodies.
Here’s what I want to ask about – the fear that some people have of digitisation. For example, in August this year Jeanette Winterson said: “What worries me is that a load of s**** has been talked about digitisation as being the new Gutenberg, but the fact is that the Gutenberg led to books being put in shelves, and digitisation is taking books off the shelves.” I suspect this fear is born from a feeling that digital space is somehow replacing physical space, in an unsatisfactory way. So here’s my question – is the shelf really getting smaller, or is it just moving?
Responding to the initial question here…
I’m constantly surprised at how many people – especially England cricketers on Twitter and schoolfriends I haven’t seen for 20 years on Facebook – use digital spaces as vessels to be filled with their personal outpourings, seemingly unaware of how many people can see what they are writing. Sportsmen in particular are renowned for being insufferably banal in obviously public interviews on TV etc, and yet they cast off their shackles with alacrity when it comes to Twittering.
A failure to understand just how public digital spaces are might explain some of it, as might the ease with which one can fire off an enraged drunken text to twitter, but there does seem to be something else at play. As has been written about copiously elsewhere, this may have something to do with the (false) feeling of invulnerability one gets from sitting alone at one’s computer, cocooned in the secure and private space of home.
One root cause of this propensity to treat pubic digital spaces as if they are private might be due to the slightly cowardly but largely secure world of anonymous blog comment posting, where some feel safe to eschew all adherence to politeness and grammar in the name of making their point. Perhaps the imperviousness of the secret blog commentating gives people false confidence in other digital spaces.
I guess that why I’m so surprised by the frequency of high-profile Twitter and Facebook gaffes is that speaking for myself, and for a substantial slice of my professional and personal peer group, I would say that there is not a great difference between our approach to public spaces and digital spaces. In both spheres, one presents a honed façade to the outside world, a version of one’s self which one believes is acceptable to those who might see it. Indeed, rather than being more unfettered online, I would say that the awareness that nothing is ever truly deleted from the Internet makes me more cautious to put my name to an utterance in the digital world.
In some ways digital spaces have some advantage over public spaces as they give us time to consider our thoughts and hone our arguments offline before uploading a fully-formed point. (I’m writing this in Word.) When we appear in ‘live’ public spaces, the pressure to say something to fill a gap can sometimes lead us to feel compelled to start speaking before we have any real idea what we are going to say. I always respect interviewees on television who leave monumental pauses before responding to a question.
With regard to Coney’s work, many of the characters in our stories exist in interactive digital spaces and are never observed in the real/public world. One of the great advantages of this is that while modern technologies such as email allow for characters to be responsive and to engage with audiences in a personalised way, there is also space left for the audience reading the online message to fill in the gaps with their own imagination. Indeed, the characters will actual be morphed by their writer (or operator) to respond to what is written by the audience. The characters in our stories thus become an amaglam, co-created by Coney and the individual audience members.
As for a question. There have been a fair few studies recently about the impact ‘The Internet’ is having on our behaviour. So my question is: Do online spaces make us more or less social?
My response can be found here,
http://vimeo.com/16164901
and the question for afterwards is …
Do we spend too much time talking about how digital space feels, and not enough time just playing in what for many is a natural environment and campaigning to ensure the widest access as consumers and makers for people both here and in the developing world?
Q: Do we spend too much time talking about how digital space feels, and not enough time just playing in what for many is a natural environment and campaigning to ensure the widest access as consumers and makers for people both here and in the developing world?
This makes me smile, as I recall tongue-in-cheek tweets recently stating 90% of people on social media are talking about social media. Sometimes it really feels like it!
The reason I find Twitter so useful is because I work in a field that I can ask a question to my network and get fast answers. It’s increased the number of people I can talk to, interact with, have a debate with, in an instant. I think it’s ruddy amazing.
Wired recently ran a headline story announcing to the world that “the web is over, long live the internet”. Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff produced a bright and colourful graph showing how usage has moved from web (i.e. visiting websites) being the main chunk of use ten years ago to peer to peer (i.e. social media) and video (yes, YouTube).
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/08/ff_webrip/all/1 I think this shows how every part of the web is now social.
In our lives, we don’t draw rings around “online” and “offline”. If we want to explore the potential of our ideas and decisions in the day to day, everything is the same, it’s just different ways of experiencing things. On a really basic level, say I want to go see a film. I don’t think, I’ll do that offline – I’ll go to the ticket office. I use the easiest and best means possible to find out what’s on, talk to friends (face to face or email, or text…) and then book it (by phone, or an app or on their website). All of these stages will involve different parts of being online and offline.
Listening to the responses to the #csr #artsfunding (I only talk in hashtags now, you see) announcements from the Arts Council RFO fallout this week, almost all the arts organisation leaders talked about these cuts restricting potential audiences, or those least likely to access the arts. Scroll through the comments on the Guardian page to see some of these: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/oct/20/arts-cuts-spending-review-comment This sounds like community outreach programmes being culled, as there is plenty of potential to broaden audiences through digital.
Real life experiences are certainly never going to go away – nor would we want them to – but digital can enhance and augment these experiences, often bringing a wider audience and creating a ripple effect of participation and interaction. As technology continues apace, and hopefully things like smartphones become cheaper, then that augmentation of the interaction becomes more accessible.
So the next question, “what technologies out there right now excite you – make you think of the potential that they hold, rather than “just another thing” to get your head around?”
[...] Online:Offline:Online intended to explore the relationship between digital space and physical space, with a focus on literature, stories, poetry and language. The debate started on the blog, where participants were invited to respond to a question, and then ask their own. The event, a recorded discussion, then took place in the gorgeous setting of the St. Paul’s Pavilion on the 6th floor of the Royal Festival Hall. The attendees ranged from writers, games developers, poets, architects, creative producers, and more. [...]