Friends- I think this is a great idea--but why not do a panel or two at the conference on this issue (not that I don't think the pre-conference workshop is a bad idea). I'd be willingto organize one. Would you be interested Michelle? AH -- Visiting Professor and Research Fellow in Digital Communications and Cultural Policy Joint Graduate Program in Communication and Culture York University 4700 Keele St.TEL 3007 Toronto, Ontario M3J 1P3 (416)736-2100 x 30157
Dear Colleagues,
I want to thank all of you for an interesting set of questions. I am particularly touched by Charles' kind words and challenging remarks. I like Charles' larger call for new methods and alternative languages for viewing and experiencing. My project may attempt this in a very small way but not, as Charles suggests, at the level of a total epistemology shift.
Wouldn't it be interesting to do an AoIR pre-conference workshop or journal issue that interrogates the ways that different disciplines and academic practices read a specific Internet setting? What fun to talk through how we come to understand sites and the implications of these readings. Such a project might allow us to articulate, change, and rework methodologies and question the implications of our academic practices.
I think that one of the ways that Charles' and my reading diverge is at the level of understanding the term "space." While I certainly relate what
is understood as "three-dimensional space" to the expression of relational arrangements between colors, forms, or other patterns, I also think there may be a number of differences between saying "I enter the screen" and "the 'enter' message in the middle of the web image suggests that the body can enter the screen."
Charles' model might encourage us to question the term "middle" or such art history designations as "lower quadrant" and "upper right corner." I believe that these terms rely on a certain understanding of centered and singular embodiment and yes arrangements and have interestingly remained largely uninterrogated even with feminist and postmodern scholars.
In writing about the web, such relational phrases as "middle" and "right side" also suggest a stability and regularity of the image that is not always reliable or present. We may be able to find some form of alternative reading and system of knowledge in the work of net artists
like Mark Napier (http://potatoland.org/ see especially http://www.potatoland.org/shredder/shredder.html) and Lisa Jevbratt (http://www.whitney.org/artport/exhibitions/biennial2002/jevbratt.shtml). Their works provide us with ways to look at web and other Internet content differently. Napier's browsers indicate that images, texts, and viewing are structured by software. They also provide a kind of shock to the viewer. Is there a reason to think about chat without word spacing and linewrap or a web sites without a translation of html tags and images into a more "easily" readable arrangement?
I would agree with Nancy that the spatial metaphor is employed more often in some Internet settings than others and is also more easily deployed when critically writing about some settings. It seems to me that there may also be an ever present convention that is conveyed by windows, browser directional arrows and other menus, and is made present even when the user
chooses software that has rejected such conventions.
I am not suggesting that we ignore the ways that users design, write, and represent such settings with spatial terms. Instead, I would like to pay more attention to the ways that the term "space" and an accompanying set of ideas function. For instance, I would like to ask why varied gaming settings render certain kinds of spaces and embodied experiences and to consider the ways that these renderings affect the user's engagement with the game, other sites, and society.
All my best, Michele
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