Ambient Literature

This book explores how the combination of place based writing and location based technologies are producing new kinds of literary experiences. It shows how situated literary experiences delivered through text and audio running on and sensor based technology systems like smartphones offer distinctive new forms of reading, listening and looking. We argue that such encounters constitute new literary forms in which the authored text lies at the heart of an embodied and mediated experience. The visual, sonic, social and historic resources of place become the elements of a live and emergent mise-en-scène. In each case, there are specific techniques of narration, including, for instance, hallucination, memory, history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditional forms of narrative including the novel as well as cinematic and audio storytelling. Such techniques are combined with the work of app design, user experience design, interaction, software authoring, networked content management, localization, and GIS (geographical information systems) to produce 'ambient' experiences where the user is taken through a textual and sonic space that engages with the world surrounding us but doesn't aim to map it, navigate it or be an 'enhanced guidebook'. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in their meaning but, unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in the everyday shared world. Our book explores the potentiality of a new literary form produced by the exchange between location aware cultural objects, writers and readers. It lays the ground for a new poetics of situated writing and reading practices.