Ambient Literature

This book considers how a combination of place-based writing and locationresponsive technologies produce new kinds of literary experiences. Building onthe work done in the Ambient Literature Project (2016-2018), this books arguesthat these 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 emergentmise-en-scène. Specific techniques of narration, including hallucination, memory,history, place based writing, and drama, as well as reworking of traditionalstorytelling forms combine with the work of app and user experience design, interaction, software authoring, and GIS (geographical information systems) toproduce ambient experiences where the user reads a textual and sonic literaryspace. These experiences are temporary, ambiguous, and unpredictable in theirmeaning but unlike the theatre, the gallery, or the cinema they take place in theeveryday shared world. The book explores the potentiality of a new literary formproduced by the exchange between location-aware cultural objects, writers andreaders. This book, and the work it explores, lays the ground for a new poetics ofsituated writing and reading practices.