Description
- Abstract:
- This thesis addresses the poetics and politics of "ambience" and "atmospherics" in contemporary culture. I am interested in how "ambient practices" often associated with the sonic arts (Muzak, Brian Eno, Erik Satie) might be said to expand across fields such as architecture, computing, management, interior decorating, meteorology, urbanism, design, marketing, perfumery, visual art, and, particularly, poetry and experimental writing. Using the American poet Tan Lin as a primary interlocutor, I suggest that the double question raised by ambient writing practices is this: What would happen if one were to (1) recognize the contemporary moment as one in which discontinuity, specificity, and singularity--whether of media, of historical or cultural objects, or even of political organizations and economies--are increasingly being dissolved into a seamless, global environment or "mix," and (2) willfully reproduce the textures and patterns of such a mix as a form of cultural practice, without becoming mired in an asocial and impotent quietism? How can the distracted attunement to impersonal flows of affect and data that characterizes our subjection be best appropriated and reinvented (rather than merely "resisted")? This has everything to do with ubiquitous computing, with the total interpenetration of computational networks and everyday life, and also with the possibility of socio-artistic interventions into these conditions, especially in an age in which many of the dreams of the historical avant-gardes have materialized as software.
- Notes:
- Senior thesis (AB)--Brown University, 2017
- Concentration: Modern Culture and Media
Access Conditions
- Rights
- In Copyright
- Restrictions on Use
- Collection is open for research.
Citation
Mapes-Frances, Alec,
"Reading machines: ambient writing and the poetics of atmospheric media"
(2017).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0862DW0
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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department....