Dolphins in the Reservoir single work   prose  
Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 Dolphins in the Reservoir
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'‘Dolphins in the Reservoir’ is an interactive recombinant work of moving images, text and sound. It confronts the many social challenges we face through the subjective, contradictory and often uncanny experiences of individuals. Thematically it passes through challenges to health, the environment, and fast-eroding democracy; our attempts to educate order out of chaos; philosophical and scientific ways of thinking about consciousness; and possible futures, including the rise of AI. Its recurrent dolphin theme transmutes many of these ideas.Saturated with media, the individual experiences a multimodal montage of the imaginal and mundane, the institutional and vernacular, the dystopian and utopian.. Juxtaposed and multilayered, the text, images and sound employ polysemy and synaesthesia while the interface evokes a murky, liminal realm. ‘Dolphins’ is structured in six distinct cycles, which repeat with variation. A single cycle of the work grows from isolated media fragments towards a dense plurality and diversity. V/users can drive the piece with clicks, and they can drag to rearrange elements. Three preformed musical sources juxtapose acoustic and digitally transformed sound, including sonified Covid-19 wave statistics. ‘Dolphins’ features trumpet by internationally renowned soloist John Wallace, our collaborator in (austra)LYSIS, the creative ensemble of which all three authors are part.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon TEXT Special Issue Digital Realism no. 69 2022 25658613 2022 periodical issue 'The COVID-19 pandemic has seen a heavy reliance on digital technologies: workplaces and classrooms have retreated to Zoom meetings; online video game narratives and streaming services have become a staple of contemporary entertainment; and social media pervades our life and seeks to distract us at every turn. Existence is now infused with non-human computer language. Even contemporary print texts display what N.K. Hayles calls the “mark of the digital” (2008, p. 159). Hayles (2008) argues that contemporary literature is deeply
    interpenetrated by electronic textuality:

    digital technologies do more than mark the surfaces of contemporary print novels. They also put into play dynamics that interrogate and reconfigure the relations between authors and readers, humans and intelligent machines, code and language… More than a mode of material production (although it is that), digitality has become the textual condition of the twenty-first-century literature. (p. 186) (Publication abstract)

    2022
Last amended 17 Jan 2023 09:24:37
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