Space and Transmediality:
The Transcanadian Highway as a mediating conjuncture
Servanne Monjour
Marcello Vitali-Rosati
The Transcanadian Highway project
- CRC to the DH Conference in Calgary...
- What is this space?
- An empty space vs. a digital space?
- The relationship between digital and "non-digital" space
- The role of literature
- Intertextualities (Cortazar, Dunlop, Savelli Ménard...)
On the road...
- We are facing a transmedial object
- Maps (digital and non-digital)
- Narratives (literary, historical, private, touristic...)
- Visuals (pictures, images, videos...)
- Writings (other's and ours! on multiple supports)
- The road (highway infrastructure)
- People
- Motels
- Restaurants
Transmedial?
Transmedia storytelling Transmediality represents a process where integral elements of of a fiction reality get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels material means of expression existence for the purpose of creating a unified multiple and coordinated experience. Ideally each medium makes its own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story reality.
The Transcanadian Highway as mediating conjunctures
- There is no original
- Maps, narratives, visulas, people, motels.. are mediated objects on the same ontological level
- The transcanadian highway is the dynamic overlapping of all these objects
- The transcanadian highway is some mediating conjunctures
The notion of mediating conjunctures
Dynamic interactions of forces in the very moment of the action.
They are characterizes by:
- Moving aspect
- Multiplicity
- Openness
- Performativity
- Collectiveness
Space as mediating conjunctures
- Space is always mediated
- There is no actual vs. digital - or mediated - space
- Space is the dynamic overlapping of transmedial objects
The Transcanadian Highway : an anamorphic construction
- See the project "Postcards from Google Street view" on http://transcanproject.tumblr.com
Anamorphosis as a structure to understand transmediation (or mediating conjunctures)
- Anamorphosis = "formed back" - "formed again"
- A dynamic interaction of different images (classical definition)
- A dynamic interaction of different ontological layers
- A dynamic interaction of different medias (textual, visual)
- A distortion operation that can be read as an original and meaningful distorsion
- A set of original distorsions (transmediations as original without referent)
The anamorphic structure of reality - how Google Street view tries to become the new architecture of space
- Landscape is an aesthetic and a cultural construction
- Google (Maps, street view, Earth) is drawing a new form of landscape
- Google is an anamorphic layer of the world pretending to be the world itself
- This anamorphic shapes appears through the failures of the software (Clément Valla, Jon Rafman)
An anamorphic writing : Postcards from Google Street view
- If Google Street view aims to become the new architecture of space...
- ...literature can confront this construction, creating anamorphoses