Suasive Iterations

David M. Rieder

Description

The PC era is giving way to a new form of popular computing in which smart, globally-connected objects and environments are the new computational ground. This new ground is the exigence for a new approach to digital rhetoric and writing. In Suasive Iterations, Rieder calls for an approach that is grounded in a new canon of digital style. He explains that the growing range of microcomponents and –processes can be botanized for the new canon. Drawing on Claude Levi-Strauss’ theory of bricolage, he describes his stylistic approach as a transductive science of the concrete, the goal of which is to engage audiences suasively by allegorizing aspects of the physical world to which the new era of microcomponents give us access. Suasive Iterations will appeal to scholars and practitioners—faculty and graduate students—in digital rhetoric, writing, digital humanities, and the digital arts. One of its innovative features is the inclusion of original, open-source programming projects for each of the four main chapters. The projects are written in/for Arduino, Processing, and the Kinect sensor. They are designed to highlight issues in the scholarly tradition.

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602355712
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

New Media Theory
Series Editor, Byron Hawk
The New Media Theory series investigates both media and new media as complex rhetorical ecologies. The merger of media and new media creates a global public sphere that is changing the ways we work, play, write, teach, think, and connect. Because these ecologies operate through evolving arrangements, theories of new media have yet to establish a rhetorical and theoretical paradigm that fully articulates this emerging digital life.
The series includes books that deploy rhetorical, social, cultural, political, textual, aesthetic, and material theories in order to articulate moments of mediation that compose these contemporary media ecologies. Such works typically bring rhetorical and critical theories to bear on media and new media in ways that elaborate on a burgeoning post-disciplinary “material turn” as one further development of the linguistic and social turns that have already influenced scholarly work across the humanities.
Books in the Series
Suasive Iterations: Rhetoric, Writing, and Physical Computing by David M. Rieder (2017)
Writing Posthumanism, Posthuman Writing , edited by Sidney I. Dobrin (2015)
Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-Shifting Media by Isabel Pedersen (2013)
Mics, Cameras, Symbolic Action: Audio- Visual Rhetoric for Writing Teachers , by Bump Halbritter (2013). Computers and Composition Best Book Award 2014.
The Available Means of Persuasion: Mapping a Theory and Pedagogy of Multimodal Public Rhetoric , by David M. Sheridan, Jim Ridolfo, and Anthony J. Michel (2012)
Avatar Emergency by Gregory L. Ulmer (2012)
New Media/New Methods: The Academic Turn from Literacy to Electracy , edited by Jeff Rice and Marcel O’Gorman (2008)
The Two Virtuals: New Media and Composition , by Alexander Reid (2007). Honorable Mention, W. Ross Winterowd/ JAC Award for Best Book in Composition Theory, 2007.



Rhetoric, Writing, and Physical Computing
David M. Rieder
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2017 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File
978-1-60235-568-2 (paperback)
978-1-60235-569-9 (hardcover)
978-1-60235-570-5 (PDF)
978-1-60235-571-2 (ePub)
978-1-60235-572-9 (iBook)
978-1-60235-573-6 (Kindle)
1 2 3 4 5
New Media Theory
Series Editor: Byron Hawk
Cover image: “WiFi Objects” by Nickolay Lamm for MyDeals.com. Used by permission.
Book Design: David Blakesley
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].


For my father,
Dr. Ronald F. Rieder


Contents
Acknowledgments ix
1 For/Get the Digital (and Ditch the Umbrella) 3
2 Transduction and Allegorized Style 31
2.5 Writing with Three-Dimensional Wa(y)ves 59
3 Onto-Allegories for the ‘Great Outdoors’ 66
3.5 Onto-Allegorized Tweets and the Third (Wayve) State 92
4 Plumbing the Paradoxical Depths 101
4.5 The Paradoxical Depths of Delivery 120
5 A Call for Distant (Transductive) Writing 127
5.5 Choric Capacitances 151
6 After the Bookish Era of the PC 159
Works Cited 163
Index 169
About the Author 177


Acknowledgments
There are many friends, family, and colleagues whom I need to thank for lending me their time, encouragement, and expertise. During the early drafting stages, members of the closed Facebook group, Savants on Sabbatical, helped me stay focused and motivated as I worked out the basic outline and content of my arguments. Susan Miller-Cochran in particular was an immense source of support through those stages of my writing process. Another colleague whom I cannot thank enough is Helen Burgess, who was my copyeditor and mentor in the final stages of the book’s development. A few more friends and colleagues who helped me at various stages include Jim Brown, Casey Boyle, Doug Eyman, Sarah Arroyo, Byron Hawk, Dave Blakeseley, Kevin Brock, and Wendi Sierra. I would also like to thank the CRDM PhD students in the spring 2015 seminar, Rhetoric and Digital Media, who read drafts of two chapters and let me demonstrate one of the projects that made it into the book. My biggest thanks are reserved for Shelley Garrigan, who sacrificed her own research time for my success, and my parents, Danièle and Ronald Rieder.


1 For/Get the Digital (and Ditch the Umbrella)
It’s time to bridge the gap between the physical and the virtual—time to use more than just your fingers to interact with your computer. Step outside of the confines of the basic computer and into the broader world of computing.
—Dan O’Sullivan and Tom Igoe, Physical Computing
I t’s a hot afternoon in July in New York City, 2013. You have been waiting in line for over five hours to experience an immersive art installation at The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) titled “Rain Room” (Belcove). Since its opening two months earlier, over 50,000 people have waited in line before you—some for several more hours—to experience one of the most Instagrammed art installations that year (Rabinovitch). Its popularity is one of the reasons that you bought a ticket. The “dramatic, Hollywood-like” pictures and videos from this installation as well as from the inaugural one in 2012 at the Barbican Gallery, London, England, have contributed to your fear of missing out, a.k.a. FOMO (Rabinovitch).

But another reason for waiting in line is a YouTube video of The Guardian ’s Architecture and Design critic Oliver Wainwright’s walkthrough in 2012, in which he offered the following remarks:
It’s really surreal. Not only is it raining indoors, but I’m not even getting the slightest bit wet wherever I go. It’s almost like I’m giving off some kind of wind that’s pushing the rain away, like I’m a human whirlwind. [“Rain Room”] somehow responds to me like I have a magnetic field. Wherever I go, it opens up around me. (“Barbican’s Rain Room”)
You want to experience something as novel as walking through a downpour without getting wet, which reminds you of descriptions of miraculous acts of water walking in several religious and fictional texts.
When you finally enter the dark, damp installation space, you and nine other participants have a ten-minute window of opportunity to engage with it. You notice that a larger group of participants are cordoned off behind a rope; the line to enter was shorter for them, but they can only watch. The installation is over 300 feet in length with a bright spotlight at the far end. The floor beneath you is a grate into which the rain falls. Looking up from where you are standing, you see that the simulated rain storm is based on a drop ceiling made up of hundreds of water valves. A few people in the space have gathered together to speculate about the technical design of the installation. Another two are taking selfies. Two more, who were holding hands, have started slow dancing together.
As you stand alone in the middle of the space, meditating on the experience of “Rain Room,” you realize that you are participating in a new form of popular computing, one in which invention or creativity is based on the ability to identify the available means of blurring the conventional line between the physical and virtual worlds. “Rain Room” may be a dramatic example of this new approach to what is called physical computing, but we are increasingly engaged and immersed in these kinds of hybrid realities, thanks to the growing number of smart, sensory-based, wireless, networked technologies in our everyday lives.
Suasive Iterations offers digital rhetors and writers, digital media artists, and “digital humanists 2.0” a method of rhetorical invention and creativity within this new paradigm of popular computing. Physical computing is a relatively new computational paradigm in which practitioners build interactive objects and environments that can both sense and respond to the analog world. It is a computational approach predicated on blurring the conventional line between the virtual or digital realm and the “real,” physical or analog world. There are a number of other terms associated with this computational approach including ubiquitous computing (ubicomp), pervasive computing, ambient computing, Internet of Things (IoT), wearable computing, “everyware,” and natural-user interface (NUI) design. In this book, I offer an approach that all of the abovementioned terms share, which is to transform the conventional ways we experience and engage with the real by finding new ways to fold some of the affordances of the virtual into it. Whether “wearable,” NUI, or ubicomp “smartifact,” these and other technological approaches to the physical hybridize the conventional space-times in which we are engaged. There is no longer a conventional, binary relationship between the analog and digital, and this realization put into practice transforms our sense of self and those relations comprising our interactions with objects and environments.
While the argument that we are now living in hybrid realities is not new, it has become more relevant with the growing