3Dology and Hypermapping
I have utilized Scalar to create a hypermap of fleshLAB to model a form of academic publication helpful when writing about things. The choice to format the written companion to the critical object as a hypermap was driven out of necessity. When I first set out to write about fleshLAB, I did so in a Word document. It became taxing and inefficient to constantly refer to elements of an object without the use of images. The thing-ness of the objects became lost to words, and felt referential or secondary to the words written about them. I then attempted to transfer to a multimedia format using InDesign. In this format, fleshLAB was picked apart and pictured piece-by-piece, page-by-page, but lost the fullness of its form. And still, the writing took over as primary, and the images of fleshLAB became supplemental, secondary. I then transferred my project to Scalar in the form of an image map with overlaid annotations, a hypermap, to operate as the “writing” of fleshLAB. This not only allowed the text and object to co-exist, it centralized the object as primary, rather than secondary, to the text. I believe that 3Dology is better captured through this format than a traditional academic essay, bound by static text, the black and white, the logocentric.
The hypermap of fleshLAB offers a branching narrative format that is textual, visual, sonic, sensory, and affective. It also allows users to interact with this site of speculative technoencounter on their own terms (though certainly not entirely, as everything is a construct always-already) as they explore the space. The linear academic essay, just like the computer, disciplines readers by requiring them to enact the embedded logics of publication in order to engage with the material. With a modular format, such as modeled here via discrete annotations, readers explore what they want, where they want, when they want. Here, ideas don’t operate as stepping stones, though that is often helpful in constructing arguments, but rather as a spatial, three-dimensional, recursive ecosystem. This flexible reading system may allow for new ideas to emerge based on the order in which the reader comes to each idea.
In addition to the ability to explore the space non-linearly, Scalar allows readers to add their own comments and ideas, yielding dynamism in academic publishing. Scalar creates projects that, by default, are open to reader contribution:
The interactive, digital hypermap provides an interface for the sharing of ideas and the creation and circulation of knowledge worlds. Because the medium so intrinsically shapes the message,[3] what is the potential richness and vibrancy of academic knowledge production if publication were imagined and produced in multitudinous forms—especially those that are dynamic, spatialized, multimediated, digital?Blog-style threaded comments, both anonymous and attributed, are available on every page of your Scalar publication, offering frequent opportunities to engage with readers. Comments can be set for automatic approval or moderated individually by the project’s authors. Authors can also opt to receive email alerts when readers submit comments. What’s more, each comment becomes a page in its own right within the publication, allowing user responses to be fully integrated in the content of a project, its visualizations, index, and more.[2]
Hypermapping combines hypertext, media, and spatiality—whose convergence has become possible via multiple digital technologies. Various off-the-shelf digital tools, such as Omeka/Neatline and Scalar annotation, can produce a hypermap. What is mapped can be both 2D or 3D, virtual or non-virtual. For instance, many Omeka/Neatline projects hypermap 2D media, such as photographs or paintings in virtual space. Other forms of hypermapping include augmented reality technologies, like the app Aurasma, and virtual 3D mapping of non-virtual space.
Hypermapping and 3Dology forefront differences among various iterations of dimensionality (2D; 3D; 4D[?!]) and spatial sites of encounter (virtual; non-virtual). For instance, how does epistemology change based on these characteristics? What can be learned or experienced in 3D that cannot be in 2D? Rather, what can be learned spatially that can’t be learned textually? What about the combination of both? How does the affective operate in relation to the 3D? For instance, what does it mean that you can physically “sit with” the 3D object in ways that the 2D object does not allow? Virtual 3D objects and spaces allow for a flat interaction, those in which objects from different worlds meet on the same plane. Scale becomes irrelevant. What might it mean to virtually explore a 3D object that was born-digital in virtual space, everted into human space via 3D printing, and then re-digitized?
FleshLAB’s location is the following: an amalgamation of both born-digital and non-born-digital objects that have been combined. It lives in digital and non-digital space. Its virtual iteration has been re-digitized from its physical iteration via digital photography, and then hypermapped via Scalar. The “reverse” combination is also possible: users could interact with the ideas embedded in the “real” fleshLAB using an augmented reality app, such as Aurasma. This would require, though, being in the same room with it.
The virtual hypermapping of born-digital objects that exist in the “real” world and have been digitized for virtual interaction adds another step of transmediation into the traditional flow of real to virtual, virtual to real, and of augmented reality. The hypermapping of born-digital, everted, then re-digitized objects further subverts “digital dualism: the fallacy that analog and digital are entirely distinct and separate domains.”[4] This is not unlike other transmediation processes of the past, such as converting music on vinyl to a digital file format, then to a cassette tape. Transmediation creates a shift in affective reception and interaction. Walter Benjamin, for instance, captures the significance of transmediation or (re)production in terms of aura.[5] The “essence” of a work shifts based on the mechanical or mediated transfer of a work. How does aura shift across the born-digital that are everted through 3D printing and are then re-digitized? What might Benjamin say about 3Dology and hypermapping? While often media transfer is concerned with “loss,” I instead wonder what is gained in the process—in the same way that mathematical subtraction also yields difference, or ontological distinction.
We can interact with various 3D spaces and things on their levels as digital mapping scrambles traditional notions of comparable scale. Hypermapping, in tandem with the improvement and increased access to 3D scanning and printing technologies, blurs the distinction between virtual and “real” space. The born-digital 3D object is printed, made “real.” That 3D print can be 3D-scanned and made virtual (again). It can be rescaled, reshaped, modified in either space. Its multiple iterations existing across various planes blur the distinction between the "real" and the “virtual,” similar to other digital tools, such as locative media.
3Dology is particularly interesting to me as it signals not only eversion (digital things coming out of the computer to live in our world) or inversion (the digitization of things from our tangible world going into the virtual world), but rather the ability to do both simultaneously, to live everywhere at once, as 3Dology affords comings and goings across digital and non-digital planes. Like early conceptions of virtual embodiment in which the human body is digitized and life is experienced "inside" the computer, eversion via 3D printing allows virtual objects to go "inside" our lived reality—or we can meet them in theirs. Is the "real" world a virtual world for the 3D printed object?
This is all about ontological movement. We go into the digital, or digital things come out to us. But what about both at once? 3Dology operates in a transversal media climate based on cross-ontological, simultaneous, distributed movement. Transversal media, 3D-printed objects included, blur the lines between virtual and real, embodied and otherwise, born-digital and not, and all become boundary objects in constant flux, all existing at once in disparate iterations. It’s particularly generative to think about how 3Dology reformulates our understandings of VR, AR, and R, and how their ghostly boundaries haunt us.
My hopeful vision of future scholarly explorations of 3Dology extends far, far beyond what I’ve modeled in this current project. The hypermap of fleshLAB is but a modest gesture toward the rich potential of future forms of spatial- and object-based scholarly writing. If critical making is further institutionalized via the nomenclature of DH and maker studies at the university level, I imagine that scholarly writing formats will expand to adapt to object-based projects. I want to believe that future researchers and scholars may go to write about their objects of study, perhaps those of which they designed and made themselves, and not first begin, compulsorily, by opening up their word processing software to a blank page that lives so far away from the object it will attempt to capture.
[1] William Gibson, “Google’s Earth,” New York Times, August 31, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/opinion/01gibson.html?_r=3.
[2] Alliance for Networking Visual Culture, “About Scalar: Reader Feedback,” accessed May 31, 2017, http://scalar.usc.edu/features/editorial-workflow/.
[3] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Mentor, 1964).
[4] Jurgenson, cited in Hancock et al., “Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday.,” 77.
[5] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51.
