imitation versus mediation: working in online and offline spaces

shaun macpherson, jana millar usiskin, and emily smith

how does the nature of online space change the offline experiences that our individual projects seek to mediate via scalar?

jana and the archive

"an archive is clearly at best a repository of possible truths that are available to the situated archival reader, rather than the truth about anything or anybody, least of all its ostensible subject. thus much depends upon the personal, intellectual, and cultural climate into which the “buried treasures” are retrieved" (234).

1. the archive as body
2. issues in the literary archive
3. modeling the issues
4. encounters

emily and contingent methodologies

“in short postmodern historicism introduces the thought of mediation in the relation to past and future. my culminating recommendation, therefore, is that postmodern historicism can best do so by visibly signaling the act of such mediation through actual media innovation or allusions to such innovation in its own form, thereby methodically bringing to view a sense of simultaneous sameness and otherness in our relation to history […] [mediation] produces a sense of anachronism […] able to make us see history as a compound relation of proximity and distance between past and present” (25).

alan liu's "contingent method":

1. complicate history
2. immerse ourselves in history
3. free ourselves from history
4. make a method
5. mediate the method

shaun and the tension of interface

“thinking involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well where thinking suddenly stops in a configuration present with tensions it gives that configuration a shock by which it crystallizes into a monad” (264–65).

1. the ubiquitous object as invisible (heidegger's "readiness-to-hand")
2. the question of whether ubiquity/invisibility is important in constructing a model for the communicative process (mccarty)
3. invisibility as imitation (i.e. unpacking weiser's "ubiquitous computing")
4. visibility-as-tension-as-innovation (benjamin)

projects in discussion
audience questions and discussion

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Author: Shaun Macpherson, Jana Millar Usiskin, Emily Smith
Word Count: 325

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