This week we revisit PhD student Eleanor Dare’s 2009 doctoral thesis. South: A Psychometric Text Adventure, is an artist’s book and a set of software programs designed to explore and establish new relationships between readers and narrative.
“This work may be described as emanating from traditions of interactive narrative that are not considered part of the main-stream of literature, such as self-help books, star sign and dream interpretations, and populist psychometrics. These forms could also be described as tailor-made or interest matching texts, in which the sense of the text having an intimate understanding and insight into its readers is essential.
“The South egg is an interim object, halfway between a book and a computer. The South software generates subject-specific material that can be loaded into it. The egg can then be taken to a specific location (the South Bank) and its instructions followed. The formation of dynamic relationships between readers and texts has been one of the central goals of my practice; as such, a large amount of my theoretical research has focused upon ideas relating to subjectivity and by extension to issues of epistemology and agency.
“While these theories have been central to my philosophical understanding of the field, I have also had to invent strategies that are effective in real-world situations and in relation to the real world materials and conditions of my practice. As a result South is built around a series of autonomous agents who perform analytical and interpretive tasks.
“My commitment to a reflexive practice emphasises the exploration of the proxy and in many ways subjective role these agents play on my behalf. Consequently the agents are both structural tools and unorthodox protagonists within this work. The limitations inherent in these agents, and the asymmetries of understanding between them and human readers, are framed as creative resources. This is not to define my materials as limiting or determining of my outcomes (or indeed to reduce the outcome of my practice to a particular set of skills in relation to those materials) but to describe a form of knowledge generation that is not easily separable from the contingency and materiality of my practice.”
Dr Eleanor Dare is now Author MSc Web Technologies at the University of Derby.
Eleanor’s blog
BodiMEetup, a regular gathering to discuss new technologies around the idea of the “digital you”, is looking for contributors to share their stories and opinions, and discuss how to engage entrepreneurial leaders.
On Saturday 20 and Sun 21 September 2014, the V&A is hosting a weekend of events celebrating contemporary digital art and design.