Ambient Stories in Practice and Research: Digital Writing in Place

From a range of academic and practice-led perspectives, this book explores how a combination of place-based writing and location-based technologies are producing new kinds of experimental ambient literary experience. In so doing, it unpacks how situated literary experiences delivered through text, audio and sensor-based delivery offer distinctive new forms of reading and listening and lay the ground for a new poetics of situated writing practices.

Exploring an experimental, practice-based approach to digital literary forms and its emerging poetics, this book critically examines the ecology of ambient literature from a range of perspectives, including researchers and practitioners working in the fields of digital writing, sonics, visual art, performance, literary studies, creative writing and computer science.

Essays look towards the emerging field of ambient literature, drawing on contributors’ own background and interests. Contributors study topics ranging from ecological and climatic challenges through critical and creative cartographies to understanding the metaphorical work of ’ambient’ as a form embedded in the social, technological and literary. Including practice-based essays from writers, artists and practitioners on the use of data to write poetry and the position of the writer as maker, this book’s combination of practice-led approaches and interdisciplinary research makes it a valuable and varied contribution to the field of digital writing.

Amy Spencer was a post-doctoral research fellow in Ambient Literature at the University of the West of England, UK and is now post-doctoral research assistant at Bath Spa University, UK. She has a PhD from the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College where her thesis, Author, Reader, Text: Collaboration and the Networked Book, focused on collaborative authorship in digital literature. She also has an MA in English from King’s College London. Amy is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction and is the author of DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture (Marion Boyars Publishers).