Ambient literature

This talk at Université Paris Nanterre examined movement as a feature of ambient literature; an emerging digital literary form. This interest stems from the ambient Literature project, which was a two-year AHRC funded research programme led by UWE Bristol, Bath Spa and Birmingham. The project investigated the potential of situated literary experiences delivered by pervasive computing platforms, which respond to the presence of a reader to deliver story. Such literary experiences operate both spatially and temporally and a reader is brought into contact with a physical location as part of the narrative. The project commissioned three works of ambient literature from established writers to understand the form, the experiences of its readers and the process of its authoring. My research, developed from my involvement in the Ambient Literature project, explores how a reader experiences an ambient literary form through movement as they are asked to simultaneously navigate both a physical and imaginative world, while being embodied in a narrative