Beyond the Archive: Immersive Textuality for William Blake’s Poetry

In the past decade the Blake Archive transformed scholarship on William Blake by making his illuminated texts widely available online. The Archive delivers some of the best features of web edited editions, including the ability for the viewer to modulate the size and color of plates, to compare similar images, and to search for thematicly similar images. Nonetheless, there are many applications of new media that the Archive does not employ. The performativity of new media matches complex performative elements in Blake’s work that are not accounted for in an archive. As poet, artist, and publisher, Blake is keenly aware of the horizons and limits of his media. As poet he creates narratives in which characters and spaces morph. Such transformation of people and places in turn structurally change the narrative. As artist, his visual puns and transformed characters take on Ovid-like metamorphosis, such as his tree/women that liberate and bind their children with their “limbs.” As publisher, his very processes of etching, painting, and publishing become characters in the narrative and morph the story world at the same time that they call attention to themselves as media in our world. This conference panel is designed to look at the “other” Blake, one not available in the Archive but necessary in the immersive experience of reading Blake’s work. As the visionary poet sets out to “open the 97
doors of perception,” this panel presents applications for modelling and simulating the phenomenology of reading. While the archive presents a “transparent” text and a reader at a non-point outside the poem and distanced from the computer screen, immersive textuality attempts to place the reader inside the space of reading while both inside and outside the computer screen. The complex image-text, multivalent narratives of William Blake’s poetry serve as an ideal model for thinking digital representation other than an archive. Blake’s work becomes a means for formulating responsive new media spaces both for scholarship and for pedagogy. Immersive texts present elements of gaming to literary criticism. The panel will consider how such environments bring gaming to scholarship. While Jerome McGann has begun to address these issues in his Ivanhoe game, recently published in Radient Textuality, the panel’s participants have been engaged in similar efforts over the last decade. Play, embodiment, narrativity, and design—key elements of gaming—help Blake scholars to rethink the look, feel, and purpose of Blake’s cosmologies. Unlike McGann’s work, the present panel uses a variety of new media technologies and designs to think through the reader's position within the text rather than rendering an interpretation of the text from an “outside.” The reader/user is asked to stand within the text rather than using various applications and discourses to post or discuss texts. The panel will provide brief demonstrations of immersive digital texts accompanied by short papers and then roundtable discussion finally opening into a question and answer period. Panelists are from a variety of disciplines. Steve Guynup, a seven year veteran in web3D and internationally recognized digital artist, will present a web3D immersive illustration of Blake’s “Crystal Cabinet” as a model that allows readers to understand Blake’s sense of folds between worlds and Blakean embodiment. Marcel O’Gorman, head of Detroit Mercy University’s Electronic Criticism program, will present “The Fourfolds of William Blake and Martin Heidegger: Minds, Bodies, Technologies.” For O’Gorman the intersections between the four folds of both Blake and Heidegger serve as a path toward understanding how design and critique might intervene in the separation of body and mind wrought by technology. Nelson Hilton, a leading scholar in Blake criticism, head of the online text of Blake, and chair at University of Georgia, will present “Golgonooza Songs, or, Blake in a Flash.” Hilton will show and discuss how Flash can be used to visualize multiple versions of Blake’s poems, calling into question textual stability and unseating transparency of the text. Finally, Ron Broglio, associate editor of Romantic Circles online journal and noted for his experimentation in digitizing Romantic scholarship, will demonstrate and discuss the use of MOOs as graphically-oriented multi-user virtual environment that can incorporate Flash and Java applets to create experiential texts. Broglio has led a team of Georgia Tech design students in consultation with Blake scholars at other universities to create scenes of reading key moments of Blake’s illuminated texts. The mix of demonstration with discussion and the variety of new media applications employed to represent the text provide a disjunctive synthesis of archival procedures and gaming environments. While much of humanities scholarship has employed computing toward editorial and archival ends, it is the hope of this panel to open traditional humanities texts to other applications, discourses, and play available in new media.