Le Carrefour des SHN / DH-Hub

Applied Media Poetics in Digital Humanities

Chris Funkhouser, New Jersey Institute of Technology (USA)

Our ability to prepare sophisticated forms of expression with digital media increases our ability to engage with others in the networked world and participate more fully with mass culture. As mediated communications have expanded over recent decades, exploring expressive and documentary practices in the Humanities has become my primary activity as researcher. Presently, my work focuses on producing and designing sound in public settings, on the Web, and in physical space. This realm of digital materiality invites many useful types of sensory immersion, and engineering sound in a range of public settings, including capturing and presenting compelling living moments with audio technology, is a central aspect of my activity as a scholar and radio programmer. This research embraces contemporary media techniques to produce audio in narrative and participatory realms using basic hardware, synthesizing materials with network interface and coding techniques. Developing methods of presenting interactive and layered audio on the World Wide Web, those working in the Humanities are able to harness new types of engagement uniting sound, person, and place in order to enhance and refine our literary and intellectual climates. This presentation will introduce examples of these experiments with interactive sound technology.

Bio: Multimedia artist and writer Christopher Funkhouser is author of Prehistoric Digital Poetry: An Archeology of Forms, 1959-1995, New Directions in Digital Poetry, Whereis Mineral: Selected Adventures in MOO, the chapbooks pressAgain, Subsoil Lutes, Electro Þerdix, and LambdaMOO_Sessions. He was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Multimedia University (Malaysia) in 2006; in 2009, the Associated Press commissioned him to prepare digital poems for the occasion of Barack Obama’s inauguration. Funk’s SoundBox 2012, nominated for a 2013 Digital Humanities award, interactively unites more than 400 recordings he produced. Funkhouser is Professor and Director of the Communication and Media program at New Jersey Institute of Technology, a Contributing Editor at PennSound, and hosts POET RAY’D YO on WGXC in Hudson, New York.