Mobilizing Digital Rhetorics: Emerging Modalities of Location-Based Writing

Home , Infamous (series), Magic Leap, Portlandia (season 5), SixthSense

MOBILIZING DIGITAL RHETORICS: EMERGING MODALITIES OF LOCATION-BASED WRITING

JACOB GREENE

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2018

To Julie and Chester. You make me feel at home wherever we are.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many people have helped me in the writing of this dissertation. To everyone at

Clemson University who first introduced me to the field of rhetoric and composition, including

Cynthia Haynes, Scot Barnett, and Sean Morey, I am eternally grateful. I would also like to thank my committee members, Laurie Gries and Gregory Ulmer, whose commitment to excellence in their teaching and research continues to inspire. Lastly, many thanks to my dissertation chair Sid Dobrin for being a fantastic advisor and introducing me to augmented reality technology.

TABLE OF CONTENTS page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 7

ABSTRACT ...... 8

CHAPTER

1 TECHNOLOGIES, APPLICATIONS, AND RHETORICS OF MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY ...... 10

Introduction ...... 10 Technologies of Augmented Reality ...... 11 Applications of Augmented Reality ...... 19 Speculative ...... 20 Print ...... 29 Gaming ...... 33 Proxy ...... 36 Assistive ...... 38 Education ...... 41 Social Media ...... 43 Rhetorics of Augmented Reality ...... 45 Conclusion ...... 52 Notes ...... 53

2 (HYPER)LINKING THE LOCATIONS OF PUBLIC WRITING ...... 54

Introduction ...... 54 Articulation: From Cultural Studies to Rhetorical Theory ...... 57 Augmentation: From Improvement to Intervention ...... 64 Location: From Technological Effect to Design Strategy ...... 70 Conclusion ...... 76 Notes ...... 78

3 AMPLIFYING DIGITAL PUBLIC RHETORICS ...... 80

Introduction ...... 80 Situating Rhetorical Situations ...... 84 Emergent Rhetorics and the Public (Sp)heres of Discourse ...... 89 Rhetorical Invention as Amplification ...... 96 Beyond Exceptional Public Subjects ...... 100 Conclusion ...... 108 Notes ...... 109

4 COUNTERPUBLIC REMIXES WITH MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY ...... 110

Introduction ...... 110 Analyzing Counterpublic Remixes ...... 113 Public Images and Rhetorical Isotropy ...... 116 Producing Counterpublic Remixes ...... 120 Conclusion ...... 126 Notes ...... 127

5 HISTORICIZING SPACES WITH MOBILE MEDIA ...... 128

Introduction ...... 128 Writing Digital Mobile Histories ...... 130 Points of Interest ...... 133 Maccabees ...... 133 Fisher Music Center ...... 135 1943 and 1967 Riots ...... 136 Hart Plaza ...... 137 Assembly Line ...... 139 Merchant’s Row ...... 140 Conclusion ...... 141

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 142

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 154

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

5-1 Mobile device screenshot of augmented reality remix...... 121

Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

MOBILIZING DIGITAL RHETORICS: EMERGING MODALITIES OF LOCATION-BASED WRITING

Jacob Greene

May 2018

Chair: Sidney I. Dobrin Major: English

With over half of all Internet traffic now taking place through mobile devices, digital writers are presented with more opportunities than ever before to rewrite the rhetorical boundaries of physical locations. Mobile writing technologies—from smartphones to wearable augmented reality displays—amplify our capacity to affect (and to be affected by) the localized discourses circulating through specific geographic areas. Such technologies challenge the field of writing studies to reconceive of physical space itself as a site of digital rhetoric and public writing due to the way in which they re-distribute rhetorical agency out into the writer’s immediate physical surroundings. As such, it is misleading to describe the act of overlaying digital media into physical spaces as an “augmentation.” Indeed, the word “augment” literally means “to add” or “to increase,” and, when used in the context of augmented reality technology, implies an improvement to one’s experience of reality wrought by the addition of digital media.

To reduce the rhetorical potential of mobile media to a narrow framework of digital enhancement betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of its rhetorical affordances as a technology for (re)writing physical spaces. Thus, my dissertation works to reorient the conceptual framework through which writing studies scholarship theorizes and deploys mobile media as a location-based writing technology. Specifically, I call for a reconceptualization of

mobile technologies not as a technology through which users can simply “add” information to the world but rather a technology for “articulating” it.

This articulation-based approach to mobile media is outlined within the context of a multi-year case study of multimodal writing projects created for three contested locations across the United States: the SeaWorld-Orlando amusement park; Woodward Avenue in Detroit, MI; and downtown Jacksonville, FL. Respectively, these three projects demonstrate applications of mobile writing to counter, historicize, and amplify the rhetorics of contested locations.

Ultimately, I claim that by participating within and alongside the existing rhetorics of a location, digital writers will be more adequately equipped to employ mobile technologies as platforms for public writing and catalysts for social change.

CHAPTER 1 TECHNOLOGIES, APPLICATIONS, AND RHETORICS OF MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY

Introduction

As augmented reality continues to grow as an industry and mass medium, the kinds of texts that writers produce will be increasingly contingent upon environmental variables within their readers’ immediate surroundings. Whether through social media feeds attached to buildings and public monuments, historical reenactments that appear within their original geographic locations, or virtual clothing items overlaid onto customers’ bodies, “digital” writing will be (and in many ways already is) rhetorically bound to the physical locations through which it is created and accessed. However, the cultural uptake of augmented reality as a writing technology is dependent upon co-advancements within ubiquitous and mobile computing technologies.

Ubiquitous computing, a term first coined by Mark Weiser in the early 1990s, refers to the idea that as technology advances, computers will begin to disperse into the user’s environment, and our everyday interactions with computers will become more intuitive, natural, and fluid. In

Weiser’s utopian vision, computers will be able to respond algorithmically and in real time to environmental inputs.

This chapter presents an overview of emerging augmented reality technologies and applications, concluding with a brief discussion of their rhetorical impact on the future of writing. I claim that as augmented reality technologies proliferate, digital texts will continue to transform from static, linear documents into dynamic, adaptable “modules” capable of generating writing in real time according to rhetorical factors within their environment (e.g. audience concerns, location, time of day, etc.).

Technologies of Augmented Reality

Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell point out in Divining a Digital Future: Mess and

Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing that there are dangers to constantly conceptualizing ubiquitous computing as a “proximal future.” Constantly thinking of emerging technologies as

“just around the corner,” they argue, “renders contemporary practice...by definition irrelevant or at the least already outmoded” (22). A “proximate future” approach to ubiquitous computing, they claim, perpetuates a cultural mood of passivity toward emerging technologies and discourages critical approaches to present iterations. More importantly, however, and as Dourish and Bell elucidate throughout their book, ubiquitous computing should not be thought of as a

“proximal future” because it is already here; it’s just a lot messier than Mark Weiser’s original vision from the early 1990s. Through mobile computing technologies like tablets, smartphones, wi-fi hotspots, and 4G data networks, we are able to interact with digital media across a variety of locations and contexts.

The term “ubiquitous computing” (or “ubicomp”) finds its roots in Mark Weiser’s work as a researcher at Xerox PARC in the 1980s and 1990s. For Weiser, ubiquitous computing (or

“ubicomp”) refers to the process of “deeply embedding computation in the world” (quoted in

Hansen, 67). Whereas the logic of the PC (personal computer) relies upon the user’s conscious engagement with computational processes, ubicomp relies upon the user’s natural, embodied interactions with her environment. The philosophy driving ubicomp can be seen within an array of new and emerging technologies. Voice activated digital assistants like Google Home and

Amazon Echo are both instances of a ubicomp trajectory that work to disperse common computational activities like searching for directions or looking up a recipe into the user’s natural environment. Such technologies ascribe to the ubicomp ideal that computers should “vanish into

the background” so that the user can more intuitively interface with the physical world itself

(Weiser).

However, Mark Hansen claims that for ubicomp to actually “vanish into the background” then it must take an entirely different approach to how computers and humans interact at a perceptual level. For Hansen, ubicomp will only become reality if we can recognize that it is not an evolution of desktop computing but rather a completely new way of interfacing with computers through subconscious, neurological processes (70). Hansen points out that Weiser’s disdain for emerging technologies like mobile devices, natural user interfaces, and even virtual reality is due to the fact that they reinforce an “atomistic correlation of single user and single computer,” a trajectory “directly counter to the aim informing ubicomp: to enhance the user’s intercourse with the world that already exists” (68). Instead of configuring computers as things that we use, ubicomp configures computers as processes for maximizing our efficacy in the world.

The term “augmented reality” is often conflated with ubiquitous computing and, as a result, sometimes loses its specificity as the visual interface for this emerging media ecosystem.

Broadly speaking, “augmented reality” (AR) refers to a range of emerging technologies capable of “adding” some kind of digital information to our experiences of the physical world (Craig,

15). This definition encompasses everything from simple location-enabled weather apps to powerful optical head mounted displays like the Microsoft Hololens. Increasingly, however, the term “augmented reality” (or “mixed reality,” as it is sometimes called) has come to refer to mobile device applications that leverage the user’s visual perspective of physical space to display digital content such as videos, images, and/or 3D animations. Thus, unlike “virtual reality,” which immerses the user in an exclusively digital world, “augmented reality” integrates real and

virtual elements into the user’s experience of the world. Ronald Azuma’s influential definition of augmented reality from 1997 established AR as a primarily visual medium when he described it as any technology that “allows the user to see the real world, with virtual objects superimposed upon or composited with the real world” (2).

The first augmented reality (AR) device was created in 1968 by Ivan Sutherland. As the world’s first OHMD (optical head mounted display), it was a massive device: dangling from a series of wires, sensors, and processors attached to the ceiling, Sutherland’s machine (nicknamed the “Sword of Damocles” by his colleagues) displayed a simple wireframe cube superimposed onto the physical surroundings of his lab. Although a very simple application, Sutherland’s pioneering work inaugurated an entirely new field of computer science and computer graphics research into technologies capable of tracking, analyzing, and augmenting the physical world with virtual data.

Throughout the late twentieth century, the concept of “augmented reality” became intertwined with other technologies and concepts, such as wearable computing, virtual reality, locative media, and augmented memory. In 1980, Steve Mann created one of the first mobile AR devices, EyeTap, which required a large backpack to held the necessary computing and filming technology to operate the device (Buchanan). Mann was primarily interested in EyeTap as a form of augmented memory and wearable computing, not necessarily its ability to overlay visual data into the user’s field of view. As a result, Mann’s device focused on extracting data from his environment through audio-visual streams, and then recalling this data in relevant contexts.

EyeTap was never marketed to a mass audience and thus remained more of an interesting experiment than a viable AR device.

For the most part, “first-wave” AR applications of the 1990s and early 2000s were confined to computer science laboratories, advanced simulation/training systems, and/or manufacturing facilities1. These AR applications were focused primarily on technical precision of overlay content because most of the anticipated industry applications were within fields like medical training and mechanical engineering, which require extremely precise alignment of physical and digital content.

One of the first major developments to come from first wave-AR technologies was the integration of physical and digital content into television broadcasts. The first application of augmented television came in 1982 when Dan Reitan, a software engineer working for a weather station, overlaid digital weather patterns over a live camera feed. Later, in 1998, the National

Football League broadcast its first for game with the now-ubiquitous yellow first down line

(Trex). Reitan’s original innovation is now so commonplace that many people don’t even consider digital graphics overlaid onto live television footage as an instance of AR.

As mobile computing grew in prominence in the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries, some artists began to leverage the GPS-enabled capabilities of cell phones and PDAs, inaugurating a new genre of digital art known as “locative media.” Locative media projects incorporate specific geographical locations as non-trivial elements into the work’s discursive and/or narrative structure. Unlike AR, locative media do not necessarily provide an additional layer of visual data on top of physical objects, texts, or locations. Locative media allowed writers to draw upon the rhetoric of the user’s immediate surroundings in crafting their texts2.

Marc Tuters and Kazys Varnelis categorize locative media projects into two general categories: annotative and phenomenological. Annotative locative media projects allow users to virtually “tag” the physical world with digital texts (sound clips, videos, images, etc.). Many

annotative media projects, such as the influential Urban Tapestries, are similar to geocaching in that they allow users to create digital texts that are only accessible within specific geographic coordinates3. Whereas annotative location-based media projects “generally seek to change the world by adding data to it,” phenomenological location-based media projects work by “tracing the action of the subject in the world” (359). As Scot Barnett claims, phenomenological locative media projects demonstrate how “writing” about a space must take into account embodied, non- conscious experiences. In his webtext “Psychogeographies of Writing: Ma(r)king Space at the

Limits of Representation,” Barnett points to digital artist Christian Nold’s “Bio Mapping” project, which uses biological feedback technology to measure the galvanic skin responses of pedestrians as they traverse a city. As the sensors track minute changes in the electrical conductivity of the pedestrian’s skin, Nold’s software generates an affective map of the city showing points of high “emotional intensity,” such as busy intersections or crowded city centers.

Phenomenological locative media projects such as Nold’s demonstrate how emerging mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies can be leveraged to trace subconscious interactions between users and physical locations.

As GPS-enabled smartphones exploded in popularity throughout the early twenty first century, locative technologies became more commercialized through their implementation into a variety of mobile services, from reviewing sites like Foursquare and Yelp to “sharing economy” applications like Uber and Lyft. Around the same time, AR gradually became more of a mainstream phenomenon as mobile device hardware began to incorporate cameras and faster processors, which now made it possible to create additional visual layers on top of a user’s experience of a location. These converging technological factors led to a series of “second-wave” augmented reality applications, which were primarily different from first-wave AR applications

in that they were created more for mass consumption on standard mobile devices than niche technical usage on large OHMDs. As a result, a slew of mobile augmented reality SDKs

(Software Development Kits) began to surface around this time, such as Layar, Aurasma,

Blippar, Vuforia, and Wikitude, among many others.

In 2008, Wikitude released an AR travel guide application for Android devices that overlaid digital text onto iconic monuments and buildings around the world. The application worked by tracking user’s GPS data and displaying relevant information about nearby locations, such as the history of a church or the function of a prominent government building. Wikitude’s

AR travel guide extends the concept behind annotative locative media projects in that it provides information relevant to the user’s physical surroundings; however, the key difference with the

Wikitude platform, and the transition from first to second-wave AR, is the overlaying of this locational data onto the user’s view of physical space4.

Many of these early second wave-AR applications relied on GPS data to orient digital content in physical space. For GPS-based AR, digital overlays are coordinated to latitude and longitude coordinates and will only appear if the user’s device verifies that it is in (or nearby) this location. GPS-based AR draws upon many of the same technologies as locative media and is well suited for use in locations that lack stable visual markers, such as public parks or forests.

However, because it cannot visually isolate elements within the user’s physical surroundings,

GPS-based AR is not as effective at displaying accurate representations of digital content in physical space, and, as a result, is increasingly being discarded in favor of vision-based AR

SDKs.

Vision-based AR leverages the user’s mobile device camera to track unique visual features within the physical environment, and then uses these features to orient augmented reality

overlays such as 3D animated models. Vision-based augmented reality is similar to “Quick

Response (QR)” code technology. By attaching QR codes to objects, such as a poster for an event, users with a mobile device are able to access additional online information about that object. QR code technology is used within a variety of industries to provide instant access to digital information. Grocery stores, for example, commonly use QR codes to allow shoppers with mobile devices to scan a product and access coupons or daily recipes. However, QR codes are increasingly being replaced by “marker-less” augmented reality technologies, which utilize the existing visual features within the user’s environment as the trigger for digital content.

Marker-less augmented reality software makes it possible to transform any unique, stable image into an access point for digital content. These visual access points, often called “trigger images” or “target images,” can be anything from historical markers, paintings, book covers, or even building facades.

The primary advantage of vision-based mobile AR over GPS-based mobile AR is that it can more realistically align digital content within the physical world. Because visual features, such as images or building facades, are more precisely located within physical space than GPS coordinates, users can view AR content that appears as if it is actually in the world and not just

2D images plastered onto the back of a user’s device. For example, if a user scans a physical advertisement such as an action movie poster, they might be able to see an augmented battle between the hero and villain in the form of a digital, 3D animation. Because the application is using the visual features within the movie poster as a physical anchor point for the digital characters, the user can move around and the virtual characters will continue to occupy the same physical space. Vision-based AR is capable of rendering a far more realistic integration of digital

elements into the user’s physical space, and, as a result, is increasingly becoming the industry standard for mobile augmented reality software development5.

With the release of beta-versions of AR optical displays such as Google Glass and the

Microsoft Hololens, it appears that we are beginning to see third-wave AR technologies, which are characterized by more realistic digital content, task-specific applications, and higher levels of interactivity. Without a doubt, the icon of third-wave AR is Google Glass. Despite its discontinuation in early 2015, Glass became a kind of cultural shorthand for AR itself, representing an entire “trajectory of innovation” toward ubiquitous computing (Ulmer, 63). Of course, as anyone familiar with the history of Glass is well aware, this device did not exactly bring about the “augmented revolution of everyday life” depicted in its marketing materials.

When they weren’t being publicly accused of technological voyeurism, beta-testers of glass often complained of the device’s failure to utilize the medial affordances of AR; for all of its hype,

Glass was essentially a smartphone that you could wear on your face. Although it allowed users to record videos/photos and answer emails, phone calls, and text messages, it didn’t include any compelling interactions between digital content and physical space.

The most recent iteration of the AR optical display, Microsoft’s Hololens, seems to have fixed some of the errors that plagued Google’s release of Glass. For one, Microsoft focused its device applications on uniquely AR experiences rather than applications that merely free up the user’s hands. Indeed, recent upticks in Google Glass usage in industrial settings indicates that

Google is pivoting its Glass project toward more specific purposes in enterprise settings rather than a mass marketed mobile device6. Unlike Glass, Microsoft’s Hololens is not a fashion accessory; it's a tool designed for task-specific applications. Moreover, because it integrates the same technology used in the Kinect depth camera, the Hololens AR device can more accurately

orient digital content within physical space. As a result, the digital overlays in the Hololens and other depth-capable AR optical displays can create more compelling AR experiences by overlaying visual data that feels like it’s actually part of the user’s physical surroundings.

Since its release of Glass, Google has pursued a similar concept to depth-based AR tracking through its new AR device Project Tango. Project Tango is part of a larger goal within the field of computer science to perfect machine vision, which is essentially teaching a computer to see the world in the same way that humans see the world. Project Tango is a tablet computer with a specially designed AR camera capable of tracking the user’s physical surroundings. With advances in machine vision, humans and computers will be able to develop a shared visual orientation of a physical location.

The most impressive device in this emerging third-wave of AR development is the technology behind the mysterious Florida-based AR company Magic Leap. Rony Abovitz, the

CEO of Magic Leap, claims that his company has created an AR device that is able to interface directly with the visual processing centers of the brain, supposedly surpassing the difficulty of creating visually realistic digital content through an optical or mobile device interface (Kelly).

In many ways, third-wave AR devices and applications are inextricable from advances in ubiquitous computing, a movement that seeks to disperse computing into the user’s natural environment. In this scenario, an AR device, such as an optical display or electronic contact lens, is simply the interface for accessing computational data embedded within the world. Of course, advances in hologram technology could do away with the optical interface altogether and instead superimpose digital content directly onto the user’s surroundings.

Applications of Augmented Reality

Novel applications of AR continue to surface on a daily basis: museums are integrating

AR content into their educational and historical displays, companies are promoting AR apps

alongside their print catalogs, and engineering firms are creating AR applications showcasing their sustainability efforts. The subsections below reflect the cultural trajectory of AR technologies, beginning with its emergence as a concept within popular media and then moving into its application as a technology within a variety of industries and contexts. Although I will not be able to discuss every application of AR within each subsection, I provide a general overview of how AR is being used within each specific area along with some representative examples.

Speculative

In Frank L. Baum’s 1901 novel The Master Key, a young boy is granted three gifts from the “Demon of Electricity,” one of which is a pair of electrical glasses called a “character marker.” When the boy dons the glasses, he sees letters overlaid on top of people’s heads that provide a rough indicator of their character (e.g. “G” for good, “E” for evil, etc.). As one of the earliest representations of AR, Baum’s novel demonstrated one of the core affordances of optical

AR: its capacity to reveal hidden information about the physical world. Indeed, from early twentieth century American literature to high budget action films, popular culture offers a rich testing ground for exploring how AR might potentially affect the cultural, political, and environmental realities of future societies. I use the term “speculative AR” to refer to representations of 1) fictional AR technologies in popular media and 2) AR technologies in early stages of research and development.

Science fiction novels such as Vernor Vinge’s Rainbows End, Clyde Dsouza’s Memories with Maya, Tim Maughan’s Paintwork, and William Gibson’s Spook Country explore the social, cultural, and political effects of a hyper-augmented future. William Gibson’s Spook Country and

Vernor Vinge’s Rainbow’s End both depict futures in which AR and ubicomp technologies have completed saturated society. In both novels, computing is construed as an activity that one can

no longer choose to not engage with because it has become so integrated into almost every facet of everyday life. Although William Gibson is more commonly associated with virtual reality technologies (he coined the term “cyberspace” in his novel Neuromancer), his novel Spook

Country also contributed a vital concept to the cultural lexicon of AR and ubicomp: everting.

Instead of compartmentalizing computer-based activities into a single object (e.g. desktops/laptops), “everting” introduces the idea that computational logic will eventually be dispersed into the physical world. In this sense, interacting with computers is no longer something that a person can choose or not choose to engage with since computation is embedded into our everyday activities and interactions with the environment. Vinge’s novel Rainbow’s End takes a similar approach in representing AR as a technology that will eventually overtake and affect every aspect of society. The novel follows Robert Gu, a famous poet who wakes up from a coma to find himself in a technologically advanced future. In this future, almost every profession and industry has been affected by the massive advancement and proliferation of wearable computing technologies. As result, Gu, a former professor, is forced to enroll in an adult education program that focuses exclusively on teaching people how to use their wearable devices. Throughout the novel, Gu seeks escape from the plethora of augmentations circling around him at every moment, even going so far as to drive out to an empty tract of forest off the highway in an attempt to find “unimproved land” (59). The kind of writing produced in such an

AR-saturated future is increasingly discrete, automated, and contextual. When producing and interacting with text, the characters write across physical spaces, such as when Robert Gu writes a digital poem and overlays it above the school. The implication of Vinge and Gibson’s novels for writing studies is that advances in AR and ubicomp will create a context in which digital writing completely infiltrates and interacts with the user’s physical surroundings.

Tim Maughan’s tripartite science fiction novel Paintwork more explicitly engages with the subversive potential of AR as a mass medium. The novel opens with the protagonist, 3Cube, climbing to the top of a Coca-Cola billboard and replacing the QR code with his own. When anyone walks by the billboard, they will now see 3Cube’s counter-ad instead of Coca-Cola’s pre- approved augmentation. As I discuss in more detail in chapter two, these types of subversive applications of AR are widespread among digital artists and activists communities who are currently experimenting with ways that AR can be leveraged to “hack” trademarked logos, remix public images, and disseminate counter-arguments within visually hegemonic public spaces.

Maughan’s novel imagines a far more hackable, ad-hoc future for AR and ubicomp technologies than the corporately controlled dystopias depicted in young adult novels such as M.T.

Anderson’s Feed and in short films like Keiichi Matsuda’s HYPER-REALITY. Maughan’s novel serves as a reminder that new technologies are always hackable and capable of being repurposed for subversive ends.

One of the most visually engaging representations of AR comes from writer and illustrator Stu Campbell’s interactive webcomic NAWLZ. Campbell’s webcomic portrays a bio- integrated future for AR where the generation of digital overlays relies upon subtle neurological actions from the user. The webcomic follows Harley, an AR street artist who designs covert overlays throughout a gritty, industrial landscape. Harley’s ability to generate augmentations depends on a neural interface that requires immense amounts of brain processing power; he seems at times to will overlays into existence. More so than other sci-fi representations of AR,

NAWLZ depicts AR as a technology as a McLuhanesque “extension” of human consciousness.

It is a future in which our thoughts can be literally (super)imposed upon the world. The cognitively-willed augmentations of NAWLZ connect the advancement of AR technologies to

current developments in informatics that seek to create a more accurate brain-to-computer interface. NAWLZ seems to imagine an ultimate trajectory of AR in which not only computer technologies are “everted,” to use Gibson’s language, but even thoughts and emotions.

Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom imagines AR primarily as a mechanism for displaying one’s social status. Doctorow’s novel portrays a future full of immortal cyborgs where money has become irrelevant and one’s economic status is entirely determined by a social evaluation system known as “whuffie.” Characters’ whuffie counts fluctuate according to their social contributions to society. The AR component of the novel makes it such that characters are constantly aware of their own (and each other’s) whuffie, thereby imbuing everyday social interactions with high-stakes economic consequences.

Doctorow is not alone in representing AR’s potential future as a device for displaying social status. Short films such as Keiichi Matsuda’s HYPER-REALITY and Eran May-raz and

Daniel Lazo’s Sight portray AR as a technology for displaying one’s social and economic status in real time. Matsuda’s HYPER-REALITY connects the point-based social quantification AR found in Doctorow’s novel with a hyper-commodified gamification of everyday life. As the film’s protagonist moves through her day, we see that almost every activity (shopping, downloading apps, etc.) has been gamified, and the points from these activities are stored in a personal account that constantly pops up in her field of view. Throughout the film, the protagonist is constantly wary of would-be hackers stealing her identity points and forcing her to

“restart” her life.

HYPER-REALITY is the second film in a three-part video series that Matsuda is making about the potential impact of augmented reality. Each video is shot in first person perspective, and any knowledge gained about the characters is derived from their interactions with the virtual

overlays. Matsuda’s first film in the series, Augmented (hyper)reality: Domestic Robocop, is a short, 90-second vignette of someone making a pot of tea in a kitchen completely overlaid with advertisements, instructions, app icons, digital labels, and virtual data streams. When the main character first walks into the kitchen, they pull up their “advertising level,” revealing that the level of advertising exposure one is willing to tolerate in this future can be modulated according to one’s economic status. So far, both of Matsuda’s films have displayed a rather bleak future for augmented reality, one completely dominated by a corporatization of space and the quantification of everyday life.

Similarly, May-raz and Lazo’s short film Sight paints a rather bleak future for AR as a social technology. The eight-minute film follows a couple on their first date, both of whom are wearing bio-integrated AR contacts that they use to surreptitiously access websites, dating tips, and social media platforms. Throughout the date, the man uses an app called “Wingman” to give him real time dating advice by analyzing the woman’s biometrics (e.g. heart rate, smile, etc.).

The woman uses her contact lenses to watch cat videos and post negative status updates about the man. Once the woman realizes that the man has been using a dating assistant app, she attempts to leave but the man overrides her AR implant, forcing her to restart the date.

Representations of an emerging technology within mass culture can greatly affect how a society comes to perceive its potential value. For instance, one of the first films to present a stunning depiction of a NUI (Natural User Interface) was Steven Spielberg’s 2002 The Minority

Report. When The Minority Report was released, gestural interfaces such as Microsoft’s Kinect were only in very early stages of research and development; however, the visually impressive representation of the NUI within Spielberg’s film cemented itself into social consciousness as the inevitable technological trajectory of desktop computing7. Indeed, some of the most iconic

representations of AR come from action films like The Terminator (1984), Iron Man (2008), and

Avatar (2009). In these films, AR is typically configured as a simple heads up display and/or interface for specific technical tasks, such as when Tony Stark activates a hologram display when he is designing the Iron Man suit.

These examples of speculative AR within film and television can be further contrasted with representations of artificial intelligence. For instance, Spike Jonze 2013 film Her depicts a future society of artificially intelligent operating systems. In this future, users interface directly with computers through conversational voice commands. Instead of computers becoming simpler, modular, and more environmentally integrated and specific, computers continue to develop as singular, complex objects, or, in this case of AI, complex organisms. The future of ubicomp depicted in Her is still one of rich computational complexity; it’s just not the same kind of computational complexity depicted in visually saturated AR futures. Speculative representations of AR and AI each come with their own set of social, cultural, and ethical implications. In the case of AR, the primary concern is a continuing visual colonization of everyday life by corporate/governmental interests combined with a heavy dose of paranoia about the surveillance capabilities of optical AR technologies. In the case of AI, the primary issue seems to be how advanced AI systems expose the illusory border between “natural” and

“artificial” life.

Although these speculative representations of AR are certainly compelling, they are by no means inevitable. These representations are less interesting as predictions of the future than they are as speculations in the present. What we learn from speculative AR is that our ideas about this emerging technology are inextricable from issues tied to desktop computing--erosion of privacy, commodification of social interaction, cyber-crime, etc. Through these

representations we can see how we project our fears about current technologies into the future.

Because of this, we too often reduce the rhetorical potential of emerging writing technologies to mere amplifications or extensions of current writing technologies.

Fictional representations are not the only instance of speculative AR. Technology companies such as Magic Leap, Microsoft, and Google are constantly creating marketing and promotional materials that demonstrate the application of their research endeavors into AR.

These materials typically come in the form of a short videos that showcases the unique affordances of AR within a particular aspect of the user’s life and/or within an industry setting.

The marketing materials used to promote these videos are not always a depiction of the technology itself but rather high-quality computer-generated animations of what the technology looks like (or will look like). When augmented reality first began to creep into our cultural vocabulary around 20098, many technology companies took it upon themselves to create short promotional videos that not only demonstrated a particular application of their product but provided a brief overview of AR as a concept. In 2010, the technology company Hidden

Creative released a highly edited CGI video demonstrating potential applications of its computer vision and mobile augmented reality technology. In one example, the video demonstrates how

AR could be used by real estate agents to visualize various furniture setups for empty office spaces. The camera uses a first-person perspective to show virtual desks and chairs appearing within the physical space of the office. This video is less interested in demonstrating a particular

AR technology than it is in demonstrating AR as a concept. Nowhere in the video is the viewer presented with a prototype of the actual device and/or technology being promoted by Hidden

Creative. This was a probably a wise move by the startup company considering that the mobile

AR technology available in 2010 would have seemed visually underwhelming compared to the high-quality CGI depicted in the video.

Representations of first-person augmentation within speculative AR demonstrate how the ideal form of this emerging medium posits the environment itself as the interface for digital content, not an obtrusive physical interface like a smartphone, tablet, or optical display. Indeed, many promotional materials for new AR technologies around this time did not focus on specific mobile AR device interfaces but instead imagined AR as being integrated within the physical world alongside developing ubicomp technologies such as holography, NUIs, and touch-screens.

For instance, Corning’s popular video series “A Day Made of Glass,” configure the world itself as the interface for digital content9. As a company that designs and produces physical materials like glass and ceramic, it is unsurprising that Corning’s vision for an AR-integrated future is based more on turning everyday material surfaces (refrigerators, countertops, billboards, etc.) into computerized interfaces rather than placing a screen into the user’s field of view.

In 2012, Google Glass become a cultural icon for augmented reality as both a concept and technology when Google released a promotional video for their new AR device (“Project

Glass”). Using first-person perspective, the video begins with a man walking up to a subway platform where Glass notifies him that the service has been suspended for this line. The optical display then pulls up walking directions to his destination at a bookstore where he uses the device to navigate to the music section. The video ends with the man playing a song on a ukulele on a rooftop while he video chats with his girlfriend.

The main theme of the video is that Google Glass allows you to do everything you already do, only better. Throughout the video, the idea seems to be that Glass is not meant to bombard the user with digital information or even additional data streams about the user’s

surroundings. Rather, the idea is that Glass literally frees up the user’s time and attention by directing the gaze away from a screen-based interface and onto the “real” world. In this sense,

Glass partners with a broader trajectory of ubiquitous computing in which computation fades into the background of the user’s life, only making its presence known at key moments of decision (e.g. directions, purchasing a product, etc.).

The immense popularity of Google Glass as an icon for augmented reality resulted in a slew of parody videos mocking Google’s official promotional video. Overall, these parody videos depict the negative consequences of optical AR, from the commodification of personal/private space to social isolationism. Many of the parodies show comical (mis)uses for optical AR, such as men watching sports while out on a date. Other parody videos, however, depict how optical AR could be used by corporations to track users’ locations and spending habits in order to display targeted advertising in the user’s field of view10.

In 2015, Microsoft released a short promotional video for its Hololens device.

Throughout the video, users are seen interacting with the device through a variety of CGI- enhanced applications: an executive walks through an office while skyping with her boss through a virtual window, and a designer overlays digital colors and accessories on top of a physical motorcycle. The video is shot from a 3rd-person perspective, which makes it possible that viewers might mistake the device as a form of hologram projection technology rather than an AR optical display. Indeed, Microsoft’s appears to be leveraging this potential misinterpretation in naming their AR device “Hololens,” which builds off the cultural familiarity of “holograms” as opposed to the less familiar term “augmented reality.”

CGI representations have become less prevalent as AR technologies have improved, allowing marketing and advertising agencies to showcase the actual use of the technology rather

than a highly edited rendering. The distinction between actual and computer-generated AR content has become more important in recent years as AR technology startups compete for venture capital funding by showcasing the most “realistic” AR technology. Magic Leap, for instance, now includes the following disclaimer in all of its marketing materials: “Shot directly through Magic Leap technology on [date]. No special effects or compositing were used in the creation of these videos” (“Magic Leap”). Magic Leap’s disclaimer reveals a dialectical tension between speculative-fictional and speculative-emergent AR. Consumers are no longer impressed by visually realistic representations of AR applications through CGI; they want visually realistic demonstrations of AR technologies. By claiming that “no special effects” were used in their video, the company seeks to differentiate itself from its competitors and establish an ethos of cutting-edge innovation, one that aligns perfectly with their claims that their technology is both unbelievable (magic) and revolutionary (leap).

In Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse, Ben McCorkle argues that out of the five canons of rhetoric, delivery is the most important to the cultural uptake of emerging writing technologies (4). According to McCorkle, new writing technologies (such as AR) are first tested out within the delivery stage. For instance, when computers went mainstream in the late twentieth century, they were primarily used as a delivery platform for content that people had been creating for years without computers (e.g. longer passages of text, videos, images, etc.); however, as computers continued to develop and advance, it soon became clear that the unique rhetorical affordances offered by digital and networked writing were beginning to affect the other canons11. The effect of computers on style and invention in particular can be seen in the development of entirely new genres of writing such as image macros, tweets, and vines, which

more explicitly engage with the rhetorical affordances of networked and mobile writing technologies.

Print media was one of the first areas to explore the integration of AR content for mass consumption. Although it might seem strange that a cutting-edge technology like AR would find some of its first applications in a writing (and reading) technology that’s over 500 years old, it's not so surprising when you consider that print was the first truly “mobile” writing technology.

Prior to the invention of the printing press in the 15th century, writing and reading took place within a public apparatus that was typically isolated to a particular location and context (e.g. books in libraries, public signage, etc.). However, with the invention of moveable typeface writing became circulable.

The centuries-old delivery framework offered by print media functioned as a kind of testing ground for early AR applications. McCorkle writes that emerging technologies become integrated into society not by replacing pre-existing technologies but by “adapting [their] features and characteristics” (27). Because AR is not yet established as a mass medium, it had to first leverage existing delivery networks in order to experience any kind of cultural uptake. AR’s reliance on print media is apparent in the massive popularity of vision-based AR platforms, which allows it to operate through an existing media ecology of mobile devices, cloud-based computing services, and widely available physical images.

AR has been used in a variety of print-based media, from children’s books to multimodal-interactive narrative to pizza boxes12. Print-based AR started emerging around 2009, with one of the first popular applications being an AR-enhanced issue of Esquire magazine featuring Robert Downey Jr. Unlike more recent instances of print AR, which use mobile devices, Esquire’s special AR issue relied on a desktop software application that overlaid digital

content by accessing the user’s webcam. For one of the earliest examples of print AR, the overlays were fairly impressive, and the multimedia experience demonstrated how AR could be applied to print forms to create more interactive and engaging content. However, the webcam setup made it difficult to engage with the print and AR content simultaneously. Moreover, because it relied on vision-based AR technology, any disturbances to the physical magazine would result in tracking issues, forcing the entire augmentation to restart.

Early print-based AR applications, including the Esquire AR issue, were created with the

Netpage SDK. The Netpage mobile app worked by creating what was essentially a digital copy of each print page and then overlaying this digital version whenever a reader scanned a page.

This was an interesting approach to print-based AR from a visual standpoint because it essentially converted all of the static texts and images in a magazine into the kind of hyperlinked content that readers were coming to expect from online texts. Netpage was not so much delivering AR content as it was utilizing vision-based AR technologies to deliver a reading experience similar to the kind found in a desktop internet browser13. Although Netpage was a fascinating example of how emerging technologies can be adapted to preexisting media, it ultimately retained too much of a fidelity to the formal characteristics of print media and thereby failed to exploit the unique affordances of AR. Netpage was largely forgotten after the emergence of tablets, which provided even greater levels of digital interactivity and more thoroughly exploited the potential of digital magazines by not having to rely on their print-based predecessors.

However, other applications of AR to print media were able to create more compelling reading experiences by leveraging AR to create entirely new genres of interactive text. Building off the massive financial success of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Sony created an

interactive AR “Book of Spells” for the release of the Playstation 3. Although children’s literature in general is well suited for interactive, tactile narratives, the Harry Potter series is particularly adaptable to an AR experience considering that the world that Harry inhabits is constantly imbuing (i.e. “augmenting”) everyday objects with magical characteristics. The physical copy of the book looks like nothing more than a series of large QR codes. To actually

“read” the book, users place it in front of the PS3 webcam, which then recognizes the QR triggers on each page and displays the relevant content. The webcam also replaces the PS3 Move controller in the player’s hand with a digital wand. While the PS3 webcam relies on vision-based

AR to display digital overlays, the Move controller uses motion-capture sensors to track the movement of the player’s wand. The movement through the text is full of dynamic, interactive content, including a lesson on a fire-making spell that requires the reader to extinguish flames that threaten to engulf the book. “Wonderbook: Book of Spells” demonstrates how print AR can draw upon other new technologies like motion capture to create even more compelling AR experiences.

Other print-based applications of AR demonstrate how AR can be leveraged to display updated and/or user-generated content on top of a static page. Created by Skip Brittenham and

Brian Haberlin, Anomaly was one of the first graphic novels to integrate AR. In an interview with Nerdist, the creators note that the introduction of marker-less AR, which doesn’t require visually obtrusive QR codes, convinced them to implement some AR functionality into the book.

In particular, they note that the AR component was fascinating in that it allowed them to update digital components of the book even after it had been published, allowing them to create alternate story lines or add more characters.

Emerging print-based AR technologies envision even higher levels of interactivity and integration of physical and digital content. The design studio Convivial created an augmented book prototype that uses hologram projection and motion capture technology to display digital content directly onto the physical pages of a book without requiring the reader to look through a screen-based display. When opened, the pages of the book display 3D renderings that model various design aesthetics. As one reporter described the technology after Convivial posted a video of their AR book, the experience seems to be a little bit closer to “how augmented reality is imagined to be: right there and visible to the naked eye” (Lutero).

The trajectory of print-based AR--from the clunky setup of the desktop webcam to the fluid interactivity of projection holograms--reveals a fundamental drive within AR application development to erase the material interfaces (e.g. smartphones, tablets, optical displays, etc.) currently required to display digital content in registration with the physical world. Indeed, this trajectory demonstrates how AR aligns with Bolter and Grusin’s theory of a “transparent interface,” or media that allow users to “[stand] in an immediate relationship to the contents of that medium” (24). If anything, these engaging, innovative examples of print based AR reveal that the book is still a viable mass medium in a twenty first century media ecology. As more print based AR experiences emerge over the coming years, it will be clear that media do not simply appear out of nowhere and replace older media but rather enter into a dynamic, reciprocal relationship that exposes the rhetorical constraints and affordances of each.

Gaming

When Nintendo released their long-awaited location-based mobile app Pokémon Go in the summer of 2016, the term “augmented reality” catapulted into popular discourse. At street corners, parks, and cafes all across the world, game-players could be seen tracking down and capturing digital monsters through their mobile device cameras. Of course, location-based

mobile games such as Zombie, Run! and The Walk had been around prior to the release of

Pokémon Go, but with over ten million downloads in its first week of release, no other location- based augmented reality app had ever achieved such rapid and widespread popularity. In what quickly became a worldwide phenomenon in the coming weeks and months, Pokémon Go cemented itself as a major milestone in the cultural and technological development of AR as a mass medium. However, the simple 2-D graphics and GPS-based AR functionality of the game have led some to declare that Pokémon Go should not even be considered AR (Dhillon). There is some merit to these claims. For starters, Pokémon Go’s AR functionality is not only a nonessential component of the game play, but many game strategy websites suggest turning it off in order to make catching Pokémon easier and to avoid the battery drain of activating your device camera (Polygon). Nonetheless, Pokémon Go created an important cultural context for how AR and location-based digital technologies could revolutionize the way we interact with digital content in physical space.

Gaming and entertainment applications that leverage some kind of AR functionality only started becoming popular within the last few years. Most of these games, however, only leverage

AR to display digital game elements (characters, objects, etc.) within the real world, and these game elements do not interact in any meaningful way with the unique spatial or environmental characteristics of the player’s physical surroundings. One of the first AR games was Novarama’s

2009 portable game invizimals. Created for Playstation Portable, invizimals uses vision-based

AR technology to allow players to “trap” invisible creatures on top of colorful fiduciary markers that come with the game. Just a year later, Nintendo released an AR-enabled version of their handheld gaming system, the 3DS. The Nintendo 3DS allowed players to overlay game characters onto the real world through a camera installed on the reverse side of the game screen.

However, only a handful of games leveraged the AR functionality of the 3DS, including an early-version Pokémon AR game called Pokémon Dream Radar. In 2013, Sony released an entire suite of free AR games called The Playroom in their 2013 release of the Playstation 4. The

Playroom allows players to interact with game characters and objects as if they are present in physical space. For the most part, the games in The Playroom were primarily designed to showcase the new functionality of the Playstation 4’s camera and motion-controller accessories.

Most “AR” games made for smartphones do not typically engage with the unique aspects of the user’s physical surroundings. Mobile apps such as InnAR Wars, ARSoccer, AR Invaders, and Firepower merely leverage the user’s physical surroundings as a backdrop for digital content rather than a real time, dynamic environment with which the player and/or the game elements can interact. Consequently, the AR content in such games looks more like something attached to the back of the player’s device than actual component of the physical world.

With advances in machine vision that allow for more accurate tracking of players’ unique surroundings, mobile AR games are likely to grow in popularity. For instance, Google’s Garden application uses the Project Tango tablet to place players into a virtual landscape that mirrors their physical surroundings. When viewed through the Tango tablet, the player’s living room is transformed into a digital forest with flowers and trees growing out of the objects (couches, chairs, etc.) in the surrounding area. Because Tango can reconstruct the player’s physical surroundings in real time, game developers are able to leverage the unique aspects of player’s environments within their game design. In their description of the application, the developers refer to Garden as a form of “mixed reality,” most likely in an attempt to distance themselves from AR games that only superficially leverage the player’s physical surroundings.

Proxy

There is an emerging genre of AR applications that configure digital content as a placeholder, or proxy, for physical objects. Used primarily within commercial industries that sell physical products, proxy AR applications place realistic digital versions of objects within physical space. Whereas media such as print and television allow consumers to imagine their interaction with products not physically present, AR makes it possible for consumers to simulate this interaction. Companies such as IKEA, Vespa, and Lowe’s are some of the first to leverage

AR technology in this way. IKEA’s AR-enhanced catalogue uses vision-based AR technology to allow customers to view digital couches, lamps, and chairs within the physical space of their homes.

In Understanding Augmented Reality, Alan B. Craig distinguishes proxy AR, or what he calls “realistic representations,” from “abstract representations” (157). While realistic AR content is designed to simulate, or stand in for, physical objects and/or processes, abstract AR content is designed to convey an idea or an emotion. However, I prefer the term proxy AR because it emphasizes the ephemeral, replaceable nature of the digital content. Proxy AR is not designed to be experienced for itself but rather as a virtual indicator of the physical shape, size, color, and/or functionality of the material object it represents.

Because it represents physical objects, proxy AR content requires technologies that can more accurately map physical space and orient digital content within it. Thus, it is no surprise that proxy AR applications are beginning to explode in popularity alongside the emergence of more accurate third-wave AR devices such as the Hololens and Project Tango. Lowe’s is one of the first companies to utilize Tango to create an accurate map of a customer’s home, which it then uses to orient extremely accurate renderings of Lowe’s products such as barstools and kitchen tables.

During its release of the Kinect for Windows NUI, Microsoft created a series of “retail scenario” videos” that demonstrate potential applications of proxy AR to in-store shopping experiences. In one of the videos, Microsoft demonstrates how the Kinect can be used to overlay digital versions of clothing items available in the physical store. Proxy AR is well suited for retail scenarios. By allowing customers to interact with and customize a store’s entire database of products, such applications seem poised to revolutionize in-store shopping experiences.

Proxy AR is also used frequently in print catalogues to showcase 3-D renderings of featured products. Companies such as Siemens, Northern Lighting, and Seft have created AR catalogues to allow customers to view digital models of products on top of the brochure or magazine. However, print-based proxy AR seems more like a transitional genre considering that more accurate tracking technologies like Microsoft’s Hololens and Google’s Project Tango will make scanning physical pages obsolete and home shoppers will be able to view digital versions of products as they would actually exist within the physical space of their homes.

Proxy AR extends beyond retail settings, however, and is currently being used in fields such as architecture, design, construction, engineering, medicine, and manufacturing. The mobile software company Augment has been teaming up with architectural firms over the last few years to allow architects to create more compelling presentations of their building concepts. In a partnership with UK-based architecture firm LSI, Augment created an AR application that overlays 3D renderings of building designs on top of 2D blueprints (“Better present & sell”). LSI used this app to showcase their award-winning designs to potential clients. The example of LSI demonstrates the rhetorical potential of proxy AR and how it can revolutionize the standard genres of technical communication such as proposals and feasibility reports.

We should also consider how projects such as the NAI’s (Netherland Architecture

Institute) AR building application revolutionize the presentation of public building projects

(Archer). The NAI application “sara” uses Layar’s GPS-based SDK to overlay 3-D models of in- progress buildings within a physical construction site. Such technologies expand a proposal writer’s ability to persuade a public about the merits of potential projects by creating accurate renderings of how a new park, art gallery, or library could reshape the spatial dynamics of a city.

As the virtual equivalent to real world objects, proxy AR promises to be one of the most compelling applications of AR technology to a variety of industries. Proxy AR aligns with a trajectory of AR technology that privileges highly realistic digital content capable of integrating seamlessly into the user’s physical world.

Assistive

In Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Adam Greenfield points out that computers will increasingly operate only according to parameters that are “appropriate to our location and context” (1). Assistive AR applications engage most explicitly with this particular aspect of ubiquitous computing by enhancing users’ ability access information about their physical surroundings and/or complete a specific task. Although other areas of AR covered in this section also provide some kind of “assistance” (such as proxy AR), assistive AR applications typically seek to downplay the presence of visual overlays in order to place more emphasis on the activity and/or environment with which the user is physically engaged.

Assistive AR generates digital content by 1) overlaying relevant information into the user’s view of the physical world and/or 2) translating relevant data about the user’s environment into real-time visual displays. Assistive AR applications are highly valued in fields where people have to quickly evaluate and make decisions about their physical surroundings. For example, engineers in Switzerland have created prototype AR helmets outfitted with an AR optical display

that allow firefighters to view digital representations of surface temperatures so they can know to avoid certain areas of a burning building.

Assistive AR applications align more with a trajectory of AR as a prosthesis for human ability and intelligence in that they are designed to help the user achieve a particular goal within her environment. As a result, the digital content of assistive AR applications is typically more visually subdued than in other application types, such as proxy or gaming AR. Digital overlays are not intended to represent non-present physical objects but rather to extract and display information about nearby physical locations, people, and objects. In this way, assistive AR is less about visual augmentation than it is about cognitive augmentation.

Ultimately, the logic of assistive AR might eventually evolve into an entirely non-visual form of augmentation. Because assistive AR is primarily about relaying information to the user, there is no reason that this information cannot be presented through visual, auditory, or even cognitive channels. Indeed, M.T. Anderson’s critically acclaimed young adult novel Feed depicts a future in which everyone in the world is outfitted with an assistive AR device that interfaces directly with the user’s brain. Although Anderson’s depiction of the effects of such a device are extremely deterministic (if not technophobic), he nonetheless demonstrates a potential trajectory for assistive AR’s integration into wearable accessories and, ultimately, biological processes.

One of the most popular applications of assistive AR that came as a result of advancements in machine vision technologies is the use of AR to create instructional guides for complex technical processes, such as building an aircraft or performing surgery. Some of the earliest AR applications were assistive AR applications, such as the OHMD used by Boeing in the early 1990s and the AR optical prototype created by students at Columbia University in 1993 that walked the user through the process of repairing a printer (Azuma, 5). Fast forward to 2016

and the AR industry is still focused on designing compelling and useful assistive AR applications: Ford’s augmented reality app overlays visual aids on top of a car engine to demonstrate simple maintenance procedures such as checking oil or refilling washer fluid

(Liszewski).

Assistive AR applications have been particularly useful in medical contexts. Unlike virtual reality medical applications, which are typically used for training purposes, medical AR applications are capable of providing doctors with real-time navigation assistance during actual procedures. The Scopis Surgical Navigation system provides urological and cardiological surgeons with a digital overlay that helps them guide instruments through tight bodily cavities

(“Scopis Augmented Reality”). More recently, Leica Microsystems partnered with doctors at

Mount Sinai Health System to perform augmented brain surgery on a patient with an aneurysm

(Mathies).

The most compelling use of AR within building construction and maintenance are applications that reveal hidden components of a building for educational and/or maintenance purposes. The Fraunhofer Center for Sustainable Energy Systems created an AR application for one of their buildings that, when held up to various walls, exposes the materials and processes that make it environmentally sustainable (“Augmented Reality for Building Technology”). The application also allows users to view relevant data points about different rooms, such as how much energy is currently being consumed. Similar applications for building maintenance have been created by companies like ARMedia and Augmented XP. The Augmented XP building maintenance application even includes a GUI (Gestural User Interface) that allows users to select specific repair tutorials within different parts of their homes (“JoinPad Augmented - XP”).

More than perhaps any other type of AR application, assistive applications demonstrate the wide applicability of AR. Unlike the general-purpose marketing of optical displays like

Google Glass, assistive AR devices, such as surgical or manufacturing-based OHMDs, are typically task specific. The device itself as well as the digital content are designed to be used within specific scenarios, thus allowing for more focused and specialized attention to the creation of AR applications. Because there is not yet adequate AR contact lens technology, task-specific assistive AR applications are likely to shape the design of the optical display itself such that users will need to purchase different AR enabled optical displays for different purposes, such as ski goggles, underwater goggles, sunglasses, and regular glasses. Such limitations are likely to discourage widespread adoption of AR optics as an “always on” display similar to Google Glass.

However, with something like AR contact lenses or neuro-integrated AR displays, users will likely be able to download different AR applications according to their needs similar to the way that we now download mobile device apps for specific functions.

Education

Educational AR is similar to assistive AR in that it provides information about the user’s physical surroundings; however, educational AR applications do not necessarily help the user complete a specific task or provide real-time data streams. Although educational uses of AR sometimes take place within actual classroom contexts, I also use this term to encompass uses of

AR within museums and historical tours.

Educational AR applications are frequently tied to location-based historical experiences, such as the Museum of London’s Streetmuseum AR application. With the Streetmuseum app, users can visit historic locations around London and view archival photographs of how these locations looked at various times throughout history. Many location-based historical AR experiences function in a similar way by offering users the ability to “travel back in time.” The

historical Gettysburg site, for instance, has an AR tour of its battlefield where visitors can view historical reenactments of key battles and speeches in the exact locations where they originally occurred (“InSite Gettysburg”). Union Station in Kansas City, Missouri also created an AR tour of its main hallway, overlaying footage of historical actors so that they appear as though they are in the physical space of the building (“Living History”). Using AR technology to experience distant historical time periods obviously captivates scholars in disciplines such as history and archaeology, some of whom are even experimenting with AR as a research and education tool.

Archaeologist Stuart Eve, for instance, is developing an AR app called Dead Men’s Eyes that allows users to view, hear, and even smell the history embedded in ancient ruins and artifacts

(Engelking).

Educational experiences that are not location-based, such as museum displays, are also becoming more common and typically provide higher levels of interactivity within the AR content than location-based historical experiences. This is partially due to the fact that museums are able to use their own technologies, which are more technically advanced than visitor’s smartphones. For example, the Middleport Pottery Museum in London created an interactive AR tour using Google Glass. When users don the optical display and start the tour, they can see detailed digital labels and links to multimedia content hovering over different artifacts.

As AR and mobile device technologies have become cheaper and more accessible over the last few years, teachers across a wide variety of grade levels have started experimenting with how AR technologies could be incorporated into class activities and assignments. Elementary schools are using simple, vision-based AR platforms like Aurasma to create augmented reality displays of student work. At Cedar Grove Elementary School in Kentucky, for instance, music teachers have helped students create AR enhanced photographs to put on display throughout the

halls. When scanned with Aurasma, the picture plays a short video of each student’s performance

(Roscorla).

As I discuss in more detail in chapter five, AR holds great potential as a pedagogical tool.

History teachers can use AR to bring historical materials to life and science teachers can use AR to display complex, visual aids on top of textbooks. However, in addition to educational applications that create content that is accessible through AR, it is also vital that teachers provide students with opportunities to engage in the process of creating AR content. As this medium becomes more advanced and ubiquitous, it is important that students become critically engaged with AR and the rhetorical affordances it offers us as digital writers.

Social Media

With exception of Snapchat’s AR feature, the use of AR as a social medium has not really caught on yet. Although AR applications like WallaMe and Taggar are designed for social interaction, they are nowhere near as popular as Facebook or Twitter. Indeed, AR is not likely to catch on as a social medium until these existing social networking platforms build out their own

AR frameworks. Recent high-level investments into AR technology by Google, Facebook, and

Alibaba indicate that technology companies are currently in a technological arms race to become the most widely adopted AR social network (Lunden).

Snapchat is one of the first social media platform to integrate AR functionality as a core component of its user interface. Using facial recognition technology, Snapchat’s AR feature

“Lenses” lets users attach virtual stickers, text, and animations to people’s faces. Snapchat’s release of Spectacles, a pair of sunglasses capable of recording in short bursts, might just be the company’s starting point for an entire array of AR wearables to come. Although Spectacles are only capable of recording, it seems likely that the success of the AR “Lenses” feature will soon be integrated into their sunglasses.

The key to social augmented reality is that it will need to leverage not only the successful qualities of existing social media platforms (high levels of user engagement, multimodal interactions, etc.) but also the unique affordances of AR. Specifically, social AR platforms need to find ways to allow users to engage in meaningful interactions between physical and digital content. Although attaching a video to a particular physical object or location is certainly one form of interaction, it doesn’t really tap into the advanced vision of AR perpetuated by representations in sci-fi literature and action films. As AR becomes more ubiquitous and widely understood as a concept, people will increasingly expect AR to live up to its speculative reputation.

For example, what if instead of simply attaching a video or text to a location, an AR social media application could extract the people from the video footage and overlay them in accurate registration within that space? This way, if you take a video of your friend doing a backflip outside of the school library, you could attach this footage to that exact location so that someone accessing the augmentation at a later date could go to the library and see your friend doing the backflip as if she were actually there. In order for this content to appear accurately in the world, however, it would require major advances in machine vision and 3D capture technologies. Similar to current social media platforms, users would be able to like and share different augmentations, which could then push updates to people’s devices whenever they were within range of a trending augmentation and/or one created by a friend.

The applications presented in this section correspond to a visual realism that projects information onto the physical world so that it can be made predictable and subdued to human agency. These applications of AR technology are certainly useful and have done much in bringing awareness and support for AR development to a variety of industry settings. However,

such applications in no way exhaust the critical potential of this emerging medium as a technology for writing. In my final section, I argue that as we continue to transition from desktop to ubicomp, we should think of writing less as the production of documents and more as the creation of modular, context-aware experiences. As we move from static documents to textual modules capable of sensing and responding to environmental inputs in real time, writing will continue to adapt (i.e. “modulate”) to more and more precise factors within a given rhetorical situation. However, just as much as “modularity” implies a flexibility to systemic variables within readers’ and writers’ immediate surroundings, it also implies dispersal of writerly agency across human and nonhuman actors within the environment, thus opening up the possibility for not only adaptability and change but also disruption and systemic failure.

Rhetorics of Augmented Reality

This section turns to “modularity” as a concept for understanding the effects of mobile augmented reality technologies on the production and consumption of writing. As writing is dispersed out into the environment and interacts with more precise factors within a given rhetorical situation, it becomes more modular, or “flexible,” as it shifts alongside the variables within a user’s immediate physical surroundings. This increasing modularization of writing not only leads to texts that are “flexible” and capable of adapting to the contingencies of a location, it also creates texts that are “plastic” and potentially disruptive to it.

From manufacturing to minimalist art, the concept of modularity informs a number of industries and disciplines. In simplest terms, modules are often defined as the building blocks of more complex structures and/or processes. Modules are specific yet exchangeable; they perform specific functions yet maintain a flexibility that allows them to remain open to reconfiguration for other functions. Due to its systemic flexibility, the module is the capitalist object par excellence. It is the widget, the cog, the “spacely sprocket” that drives the invisible forces of

capitalism, adapting (i.e. “modulating”) alongside the supplies and demands of market-based economies. In a society where survival is contingent upon the ability to react and adapt quickly, the “flexibility” of the module (human and nonhuman) is an economic and political necessity.

However, as Catherine Malabou points out in What Should We Do with Our Brains?, to be “flexible” also means to be “plastic,” or “capable of causing violent explosions” (5). For

Malabou, the neoliberal rhetoric of maintaining “flexibility” in relation to the shifting economic desires of the market disguises the degree to which “flexibility” also implies “plasticity” and thus perpetuates the very outcome it works against: systemic failure. Something “plastic” has the

“capacity to receive form” as well as the “capacity to give form” (Malibou, 5). Sidney I. Dobrin points to a similar tension in the fluid-like nature of writing, or its tendency to “saturate” and supersede the very logics and processes it works to establish:

[i]t is by way of saturation that writing fluctuates, moving through the very networks that emerge from within writing, adjusting to and contributing to changes in networks, filling in new spaces, perpetually permeating all of a network while simultaneously eroding away the very edges of its boundaries, seeking to expand its space while providing new spaces in and through which networks may move (183).

Writing that is modular, flexible, and adaptable to systemic, environmental forces is simultaneously disruptive, resistant, and potentially destructive to the system itself. Similar to how a viscid fluid retains traces of its material surroundings, writing retains a “memory/residue of its previous interactions with the same or other networks” (Dobrin, 185). Writing with AR seeks to account for the “residue” of a text’s immediate surroundings, modulating and adapting its rhetorical characteristics in response to various environmental inputs, such as audience, weather, nearby buildings, and time of day. The most compelling AR experiences, such as assistive, spatially aware AR applications, do not overlay static content but rather respond dynamically to the user’s surroundings. To leverage the rhetorical potential of AR, we need to stop thinking of it as a technology that merely allows us to circulate static texts. Rather, we need

to use it to exploit writing’s “potential for fluctuation” alongside the physical location in which it accessed and created (Dobrin, 157). Writing with AR technologies is less about creating documents and more about designing context-aware, modular experiences capable of interacting with the material contingencies of specific environments and situations.

Documents are written and then they circulate; modules remain unwritten until they circulate. Documents create meaning out of interactions with diverse audiences and environments; modules produce meaning out of interactions with specific audiences and environments. Documents circulate across disparate locations and situations; modules are directed at specific locations and situations.

In his contribution to Stuart A. Selber’s Rhetoric and Technologies: New Directions in

Writing and Communication, Geoffrey Sirc intervenes into what he sees as composition studies’ overemphasis on the production of “thesis-driven” documents. For Sirc, such pedagogies perpetuate a narrow view of writing, one in which smaller elements (or modules) are ignored unless they “inflect together...to cohere into an autonomous work” (60). Sirc advocates for a new approach to composition pedagogy he terms “serial composition.” Turning to the work of minimalist sculptors like Robert Morris, Sirc describes how these artists demonstrated seriality within their work by placing an emphasis on material repetition, simple geometric patterns, and unembellished objects. In doing so, they sought to reject the representationalism and adherence to “overarching compositional wholes” found in much traditional artistic practice. In Sirc’s view, composition studies should take note of how these artists viewed seriality as not just a stepping stone to a more complex work, but as an end in itself. Approaching writing pedagogy, and writing more generally, as the production of serialized rather than homogenous texts encourages writers to focus more explicitly on how “juxtaposition creates its own dense meaning” (66).

Moreover, in light of the rapid acceleration of digital writing technologies and short-form genres that it produced (blogs, status updates, etc.), Sirc points out that seriality will no doubt continue to instantiate itself as an essential “compositional strategy” of digital writing (65).

Concepts of modularity are integral to our theories and pedagogies of writing. In fact, modularity guides most process-based composition pedagogies, which move from simpler elements (i.e. modules) such as introductions, conclusions, thesis statements, and transitions to more complex, cohesive documents like essays and research papers. Although modularity greatly informs the theories and pedagogies of writing studies, the production of modules is, as Sirc points out, typically in service to the production of some kind of stable document (essays, research papers, blog posts, etc.). This is not to say that the production of documents is bad or unnecessary, but if document production continues to be emphasized in an era of ubiquitous computing we are greatly limiting the range of rhetorical experiences offered by context-aware writing technologies like AR.

In AR experiences, the formal cohesion normally carried out by the document is distributed across an array of rhetorical actants: readers, writers, objects, locations, etc. As assistive AR applications demonstrate, the textual information contained within a module is minimal, appearing kairotically to improve the user’s interactions with her surroundings at specific, opportune moments. Thus, writing becomes kairotic in the sense that Thomas Rickert describes kairos as important to invention. For Rickert, it is important that writers consider kairos not just in the Kinneavian sense as an “opportune moment” to write/act (i.e. the domain of delivery) but also as “an emergent process extending far beyond the bounds of an autonomous, willing subject” (“Invention in the Wild,” 72). Paying attention to the rhetorical affordances and constraints of one’s environment is a vital component of kairos, which, for Rickert, is less

something that “we avail ourselves of” than it is a distributed network through which “words and actions emerge” (81). Writing through AR means that writers will come to see themselves less as authors and more as co-creators, producing writing alongside the variables within their audience’s material surroundings.

With more and more information about the physical context in which readers will access a text, writers will be able to craft more precise arguments that leverage this information for greater rhetorical efficacy. Instead of crafting a document that is capable of addressing a diverse array of audiences, environments, and situations, writers must develop methods for designing modules capable of responding to the contingencies of different audiences, environments, and situations. Modular texts are automated and data-driven, which will most likely encourage writers to increasingly rely upon automated writing programs and interfaces for producing documents. This might require writing variables into a text similar to the way we write variables into a piece of software, embedding “if-then” logics into texts so that they can become context- aware and modulate according to the unique environmental factors within the reader’s environment.

Indeed, professional writers are already beginning to create texts in a more modular, templated manner: the Associated Press has started using automatic writing software that now generates over 10,000 articles a year, and the media company StatSheet has been using software since 2010 that automates the process of writing statistics-driven articles for different sports teams (Miller; Stross). Automated writing technologies are often evaluated according to an AI model of computing rather than the more distributed, modular framework of ubicomp. As a result, we have developed an antagonistic relationship between humans and automated writing

applications fraught with an underlying sense of anthropocentric nostalgia that “robot writers” will take away one of the few remaining activities at which we excel.

A 2015 story on NPR’s “Planet Money” podcast exemplifies this antagonistic cultural attitude that many people have towards the automation of writing (Smith). The short episode pits a human reporter, Scott Horsley, against Wordsmith, a popular auto-writing software from

Automated Insights. Wordsmith works in a modular fashion by drawing from a database of stock phrases which it then fills in with variables such as recent statistics, company names, and dates.

Horsley and the software race to see who can write the best article in the shortest amount of time.

Wordsmith completes the article in about two minutes and Horsley in seven. However, in comparison to the imaginative language in the human report, the Wordsmith article feels incredibly dull and generic. Computers will most likely continue to automate those aspects of writing that we deem perfunctory and inexpressive (e.g. stock reports, email salutations, etc.).

This is not a bad thing. Indeed, as Nate Hoffelder pointed out in a follow up piece criticizing

NPR’s reporting, the purpose of automated writing programs like Wordsmith is not to replace human writers (as their “human vs. machine” structure implies) but to allow human writers to adapt their writing to a variety of circumstances and situations.

So how might modular design through AR work in the real world? Consider a public advertisement for a clothing company. Typically, a marketing agency will take into account the area’s demographics, local culture, and other variables to determine how to write the ad according to the unique rhetorical constraints of the location. However, instead of writing a single ad that is forced to take all of these constraints and make them “cohere into an autonomous work,” what if this advertisement could modulate in real time according to various inputs from its environment, such as weather, time of day, and nearby user-profiles? Instead of

writing a single, generalized text that could work in a variety of situations, the copywriter could program a modular text that draws upon automated writing software to create a piece of writing that responds more directly to specific readers, similar to the kind of advertising depicted in The

Minority Report when John Anderton walks past a hologram display that scans his retina and serves up targeted ads. Although this is a rather simple example, it nonetheless demonstrates a

“flexible” conception of modular writing capable of adapting in real-time to its reader’s surroundings and concerns.

However, just as much as modular texts are “flexible,” or capable of responding/adapting to natural processes of a location, they are also “plastic,” or capable of disrupting/exposing flaws in how a location and the bodies that move through it are presented as “natural.” For instance, consider Microsoft’s proxy AR application for the Kinect. In the videos depicting potential uses for this technology, Microsoft demonstrates an application of the Kinect that overlays virtual clothing over customers as they enter a clothing store. In the video, customers of various genders walk in front of a Kinect mirror where their bodies are overlaid with digital hats, sunglasses, and dresses. The AR software depicted in the video is able to modulate product options for each customer based off gender designations that are (presumably) decided by the software itself. This augmentation of people’s bodies is modular, or “flexible,” in the sense that it responds to the contingencies of its surroundings by creating targeted, real-time advertisements that maintain traditional relationships between clothing and gender identity. The modular AR application orders customers to “flex” to the gender identity assigned by the Kinect mirror; however, because what is flexible is also “plastic,” or potentially explosive, it’s likely that such modularity will be met with much deserved resistance from any non-binary or transgender customers entering the store (Malibou 6).

Designing context-aware AR experiences requires that writers inscribe environmental contingency into the production of the text itself, thus allowing it to remain malleable, plastic, and potentially antagonistic to the very environment it is intended to modulate. It is an approach to writing that allows a text to remain open to environmental variables, including those that seek to reshape, or modulate, the rhetorical function of the text itself.

Conclusion

In her keynote address at the 2016 Conference on College Composition and

Communication, Joyce Locke Carter argued that our discipline should get used to colleagues describing their research in terms of not only writing books and articles but in creating software applications, starting up maker labs, and even inventing new products. Throughout her keynote address, Carter emphasized that rhetoric and composition scholars cannot sit idly by as emerging computing technologies continue to call into question the fundamental assumptions that have shaped our discipline for decades. Emerging technologies do not make our discipline irrelevant; they just expand the kind of knowledge we will need to draw upon in order to more adequately study the phenomenon of “writing.”

Of course, as John Tinnell points out, it is extremely difficult to determine “which novel aspects [of a new technology] will be the most transformative and consequential for cultural development” (“Grammatization” 133). Although our job as writing studies scholars is not to predict the future, we should pay attention to the impact that emerging communication technologies will have on the production of writing, not so that they can be resisted or critiqued, but so that we do not take them up unreflectively and/or continue to theorize the relationship between writing and technology through the lens of earlier writing technologies, such as desktop computing.

This chapter has presented an overview of the technologies, applications, and rhetorics of mobile augmented reality. The examples above demonstrate how AR is being used to maximize human intelligence and create more compelling interactions between physical and digital space, but we have yet to explore how AR might be used to challenge, subvert, and re-articulate the user’s perception of the physical world, which is the focus of chapter two.

Notes

1 In 1990, Boeing utilized OHMD-AR devices to overlay airplane wiring schematics for its technicians, and just a few years later students at Columbia University created a device that overlaid repair instructions on top of a physical printer (Azuma, 5).

2 For instance, Paula Levine’s 2004 locative media project Shadows From Another Place: San Francisco <-> Baghdad transposed the locations of U.S Military strikes occurring in Iraq to an online map of San Francisco (Suneel, 493).

3 The now defunct, UK-based Urban Tapestries project allowed users to “author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically.”

4 Yelp’s AR functionality “Monocle” leverages the user’s device camera in a similar way to overlay reviews of nearby restaurants as the user walks around a city.

5 Vuforia, a leading vision-based augmented reality platform, has been named “Best Tool” at the Augmented World Expo for four years in a row. Vuforia has commercial partnerships with Samsung, 3M, Disney, and BMW, and its augmented reality SDK is currently in use on over 25,000 apps on the Google Play and Apple iTunes stores.

6 See for instance Glass being used in Volkswagen factories (Lelinwalla).

7 For examples of The Minority Report’s influence on interface design see Sixthsense and Underkoffler.

8 See Google Trends analysis of “augmented reality” (https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=augmented%20reality)

9 Also see Corning’s follow up video “A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision.”

10 For example parody videos, see “How Guys Will Use Google Glass,” “ADmented Reality - Google Glasses Remixed with Google Ads,” “Goggle - Project Dangerous Glasses,” and “FirstBank- Get Back to the Real World.”

11 For a more thorough discussion of the impact of digital media on the rhetorical canons, see Brooke.

12 See a video of the ad campaign “Papa John's Road Trip augmented reality” created by the public relations and marketing agency FleishmanHillard.

13 Although the Netpage mobile app went defunct around 2013, you can still see an example Netpage document by consulting Pottinger.

CHAPTER 2 (HYPER)LINKING THE LOCATIONS OF PUBLIC WRITING

Introduction

According to Gunner Brammer’s October 12th, 2015 post on the Flymen Fishing

Company blog, if you really want to catch trout, then you need to be using articulated streamers.

Unlike “dry flies,” which rest on top of the water, streamers glide just under the water’s surface where their flexible joints can “articulate” the serpentine motion of small baitfish such as minnows. As Brammer notes, fishing with an articulated streamer is not as simple as purchasing

“a streamer with an articulation joint.” Rather, it is a process of constructing temporary material relationships (between factors like streamer length, joint tension, and knot types) such that the streamer “will articulate” as fish food.

However, articulation does not simply emerge out of the streamer’s potential to articulate. The streamer does not actually “articulate” until it begins to move through the water, thereby (per)forming an expressive, interpretable sign for the trout. In other words, the articulated streamer leverages its agency as a minnow through the actions of the angler, and the angler leverages her agency as person-eating-fish-for-dinner through the material rhetoric of the streamer. Moreover, for both streamer and angler, this rhetorical action (“minnow-ness”) only emerges when it is articulated through a confluence of already-present environmental variables from the color of the riverbed to the current of the water to the “wiliness” of the trout (Burke 5).

Following Cheryl Geisler’s report on the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies’ conception of rhetorical agency, we might say that although both angler and streamer hold the “capacity” of minnow- ness, they can only act on this agential capacity by entering into a co-productive relationship with the various environmental constraints and affordances (e.g., current, wind patterns, etc.) that

serve as the “point of articulation” for this emergent interaction between human, bait, trout, and river (Gaonkar qtd. in Geisler 10).

In disguising herself behind the very movement through which her presence is made known to the fish, the angler’s role is similar to the analogy drawn by Bruno Latour between the work of the scientist and the work of the stage manager. Latour writes that scientist and stage manager alike work toward “disappearance” so their respective audiences will focus on the work itself rather than their role in producing it (Pandora’s Hope 135). In all three cases—fishing, scientific work, stage managing—human actors augment (or “add” to) a situation to participate in an emergent rhetorical act alongside (and through) other humans, nonhumans, and environments. Although engaging in any rhetorical act requires augmenting a situation in some way—writing an essay, designing a poster, reeling in a fishing line—this “additional” rhetorical element is not solely responsible for all of the changes that might emerge as a result of its addition. Rather, this act participates within an emergent network of potential relations and rhetorical interactions. Consequently, agency is “dispersed, as a series of articulated networks” across the human and nonhuman actors inter-acting in the situation (Wells qtd. in Geisler 11).

This chapter claims that creators of location-based public writing projects should focus less on how a location can be “augmented” and more on how it can be “articulated.” I draw on articulation theory to outline a rhetorical practice for designing location-based, augmented reality experiences with mobile technologies1. Whereas “augmentation” ascribes to a rhetoric of addition-as-improvement, “articulation,” I argue, encourages us to approach location-based AR design as a process of creating and identifying emergent connections between the digital content of the application and its material surroundings. Commercial applications of AR construe it as a technology for enhancing the user’s environment by 1) overlaying digital objects that represent

physical objects and 2) overlaying real-time data streams that enhance the user’s ability to interact with her immediate surroundings. Such applications are certainly useful, beneficial, and potentially lifesaving2. However, they also perpetuate a valuation of AR content primarily in terms of human agency, thereby neglecting the distributed agential forces embedded within one’s environment. As a way of demonstrating alternative trajectories for AR technology, I turn to a discussion of how artists are leveraging AR to articulate new perceptions of public spaces, thereby modeling emerging genres of digital counter-discourse. Finally, I demonstrate how articulation operates as a rhetorical design strategy within the context of a location-based, mobile

AR application that I co-created for use within the SeaWorld-Orlando amusement park. The

SeeWorld mobile app allows visitors to access digital overlays detailing the park’s efforts to disguise the hazards of marine captivity behind a rhetoric of entertainment and conservation.

From surveying the amusement park to creating multimedia content for the application overlays,

SeeWorld demonstrates how articulating a location through AR is less an effect of any particular technology and more of a design strategy that must be actively engaged throughout the entire creation process.

The term “augmented reality,” though firmly established within our cultural lexicon, overstates the importance of digital content being added at the expense of the environment from which it co-produces its rhetorical efficacy. Like fishing with an articulated streamer, mobile AR is less a technology for imposing rhetorical agency onto a location and more a practice of co- creating rhetorical agency alongside one’s material environment. When a writer “augments” a location, she merely adds digital content to the user’s experience of the location; however, when a writer “articulates” a location, she discovers and creates relationships between the human and non-human entities already circulating within it as potential rhetorical actors.

Articulation: From Cultural Studies to Rhetorical Theory

Colloquially, to “be articulate” often means to speak (or write) with a clarity of thought and style, and it is often used as a synonym for “eloquent3.” For example, if I am having trouble conveying a particularly complex idea, I might say that “I know what I want to say, I just can’t quite articulate it.” But what do we mean when we say that a piece of writing needs to be

“articulated” more clearly? In this sense, “articulate” seems to refer to how a writer’s words, phrases, and sentences work together for rhetorical effect. Indeed, to say that a text is clearly articulated often implies that it is persuasive or at least impactful in some way. I might say that a writer presented a particularly “well-articulated” overview of a concept or topic even if their text did not “add” anything new to the conversation. In everyday speech, then, “articulation” seems to refer less to what we are saying than to how we are saying it. In a linguistic sense, then, articulation is the process of creating temporary, contingent connections in language through which familiar ideas begin to emerge as something new, thereby endowing them with a newfound communicability and rhetorical efficacy.

The verb “to articulate” also has a more material connotation. According to the Oxford

English Dictionary, anything “united by a joint” is articulated. To “articulate” something means to endow it with moveable, flexible joints through which it can maneuver more adeptly within physical space. Thus, at a material level, articulation refers to a flexible connection between two or more distinct objects or elements. A truck is in an “articulated” relationship to the trailer it is towing just as an angler “articulates” the flexible joints of a lure as she reels in her line. This overlap between linguistic and technological domains reveals the extent to which “articulation” refers to the process of creating connections in general, whether through language or material objects.

In the late twentieth century, cultural studies scholars such as Stuart Hall began to draw on Ernesto Laclau’s notion of “articulation” as a method for creating “non-necessary links” among different social and cultural discourses (e.g., class, race, gender, religion, etc.) (Slack

120-124). In an interview with Lawrence Grossberg, Hall describes articulation as “a linkage which is not necessary” (53). For Hall, an “articulated” connection is possible but not

“essential.” As a cultural studies methodology, then, articulation is less interested in reducing social phenomena to their essential characteristics than it is in generating novel connections among seemingly disparate groups, cultural discourses, and ideologies as an attempt to open potential avenues for political formation and social change.

For writing and rhetoric scholars, one of the more common definitions of articulation comes from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, who define it as “any practice establishing a relation among elements such that their identity is modified as a result” (105). In Toward a Civil

Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, Sharon Crowley draws on Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of articulation to describe how rhetors can create “openings” in discourses and ideologies

(52). For Crowley, articulation describes a model of “ethical rhetorical exchange” in which the goal is not to “shut down argumentative possibilities but to generate all the positions that are available and articulable in a given moment and situation” (56). Similarly, in Image Politics: The

New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism, DeLuca points to Laclau and Mouffe’s theory of articulation as a process of “linking” discursive elements “such that they can be understood as being spoken anew” (38). For both Crowley and DeLuca, “articulation” serves as an active practice that rhetors engage to open up alternate discursive pathways into entrenched public arguments and ideologies.

Indeed, theorists from a range of disciplines draw upon articulation as a term for describing the act of creating temporary links or “associations” among seemingly disparate entities. In his work in science studies, Bruno Latour describes articulation as a method for tracing how human and nonhuman “actors” co-produce scientific knowledge. In Pandora’s

Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies, Latour describes articulation as a method for linking together “occasions” for actors “to enter into contact” (141). Latour is interested in such

“occasions” for how they allow previously disconnected entities to “modify their definitions over the course of an event” (141). Following the work of two scientists researching a section of the

Amazon rainforest, Latour writes that as the elements of the rainforest are scaled down and set in close relation to one another, they form new, emergent relations:

In the calm and cool office the botanist who patiently arranges the leaves is able to discern emerging patterns that no predecessor could see . . . Scattered through time and space, these leaves would never have met without her redistributing their traits into new combinations. (38; my emphasis)

By extrapolating the forest into a portable grid and filing forest leaves into manila folders, the scientists create “occasions for interaction” between previously disconnected phenomena (141).

This process is not an imposition of human agency onto the environment but rather a mutually constitutive engagement with the material “constraints and affordances of the jungle” (Prenosil

101). Indeed, Latour is quick to point out that articulation is not the “privilege of a human mind surrounded by mute things” but rather an activity “in which many kinds of [human and nonhuman] entities can participate” (142).

In his book Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Latour draws upon the concept of articulation to explain how actors inter-act within physical locations to produce a sense of place. Latour writes that places become “articulated” through “the transported presence of places into other ones” (194). He uses a lecture hall to demonstrate how

locations are, to an extent, already “scripted” for us before we inhabit them. A teacher walking in on the first day of class, for instance, confronts rows of tiered seats and a large podium projecting out into the crowd. These nonhuman objects work together to “place” the teacher’s actions toward specific institutional ends (i.e., lecturing). Entering such a “scene,” writes Latour, gives you the feeling that “most of what you need to act is already in place” (195). By “placing” a location, nonhuman actors mediate human agencies. Although the architects who designed the lecture hall are no longer present, the desks, blackboards, and walls that currently inhabit this space “carry their action in absentia” (195).

Throughout his work, Latour emphasizes the dexterity of “articulation” as a method for tracing the mutually constitutive network of associations between human and nonhuman actors.

However, these networks are not created ex nihilo out of the scientist’s work nor do they magically emerge from an objective, “natural” world. The process of tracing networks produces networks. According to Thomas Rickert’s interpretation of actor-network-theory, a “network” is not an entity waiting to be discovered but a process waiting to unfold: “Not network, says Latour, but worknet—one does the work to establish what the network will have been” (138). Rickert’s approach to “worknet” is useful for understanding how “adding” elements to something—a discourse, a science experiment, etc.— “transforms the very framework for understanding” what that thing even is in the first place (143). In his chapter “The Whole of the Moon: Latour,

Context, and the Problem of Holism,” Rickert references a 1922 science experiment described in

Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway. In the experiment, two scientists accidentally prove electron spin (which was not the focus of their research) thanks to the sulfur fumes from one of the scientist’s cheap cigarettes. Although the sulfur smoke was certainly a vital, nonhuman actor in the experiment, this discovery still required the scientists’ work tracing the

smoke’s role in reshaping the bounds of the experiment itself. For Rickert, this “indicates that an assemblage needs more to be understood than the incorporation of added elements that make a difference” (143, emphasis added). Whereas the cigarette was initially “plasma” (i.e., a seemingly insignificant element of the experiment) it ultimately became a full-fledged actor. As

Rickert demonstrates, when we “add” elements, we must account for the fundamentally emergent and transformative effects they initiate. Similarly, when we “augment” a location, we must pay attention to how these “added elements” operate as co-producers alongside the network of relations within it.

In their introduction to Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, Paul

Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers draw upon Latour’s theories to understand how the phenomenon of writing operates as a mutually-constitutive process taking place between and among human and nonhuman actors. Lynch and Rivers note that re-distributing agency among and between nonhuman “actors” like objects, texts, and locations is troubling to a discipline like rhetoric and composition that likes to “hold people accountable” (and teaches its students to hold others accountable) for their rhetorical actions (5). However, in redistributing agency among nonhuman actors, humans are not deprived of agential capacity. Rather, as Lynch and Rivers claim, agency should be understood as “a partially discernible—though mysterious—network” emerging out of the inter-actions of humans and nonhumans. Similar to how the scientists articulate the leaves to

“discern emerging patterns” about the rainforest, writers articulate things, places, people, and events to produce and discover knowledge about the world. Although writing produces contingent associations (i.e., the associations could be traced differently), this does not necessarily entail such associations are not real and active; it just means that they are not determinative, or as Hall states, “essential for all time” (53). As Lynch and Rivers note, the fact

that knowledge is articulated through language does not make it “any less true” (9). Indeed, as

Latour writes in his discussion of the various technologies through which scientific knowledge is produced—methodologies, microscopes, graphs, writing—the scientist is not obscuring an objective world by applying such “filters” to it; rather, it is through these very filters that the scientist’s view of the world becomes “clearer” (137). Similarly, every time we write, argue, exhort, critique, or explain, we articulate a reality that is inseparable from (but not utterly determined by) the human and nonhuman actors within our rhetorical situations.

In his article “Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice,”

Kevin Deluca describes how “articulation” opens alternative frameworks of deliberation by creating “antagonisms” that “point to the limit of a discourse” (336). DeLuca writes that antagonisms arise when a taken-for-granted discourse or ideology (e.g., “The American Dream”) is called into question by linking it to elements (e.g., minorities, immigrants, etc.) for which it doesn’t account. Antagonisms seek to expose relations as social, or non-natural, and thus capable of being changed. DeLuca extends this idea in his book Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of

Environmental Activism, where he describes how antagonisms can be produced through “image events.” DeLuca describes how organizations like Greenpeace and Earth First! began to create performative “stunts” (e.g., tying themselves to trees, blocking whaling ships, etc.) intended for circulation through tele-visual media to raise awareness and support for environmental issues.

DeLuca writes that image events are “critique through spectacle;” they operate “in the territory of the system but outside the sense-making rules or the lines on the grid of intelligibility of the system” (20-22). Image events are not reducible to the conscious rhetorical actions of the protestors or their intentions for how such “events” will circulate across media. In one example,

DeLuca describes how a Greenpeace protest against whaling vessels produced an “image-event”

when the whaling ship decided to shoot its harpoon at the whale despite the proximity of the protestors. As footage and images of the event began to circulate, public discourse about the ethics of whaling began to coalesce around the image of the protesters standing in the whalers’ line of fire. This event, or rather its circulation as image-based media, created an antagonism within the public’s conceptualization of the whale as both majestic animal and economic resource.

As DeLuca points out, merely exposing differences and “contradictions” is insufficient as a method for inducing social change or opening alternative discursive pathways. Rather, it is

“through rhetorical practices” taken up by both human and nonhuman actors that contradictions become “antagonisms” capable of re-articulation (“Articulation Theory” 343). When rhetors account for the nonhuman elements of a discourse, they are able to more fully engage their

“available means” for effecting social change. When we write, we do not create rhetorical elements from scratch; rather, we draw upon the existing (human and nonhuman) elements that are already circulating as part of the discourse with which we are engaging. Although a rhetor might “augment” a conversation with a new piece of information, “articulation” forces us to consider how this “added element” is insufficient in itself to evoke change. Articulation encourages us to approach public discourse less as a practice of adding something to it (e.g., data, statistics, evidence, etc.) and more as a practice of working with what is already an important part of the discussion. This is not to discount the value of additional information. For instance, new data and scientific research are incredibly valuable in the public conversation about global climate change. However, merely “augmenting” the public conversation about global climate change with more research has been shown to be insufficient as a rhetorical move

“to carry the day politically” (342).

From its usage within cultural studies scholarship to its application within rhetorical theory, “articulation” serves as a useful theoretical framework for understanding how temporary, contingent relations create emergent patterns of meaning. In my next section, I describe how the theories of articulation outlined here offer writing and rhetoric scholars an alternative way of conceptualizing AR as a location-based writing technology. Unlike its commercial trajectory, which configures AR primarily as a technology for spatial improvement, artists’ and activists’ trajectories for AR configure it as a technology for spatial intervention.

Augmentation: From Improvement to Intervention

In January 2015, Google announced they were ending funding for their wearable augmented reality device, “Glass.” Although Google has since clarified their position, stating that they are simply getting the device “ready for users,” this announcement marked a major setback for AR’s emergence as a mass medium (Vincent). As Douglas Eyman cautioned the field of computers and writing back in 2011, any prediction about future changes to communication practices based on contemporary technologies must be “tempered by an awareness of the kinds of infrastructure and social changes such technologies will require” (Walker et al. 328). In the case of Google Glass, and perhaps wearable computing in general, some of the most unanticipated “social changes” were related to public concerns about privacy. Indeed, it was not uncommon for “Glass Explorers”—public beta-testers of the device—to be met with vehement, and sometimes even violent, reactions from those wary of Glass’s surreptitious recording capabilities (Suba).

Although privacy concerns certainly contributed to Google’s decision to discontinue research into Glass, issues related to the rhetorical function of the device itself might have been even more of a determining factor. According to MIT’s technology review editor, Rachel Metz,

Glass essentially did everything we expect from our smartphones (web browsing, texting,

navigation, phone calls, etc.); it just “didn’t do any of them all that well.” Metz writes that this problem could have been overcome if the functionality of Glass actually did the “amazing things” it claimed rather than working like a smartphone you wear on your face. By not promoting compelling interactions between physical space and digital content, Glass failed to capitalize on the unique rhetorical affordances of augmented reality. Although Glass may have incorporated AR content into the design of its interface, most applications did not encourage the user to interact in any meaningful way with the physical layer, and the novelty of digital content simply “existing” within physical space was not a compelling enough reason to engage with the device.

In Understanding Augmented Reality: Concepts and Applications, Alan B. Craig defines

“augmented reality” as any medium “in which information is added to the physical world” (15).

Unlike “virtual reality,” which immerses the user in a completely digital world, AR integrates digital and physical elements into the user experience. Craig contextualizes AR technologies within an evolutionary narrative of humanity’s ability to “augment” our physical environment through the development of more advanced technologies: from primitive tools to complex symbol systems (2-5). This conception of AR as technological improvement is widespread among futurists and technology evangelists, and, as a result, the term “augmented reality” is quickly becoming synonymous with digital enhancements to physical space.

Craig argues that AR can break from the derisive labels leveled at AR devices like

Google Glass “only by exploiting the affordances” of which it is uniquely capable as a medium

(151). Instead of seeing AR as a technology for accomplishing activities typically done through a smartphone (e.g., texting, web browsing, social media, etc.), technology companies are beginning to configure AR more as a task-specific technology4. Although there are a variety of

industries and applications for these task-specific AR applications, I break them into two general categories: proxy and context-aware AR.

As I mentioned in chapter one, proxy AR applications configure digital content as a placeholder, or proxy, for physical objects. Marketing expert Rebecca Borison writes that companies who use proxy applications effectively leverage AR by showcasing “the functionality of [their] brand” rather than merely linking to a website through a Quick Response (QR) code.

Although proxy applications are certainly useful, they inadvertently perpetuate a representation of AR content as subordinate to the physical objects they represent. Within this representationalist trajectory, AR becomes a medium for maintaining established relationships among the elements of a physical space (e.g., people as consumers, objects as products) rather than a medium for articulating new relationships between them. For the commercial release of its

Kinect AR-motion capture technology, Microsoft created a retail scenario video showcasing a

5 Kinect application that exemplifies both proxy and context-aware AR . In the video, customers walk in front of a Kinect mirror as their bodies are overlaid with digital hats, sunglasses, and dresses. The video centers on a woman who wanders over to the Kinect mirror and stares approvingly at her reflection as it is augmented with a new dress. The woman does not do anything to indicate that she has given the Kinect permission to augment her reflection. The AR software depicted in the video modulates product options for each customer based off gender designations decided by the Kinect. In other words, the Kinect attempts to “identify” customers’ genders so proxy AR clothing can be more precisely targeted to them. The application exposes the degree to which the naturalized space of the clothing store works to stabilize gender identity for profit and, in the process, reveals how gender identification can be (super)imposed upon individuals by a location. However, as Sidney I. Dobrin points out, any attempt to “order a space

to a particular end” in no way guarantees that this “order” will be “recognized or obeyed by all who enter that space” (17). Indeed, any gender-nonconforming customers confronted with such an AR experience might invoke their right to “disobey” the gender identification assigned by

Microsoft’s augmentation of reality.

As John Tinnell points out, to say that a technology “augments” reality implies the presence of a “universal, stable reality” capable of being augmented in the first place (“All the

World’s a Link”). In the case of the Kinect mirror, the digital clothing is configured as a mere representation of the physical clothing that it represents and will eventually be replaced by.

Moreover, to draw the customer’s attention to the physical verisimilitude of the digital clothing, the physical space reflected back in the mirror is configured as a stable backdrop which the user ignores when engaging with the application’s content. Representationalist AR applications maintain the user’s preconception of her physical environment because to disrupt it would be to simultaneously disrupt the spatial stability that makes it possible to “augment” the environment in the first place. In such a scenario, “reality” functions as a stable backdrop that is capable of change only insofar as a new element is “added” to it. Such applications create a narrow representation of what constitutes an AR experience by construing physical space as a stable backdrop for human-oriented actions.

However, digital artists are beginning to explore alternative trajectories for augmented reality by leveraging this emerging technology to articulate new relationships among the rhetorical elements of public and private spaces. These born-digital artworks incorporate physical space as a key rhetorical component of the user’s experience. As these projects demonstrate, AR can not only improve the user’s experience of a space but also can point out

undisclosed connections between seemingly disparate social, cultural, and environmental phenomena.

Using AR technologies as an interventionist practice first emerged in the work of a group

6 of digital artists known as Manifest.AR . Digital artist Tamiko Thiel’s mobile AR project

“Clouding Green” is accessible at the corporate headquarters of ten major technology companies in Silicon Valley. Drawing from a 2012 report from Greenpeace revealing that cloud-computing was expanding at a rapid rate with little thought put into its impact on the environment, Thiel’s application overlays digital green and gray clouds over the buildings to visualize the carbon footprint of each company’s cloud-computing services. By articulating elements that have been ignored and/or actively repressed from the rhetorical production of these locations, “Clouding

Green” articulates a visual antagonism between the environmentally-friendly rhetoric of “cloud computing” and its dirty, material reality.

As Thiel’s project demonstrates, one of the primary affordances of AR is the potential to establish relations between experientially disconnected phenomena. Although her project’s overt critique is directed at the technology companies, Thiel’s application also serves to expose the user’s connection to the issue of cloud computing and carbon emissions. Because her work can only be accessed through an internet-connected mobile device, the user must rely on the same technology (cloud computing) that the project critiques. As the user looks through her iPhone at the large, gray clouds swirling over Twitter’s headquarters, the various rhetorical elements present within this space suddenly link up in new ways that force the user to articulate her own complicity within the environmental concerns raised by Thiel’s project.

Many interventionist AR projects take an approach similar to Thiel’s by linking the user’s personal actions to spatially and temporally distant public issues. Mark Skwarek, one of

the founding members of Manifest.AR, created an AR intervention accessible by scanning any

British Petroleum logo. His project, “The Leak in Your Hometown,” was created in response to

BP’s complicity in the Deepwater Horizon oil spill—thereby re-articulating the relationship between the user’s private actions (getting gas) and a distant public disaster (the Gulf oil spill).

Skwarek’s project functions as what Gregory Ulmer refers to as an “abject monument:” it articulates the public’s perception of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill so that it is no longer a random accident but rather a structurally necessary sacrifice for maintaining a particular cultural value (i.e., cheap gas) (57).

John Craig Freeman’s AR intervention “Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos” addresses the issue of rising immigrant death rates at the U.S.-Mexico border. Freeman’s application generates a digital calaca—a traditional Mexican wood carving commemorating the death of a loved one—at the precise GPS coordinates of each recorded migrant death. According to Freeman, “Border Memorial” seeks to invoke the affective weight of the migrant death toll by allowing users “to visualize the scope of the loss of life” that occurs invisibly at the U.S.-Mexico border each year. In doing so, the calacas create an important link between a social value (cheap immigrant labor) and the sacrifices that sustain it (immigrant deaths). Although the geo-located skeletons “augment” the space of the border wall, they are not the sole rhetorical agents within the critique. The digital calacas work alongside the harsh material rhetoric of this space (hot, dusty, dry, etc.), and they create a juxtapositional framework, which allows the user to articulate her physical experience of the border within the context of the more than 6,000 people who have died attempting to cross it.

As a rhetorical practice, articulation seeks to reinvigorate the complexity of a space by placing the human and nonhuman elements circulating within it in new, emergent relationships.

Raúl Sánchez defines emergence as “modes of action that develop over time and as the result of recurrent and multiple exchanges between and among actors” (29). Articulating reality through location-based public writing projects means crafting “emergent” relations between the location, the AR content, and the users who are likely to engage with it. Creating location-based augmented reality, then, is not only “adding” to a stable conception of a space; it is an ongoing rhetorical process of crafting flexible, contingent links “between and among actors” who are already part of it.

Location: From Technological Effect to Design Strategy

In his chapter “Techno-Geographic Interfaces: Layers of Text and Agency in Mobile

Augmented Reality,” John Tinnell traces the history of ubiquitous computing alongside efforts to untether human agency from the stationary constraints of the personal computing (PC) era. As an alternative to PC-era logic, Tinnell argues that AR is poised to initiate a “broader ecology of digital interaction whereby multimedia becomes structured by non-human activity” (70).

Building on Gilbert Simondon’s concept of “techno-geographic milieus,” Tinnell describes how context-aware AR produces “techno-geographic information,” or information that maintains a

“direct relationship to the present activities occurring at that particular location” (77). Unlike AR applications that merely provide access to web-based information, such as a QR code attached to an historical marker in a local park, “techno-geographic information” (or what I call “context- aware AR”) generates content based on real-time analysis of “geographical flows” within the user’s immediate surroundings (72). Because context-aware AR applications necessarily draw upon the user’s immediate surroundings to generate content, they distribute writerly agency out into the environment. For Tinnell, AR is a posthuman writing technology; the production of its textual content is inseparable from the physical location in which it is generated. A context- aware AR clothing advertisement, for instance, would be able to analyze current weather

conditions and nearby social media feeds to determine if it should display a digital raincoat or tank top.

As Tinnell points out, writers who create location-based AR cannot ignore the material rhetoric embedded within the location: “from the standpoint of production, one must learn to write and design with the accidents of the sensible” (82). For Tinnell, the emergence of techno- geographic information transforms the role of the user’s material environment from “a standing- reserve . . . acted upon by an already constituted subject” to a “constitutive element” in the production of “perception, memory, and decision-making” (73). However, as Tinnell makes clear, the production of techno-geographic information is not reducible to highly technical, context-aware AR technologies; this content operates as an integral rhetorical element throughout the “design process” itself (78).

Along with Tinnell, I argue that designing location-based AR is not reducible to context- aware AR. In seeing ourselves as “co-producers” of location-based AR experiences, however, there is a danger that we might conflate writerly agency with context-aware AR technologies. In doing so, we downplay the rhetorical significance of “static” multimedia content—images, videos, 3D models, etc. Although context-aware technologies are certainly one way in which writers can articulate an environment, I argue that “articulation” as a model for designing location-based AR is less an effect of any particular technology and more of a design strategy.

As I hope to demonstrate through my discussion of a mobile AR application designed for

SeaWorld-Orlando, creators of location-based AR must allow the rhetorical elements in the location (human and nonhuman) to shape each stage of the creation process, from the selection of augmentable areas to the creation of multimedia overlays.

At Trace Innovation, a digital humanities initiative in the University of Florida English

Department, we support the development and publication of “Augmented Reality Criticisms”

(ARCs). ARCs are mobile applications that provide critical and/or educational digital content within the context of a physical location, image, or text. Co-created by Sidney I. Dobrin, Melissa

Bianchi, and myself, the SeeWorld ARC works to re-articulate visitors’ perceptions of specific marine life with the aim of drawing them into a broader public conversation taking place about

7 SeaWorld and the ethics of marine captivity .

Creating a location-based AR application is not a linear process. Like any writing project, the various stages of planning, designing, and building the application often overlap and/or occur simultaneously as new developments within one stage force changes in another. This process requires a keen rhetorical eye for how a confluence of human and nonhuman elements (e.g., the animals in the park, the software used to design the app, park visitors, Florida’s tourist economy, etc.) co-produce the application alongside its human “creators.” Without a doubt, the process of planning and designing the SeeWorld ARC revealed how “articulating” a location with AR requires sustained consideration for how the location itself is operating as a significant rhetorical actor within each phase of the application’s design.

The process of “articulating” the space of SeaWorld-Orlando began the moment we started “mapping out” the application itself. In our initial meetings, email threads, and planning documents, we created a rough outline of what we wanted the application to do, how it would work, and what kind of content it would allow the user to access. We decided that the application content should be short, straightforward, and non-condemnatory; we wanted to, as Sharon

Crowley writes, “articulate available openings” in discourse about SeaWorld and marine captivity in general, not close them down through divisive, accusatory rhetorics (52).

Once we had a good grasp of the general purpose and function of the application, we travelled to Orlando where we (literally) mapped out the specific locations where augmented reality content would appear throughout the park. SeaWorld-Orlando is broken up into eight main sections designed to guide visitors in a clockwise direction through the park’s main attractions. This layout encourages visitors to start in the Sea of Shallows (dolphins, stingrays, and turtles) and end in the Sea of Power where the park’s final Orca show starts at 5:00 pm, thereby encouraging guests to wrap up their day before the park’s 6:00 pm closing time.

The spatio-temporal structure of SeaWorld-Orlando contributed a vital piece of “techno- geographic information” to our knowledge of how guests move through the park and informed the overall structure of the application interface. Beginning at the park’s entrance, we decided to augment six areas of the park, focusing most of our augmentations on popular exhibits where we noticed guests linger for longer periods of time, such as the stingray petting pool, the dolphin viewing area, and the Orca exhibit. These areas are typically full of informational texts, which not only serve as useful trigger images but also encourage visitors to slow down their pace within

8 that section of the park . Because these areas are more popular, we also hoped that other visitors might notice people engaging in the ARC and inquire about the project. We also had to pay attention to how the user’s immediate physical surroundings would impact their experience of the application content, such as noise or light interferences. We noticed that the dolphin viewing area was smaller and more confined than other exhibits, so any noise from a user’s device would likely draw attention. We leveraged this acoustic facet of the user’s physical environment to place all our dolphin critiques in this area, not only because it is a popular place for visitors to remain for extended periods of time but also because the audio overlays would likely draw attention to those engaging in the ARC and hopefully spread more awareness about the project.

“Articulating” a location is a two-way process: the rhetorical actors embedded within the location (the park layout, tourists, exhibit designers, etc.) influence the type of content that can be accessed within it as well as the manner in which it can be accessed. From the mapping phase of the design process, we were forced to consider how our plans for the mobile application had to work alongside SeaWorld’s physical design of the park and how visitors were likely to move through it. As Latour notes in Reassembling the Social, when “acting” within a physical location,

“most of what we need to act is already in place” (195). As writers of location-based experiences, we cannot ignore these geographic scripts; rather, our goal is to re-articulate them so they link up in new ways for the user.

The AR overlays for the SeeWorld application are short videos accessed by scanning the park’s existing signage such as informational texts about specific animals or SeaWorld logos scattered through the park9. There were a few reasons why we decided to use short video overlays as opposed to other media types such as images, web links, or 3D models. First, we figured that video content creates a more engaging contrast to the park’s physical signage than would images or web links. In addition, it is much simpler to push updates to streaming video content than complex 3D animations. Designers of AR content can update streaming video without updating the entire application. Lastly, the videos allow us to include both audio and captioned text so our overlays can be accessible to visitors with visual or hearing impairments.

Using “static” video overlays does not mean that our application is not “context-aware.”

The AR content of the application still articulates new relations between the human and nonhuman elements (marine animals, tourists, park informational texts, etc.) circulating within different locations of the park. For instance, as we began work on our video content, we wanted our overlays to directly respond to the rhetoric of the physical signs being augmented and not

just create a general critique about SeaWorld or the hazards of marine captivity. Many signs in the dolphin viewing area attempt to dispel any concerns about the scarring that is common among dolphins held in captivity as well as those in the wild. Moreover, the playful posture of the three dolphins in the image reinforces the playful, carefree attitude that SeaWorld wants the viewers to feel about the dolphins swimming in the large pool behind them. Thus, the elements within the underwater viewing area craft a powerful rhetorical message, which seeks to persuade visitors that SeaWorld’s dolphins live happy, fulfilling lives within captivity.

While addressing visitors’ superficial concerns about the dolphins’ physical appearance, the sign glosses over more pressing social concerns for dolphins held in captivity. As the AR overlays created for this image explain, captive dolphins cannot participate in the same social, cultural, and environmental interactions as their wild counterparts. The AR content does not contradict the information in the sign put up by SeaWorld. Rather, it establishes an “antagonism” between the viewer’s experience in the dolphin viewing area and the information provided by the video. Kevin DeLuca explains how “the act of linking in a particular articulation” creates a rhetorical framework that allows elements to be “spoken anew” (Image Politics 38). When the viewer scans the image and the video begins to play, the various “elements” within the underwater viewing area—calm music, swimming dolphins, reassuring information, playful images—begin to re-articulate for the viewer from “natural” to “artificial” elements as they are juxtaposed with information about wild dolphins.

Articulating locations through AR technologies provides another avenue for writing and rhetoric scholars to extend their teaching and research practices into what Christian Weisser terms “public writing in context” (95). For Weisser, public writing in context occurs when writers engage with communities who are not merely participants within an abstract public

sphere (e.g., people reading letters to the editor) but rather potential agents of social change. By articulating contested locations like SeaWorld, writers participate in shaping public perceptions about that space as well as the public issues that circulate within it. Like any writing project, it’s impossible to predict the degree of public impact that a text is going to have on an issue, argument, or location. However, considering the massive popularity of mobile devices and predicted advances in wearable technologies, it seems likely that location-based AR is only going to become more popular in the coming years. Thus, even if location-based AR projects

“fail” to have a social or political impact in the present, they are still valuable experimental testing grounds for an emerging medium that seems poised to fundamentally reshape how we create and access digital content with physical locations. Although the public impact of current location-based AR projects may not carry the same rhetorical heft as they might if AR were more prevalent, we can prepare for (and perhaps even actively shape) the digital genres of location- based writing that are beginning to emerge alongside an impending era of ubiquitous computing.

As a method for creating location-based AR, articulation is an ongoing, recursive design strategy through which the human and nonhuman elements of a location co-produce emergent rhetorical experiences for both designer and user. Although context-aware AR technologies are able to generate dynamic, real-time data about the user’s environment, they are not the only way to “articulate” a location. For static AR content to engage with the material constraints and affordances of its users’ surroundings, AR designers must pay attention to how the location itself is articulating the available means of persuasion embedded within the location.

Conclusion

Locative writing technologies such as augmented reality hold great potential in reshaping our approach to writing within and about contested places. Through AR, writers have the capacity to participate in a genre of public writing that exposes alternative perspectives on a

location, potentially providing an avenue of representation for those (human and nonhuman) voices who are not being heard. Here, I have called for a turn to articulation theory for how it emphasizes the creation of emergent, identity-modifying relationships within the existing rhetorical elements of a location. Although commercial trajectories of AR configure it as a technology for enhancing a space, I demonstrated how digital artists are re-configuring AR as a digital genre for intervening into spaces and re-articulating the user’s relationship to disparate social and cultural phenomena. Building from the work of these digital artists, I described my own involvement in a location-based public writing project at SeaWorld-Orlando to argue that

“articulation” is less a technological effect and more a strategy that rhetors must engage throughout the entire design process. Through this, I hope to provide a generative model to inspire other scholars to engage in their own location-based AR projects in their teaching and research practices.

The field of digital rhetoric is uniquely situated to take on the challenge of experimenting with ways in which location-based writing technologies like AR can be used to write within and about physical objects, texts, and locations. As Catherine Braun points out, digital media work must be actively “cultivated” if it is going to become a viable form of scholarly production.

Braun argues that the production of digital projects should not be restricted to students in multimodal writing courses but rather “a site to reconceptualize the work of scholarship” (5). By designing and building location-based AR applications, writing and rhetoric scholars not only provide generative models for what it means to “write” a space, but they simultaneously take up an active role in shaping the rhetorical future of this emerging medium and the new genres of mobile writing it makes possible.

Notes

1 I use the term “augmented reality” (AR hereafter) to refer to computer-generated, multimodal data overlaid in registration with a live camera view of the physical world.

2 Indeed, these kinds of “context-aware” AR applications, as I term them later, are highly valued within jobs where people must quickly evaluate and make decisions about their physical surroundings. For instance, engineers in Switzerland have created prototype helmets outfitted with an AR optical display that allows firefighters to view digital representations of surface temperatures so they know to avoid certain areas of a burning building. These types of AR applications are also becoming more common within medical contexts by providing surgeons with real- time navigational assistance during complex procedures (“Scopis Augmented Reality”).

3 Of course, “being articulate” is culturally relative and is often directed against those who do not act, speak, or write in a manner appropriate to the dominant modes of a particular discourse community. In the United States, for instance, a person is often only considered “articulate” if she or he speaks according to the conventions of standard American English—a dialect synonymous with the white, upper-middle class. As a result, the term “articulate” often carries micro-aggressive connotations when directed at minorities or marginalized communities (e.g., “You’re so articulate!”). In this sense, to “articulate” is not just something that you do; it is something that you inhabit at a social level, and what it means to “be” articulate can shift according to culturally contingent markers of race, class, gender, orientation, and/or ethnicity.

4 Within the last few years, task-specific AR applications have exploded in popularity. Companies such as Lowe’s and IKEA are currently developing mobile AR applications that allow customers to view new countertops and couches within the physical space of their homes simply by looking through the camera view of a tablet or smartphone. In addition, the car manufacturer Ford recently released an augmented reality app that overlays visual aids on top of a car engine to demonstrate simple maintenance procedures such as checking oil or refilling washer fluid (Liszewski).

5 I use the term “context-aware” AR to refer to applications that generate AR content based on real-time data inputs from the user’s immediate surroundings. In Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing, Adam Greenfield points out that computers will increasingly operate only according to parameters that are “appropriate to our location and context” (1). Context-aware AR applications engage most explicitly with this aspect of ubiquitous computing by creating content unique to the specific time and place in which it is generated.

6 Manifest.AR connect their interventionist work to the Situationist art movement of the 1950s (Skwarek, 8). The Situationists practiced a technique they referred to as “detournement” (French for “diversion”) in which they would appropriate cultural materials such as logos and advertisements as sites of critique. Contemporary iterations of detournement can be seen in the work of “culture jamming” groups like Adbusters and the Billboard Liberation Front as well as the work of street artists suchlike Banksy and Shepard Fairey. This type of public art activism is typically unsanctioned, highly visual, and aims to intervene into the social and political conditions of viewers’ everyday lives.

7 SeaWorld-Orlando was the focus of the 2013 documentary Blackfish, which followed the death of one of their trainers, Dawn Brancheau, during a live Orca performance. Since the release of Blackfish, SeaWorld has faced strong public backlash as former trainers have come forward to recount a history of abuse and negligence within SeaWorld’s facilities.

8 Unlike geo-based AR, which uses GPS coordinates to determine the location of digital content within physical space, vision-based AR relies on visual markers known as “trigger images” (such as a street sign or public advertisement) to orient digital content. There are a variety of free, vision-based augmented reality creation platforms available online, such as Aurasma Studio and Vuforia. Aurasma is a mobile application that allows users to create content for specific accounts that other users can then follow. Vuforia is a software development kit (SDK) that can be used to create standalone applications for the Google Play and Apple app stores. For more information about the Vuforia SDK, see Greene.

9 As counter-augmentations become more accessible and ubiquitous, it is possible that target sites (such as SeaWorld) will claim that these augmentations violate property and/or image copyright laws by overlaying unofficial information on top of private property and copyrighted images. However, Brian Wassom, one of the few legal scholars working in augmented reality law, argues that augmented reality criticism operates as a form of “critical consumer speech” and should be protected under the First Amendment (122-24).

CHAPTER 3 AMPLIFYING DIGITAL PUBLIC RHETORICS

Introduction

The HBO comedy series High Maintenance follows a nameless marijuana dealer as he makes his rounds through the streets of New York City. In one episode, the protagonist chains his bike up to an abandoned bicycle outside of the apartment building where he has a delivery.

As he is walking away, a woman from the apartment building shouts down at him: “That’s a memorial, you know!” As the dealer and the woman argue, a hazy ghost appears decked out in cycling gear, shouting futilely at the man to unlock his bike from the memorial that was placed at the intersection to commemorate his death. This is an important scene because it’s one of the few places where ghost bikes have been represented in popular culture. Although not uncommon in most major cities or areas with poor cycling infrastructure (like New York City), many people are unaware of ghost bikes or are not familiar with their public rhetorical function to promote cyclist and pedestrian rights1. However, as this scene from High Maintenance demonstrates, the ghost bike’s rhetorical function as a public memorial is slowly beginning to creep into public consciousness.

Ghost bikes first began to appear as roadside memorials in the early 2000s, with one of the first documented sighting appearing in St. Louis, Missouri in 2003. In this installation, a man witnessed a fatal crash between a motorist and cyclist and decided to commemorate the death with a white bicycle and a small sign that read “Cyclist struck here.” However, as the ghost bike movement took off as a form of cyclist and pedestrian advocacy in subsequent years, cycling organizations opted to simply install ghost bicycles without any additional signage or informational text, offering the public no explicit instructions for how to interpret or interact with them.

A ghost bike functions as what Jody Murray calls a “non-discursive text” in that it derives “its meaning-making from the complexity and ambiguity of its medium” (5). Indeed, ambiguity is vital to the ghost bike’s function as a public rhetorical practice. In fact, it is the ghost bike’s rhetorical ambiguity that spurs the interaction between the two characters in High

Maintenance. The scene demonstrates how ghost bikes work to convert the mundane space of the street corner into a micro-public exchange about the appropriate ways to interact with and define this object. Is it a memorial to be respected or a stable object capable of preventing bike theft? In catalyzing this interaction between the man and the woman, the ghost bike is public writing in the sense that Nathaniel Rivers describes public writing as a phenomenon that “moves through space composing connections among people, places, and things” (576). For Rivers, it is these very “agonisms” that “produce publics” in the first place. Ghost bikes present opportunities to compose a connection among disparate publics. However, they do not do so via linear arguments and rational claims supported with evidence. Rather, they merely offer opportunities for public exchange by intervening into the mundane spaces—sidewalks, intersections, bike paths—of everyday life. Physical ghost bikes function as a kind of intervention into a public’s perception of a space, forcing those who pass by them to acknowledge the casualties of petrocentric road design2.

In our webtext “Augmented Vélorutionaries: Digital Rhetoric, Memorials, and Public

Discourse,” Madison Jones and I describe how ghost bikes evoke ambient rhetorical effects when placed within areas that publics often overlook:

Ghost bike rhetorics critique petrocentric spaces. As such, they are less like rhetorical objects to be examined and analyzed and more like ambient forces to be inhabited and felt. As Thomas Rickert points out, ambient rhetorics are unpredictable and emergent, they “[generate their] own landscape that in turn [contribute] to the always ongoing reshaping and revealing of the world” (27).

Ghost bikes embed themselves within the architectural rhetorics of public life, initiating ambient effects upon a space and the publics that circulate through it.

Due to theft or removal by local authorities, many ghost bikes only remain for a few weeks or months after being installed. As a result, they are often unable to generate the ambient network that might foster the kind of public rhetorical exchanges depicted in High Maintenance. Indeed, as Jones and I discuss in our webtext, in the city of Jacksonville, FL there are no remaining ghost bikes of the six that have been documented by ghostbikes.org.

This chapter presents a rhetorical framework for amplifying local public rhetorics with mobile writing technologies within the context of an augmented reality criticism (ARC) project I co-designed for the city of Jacksonville, FL. The project, “Death Drive(r)s: Ghost Bike

(Monu)mentality,” re-places digital facsimiles of physical ghost bikes within the exact physical locations where they once stood. The “Death Drive(r)s” ARC employs Gregory Ulmer’s concept of MEmorial. Ulmer claims that wide scale social problems become normalized to the point that they are no longer seen for what they are: invisible, abject sacrifices on behalf of pervasive cultural values. Ghost bikes MEmorialize cyclist deaths as corollary to the right to own and drive a car at high speeds. Every time a ghost bike is removed from a city street, the sacrifices made by dead cyclists on behalf of petrocentric attitudes is silenced and obscured. By using this project and its emplacement within these specific intersections in Jacksonville, I want to test the affordances of AR as a platform for public rhetoric and social advocacy, thereby extending

David Rieder’s methodology in Suasive Iterations: Rhetoric, Writing, and Physical Computing, where he argues that “Rhetoric is at its best when its practices and theory are explicitly engaged with the materialities comprising the cutting edge of suasive possibilities” (31).

As Bitzer points out in this chapter’s epigraph, a cyclist’s death cannot be changed through rhetorical action. However, how the public comes to conceive of this death (accident?

sacrifice?) can be. The ghost bike demonstrates the extent to which cyclist and pedestrian death initiates rhetorical exigence: the ghost bike reframes individual death as a public problem capable of being changed. Unlike the state-sanctioned road signs that emphasize individual action and responsibility (i.e. drive with care), the ghost bike operates in a non-discursive framework that invites emergent, micro-public response.

Thus, this chapter turns to a discussion of the wider implications of mobile AR as a platform for public rhetoric and the rhetorical design strategies necessary to foster more affective and emergent public discourses. Along with other writing and rhetoric scholars who call for greater attention to the unique rhetorics of specific locations, I propose a shift from rhetorical situations to situated rhetorics. Situating rhetorics is creating the grounds for emergent rhetorical situations. Through AR, we can reproduce the exigence, the problem or defect, that has been concealed by the prevailing rhetorical structures of a given location. In doing so, I argue, the public issues embedded within mundane public spaces (parks, sidewalks, busy intersections, etc.) can be amplified. Drawing on concepts of amplification from rhetorical theory, I describe how amplification via mobile technologies is also a process of “(e)strangement.” The bracketed “e” here is intended to signify the role of electronic media in making mundane spaces strange.

Moreover, it signifies the dual process of “stranging” (i.e. new, surprising) and “estrangement”

(i.e. to move away from). To make a mundane place strange is to see it in a new way; in addition, to make a mundane place estranged is to give it distance from the habituated discursive pathways that typically guide how a public interacts with and talks about such spaces. Finally, this chapter turns to a discussion of public writing as an emergent, affective phenomenon not reducible to stable acts of persuasion directed at pre-existing audiences. Rather, public writing is (again) an

act of articulating the existing rhetorics of a location such that they foster further public discourse and produce new forms of public subjectivity.

Situating Rhetorical Situations

In 1968, Lloyd Bitzer famously declared that “rhetoric is situational” (3). Because rhetoric is not reducible to a set of core principles that can be predictively observed in the world,

Bitzer surmised, it cannot (and should not) be taught as such. Bitzer’s article was instrumental to rhetoric and composition’s shift away from current-traditionalism and toward process-oriented approaches to teaching writing. Moreover, it laid the groundwork for the more dynamic, posthuman notions of rhetorical agency that would emerge at the end of the 20th century. For

Bitzer, rhetoric is always contingent on three core elements that shift according to different situational factors: exigence, audience, and constraints. Bitzer’s recognition of these three core elements demonstrates how rhetoric emerges from specific times and places. Bitzer’s critique forced the discipline to recognize that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to rhetorical theory.

Because these three elements shift according to a variety of situation-specific factors, the rhetor’s abilities rested less on creating arguments for a generalized audience and more on effectively leveraging the constraints of specific situations to persuade specific audiences.

Bitzer conflates exigence with defect, arguing that it is the job of the rhetor to motivate the audience via discourse to address this defect (6). A rhetorical situation is an open situation, and thus invites rhetorical discourse to “close it,” so to speak: “a situation is rhetorical insofar as it needs and invites discourse capable of participating with situation and thereby altering its reality” (6, emphasis mine). When we create arguments for specific locations (a situational constraint), we participate and respond to the existing rhetorics embedded within it. For the most part, we experience public problems at a level so far removed from our direct actions (e.g. I have never hit a cyclist in my car) that we do not see it as a “defect” or “obstacle” over which we or

any potential audience might have a sense of agency or even responsibility. Thus, we do not speak about such issues because the audience capable of mediating the change necessary to resolve the exigence of pedestrian and cyclist deaths cannot be addressed at an individual level.

Bitzer writes that “In any rhetorical situation there will be at least one controlling exigence which functions as the organizing principle: it specifies the audience to be addressed and the change to be affected” (7). However, some situations do not have a clear audience; rather, the point of the rhetorical act (i.e. installing a ghost bike) is itself the catalysis for public subject formation itself. To be “moved” by a ghost bike is not to be persuaded to a new course of action or explicit policy decision; rather, it is to identify with the mundane space of the road in an entirely new, even strange, way. The ghost bike re-articulates those within the intersection as more than motorists but as public citizens whose political actions affect the lives and well-being of the non-motorists who pass through this space. No longer a passageway from A to B, the road is rearticulated as a mechanism for moving bodies that privileges certain types of mobility over others.

Shortly after Bitzer’s article was published, Richard Vatz published his equally-canonical response, “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” which critiques Bitzer’s notion of rhetorical situations as objective social phenomena. Vatz writes that “No situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it” (154). Laying the groundwork for Thomas Kent’s argument a couple of decades later that all writing is interpretive, Vatz argues that all situations are interpretive, and thus it is misleading to say that rhetors simply “respond” to a situation when the very act of perceiving and describing the situation is what constructs it in the first place (156). Drawing heavily on Burkean constructivism, Vatz argues that because there is always a selection and

deflection of reality occurring in any person’s experience of exigence, as rhetors we do not so much respond to an objective exigence out there in the world but rather a perceived exigence that has been symbolically constructed (perhaps unknowingly) by ourselves as well as others.

However, Vatz’ perspective on the subjective nature of rhetorical situations veers too far into relativism. Situations are certainly up for individual interpretation, but they do not exist exclusively, as he claims, “in the head of the observer” (154). In fact, it is this kind of relativist, solipsistic thinking that leads to the perpetuation of anti-cyclist and anti-pedestrian discourse in the first place. Some people “interpret” the situation of a ghost bike as a haunting reminder of the damaging effects of unsafe road infrastructure while others will “interpret” it as an unfortunate accident reducible to the individual actions of a careless driver and/or cyclist.

Whereas rhetorical situations persuade audiences toward actions that resolve an exigence, situated rhetorics do not assume such audiences yet exist and thus works to foster the formation of audiences. In Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm, Thomas Kent argues that writing “is a practice that cannot be captured by a generalizable process.” Post- process theorists generally agree on three primary tenets in conceptualizing the act of writing: writing is public, interpretive, and situated (1). For Kent, “we write always in a relation with others….at specific historical moments and in specific relations with others.” As a result, “no process can capture what writers do during these changing moments and within these changing relations” (2). In other words, writers are always situated “somewhere” (2).

Sidney I. Dobrin builds on this idea of situated rhetorics in his essay “Writing Takes

Place,” where he claims that in order for writing to engage others in any kind of meaningful exchange “it must situate itself in context; it must grow from location” (18). Dobrin continues:

“Writing does not begin in the self; rather, writers begin writing by situating themselves, by

putting themselves in a place, by locating within a space” (18-19). To situate (to write) is to generate. For Dobrin, writing is an emergent act that moves beyond and against (i.e. “grow from”) its point of origin. To situate, then, is not to demarcate rigid boundaries or isolate a defect

(i.e. Bitzerian exigence) to be (re)solved. Rather, to situate is an act (of writing) that occurs alongside the exigence in such a way that it propagates and “grows” across seemingly disparate social, political, and rhetorical registers.

In her article “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to

Rhetorical Ecologies,” Jenny Edbauer describes how thinking of rhetoric as responses to

“situations” creates a stabilized conception of rhetorical exchange. Edbauer goes on to argue that public issues and events are positioned within wider “affective ecologies” that “bleed” across the seemingly stable discursive boundaries we define as “situation” (9). Edbauer draws on Barbara

Biesecker to level her main critique with the concept of “rhetorical situation,” writing that “the problem with many takes on rhetorical situation is their tendency to conceptualize rhetoric within a scene of already-formed, already-discrete individuals” (7). As a result, rhetoric becomes a mechanism for moving rational individuals to action or belief rather than a process of identity formation.

However, Edbauer’s most important move in this article is in her mapping of the logic of elemental rhetorics onto theories of location. An elemental approach to rhetoric remains firmly rooted in the field, as Edbauer points out, with many descriptions of rhetorical situations merely appearing as a neat categorization of a series of discrete elements: audience, exigence, writer, text. Edbauer describes how this elemental approach to situation obscures our perspective on the mutually constitutive relationship between publics and locations: “Our sense of place tends to remain rooted in an imaginary that describes communities as a collection of discrete elements”

(10). In contrast, Edbauer views locations as emerging from the links between such elements, or

“the in-between en/action of events and encounters” tied to a location (10). As Michael Warner points out, publics are not a series of discrete elements but rather emerge from the circulation of discourse; likewise, spaces are not a series of discrete objects or materials but rather emerge from the rhetorical connections between different human and nonhuman actors (413).

We do not find rhetorics pre-existing in locations; rhetorics participate in the “intensities” already circulating within a location (Edbauer, 14). Thinking of situations as “ecologies” shifts the function of digital public texts like augmented reality overlays and GPS-based audio tours.

These “texts” are meant to spur further public discourse and creation. Ghost bikes, much like the rhetorical movement of the “Keep Austin Weird” slogan that Edbauer traces in her article, are not merely arguments designed to get people to drive slower, fight unsustainable suburban sprawl, or appreciate the fragility of life (although they might do these things). Rather, the rhetorical energy of the ghost bike resides in its pluralization as a material network of rhetorically ambiguous objects across a petrocentric urban landscape. This network sustains the grounds for an emergent public rhetoric that a public must respond to via social interaction:

“What are these things? They are ghost bikes. What’s a ghost bike? It commemorates the death of a cyclist who was killed by a vehicle. Why are there so many of them?”

Of course, as the scene I referenced at the beginning of this chapter demonstrates, this is not always how the script plays out. The ambiguity of the ghost bike forces a rhetorical improvisation between different members of a community (drivers, cyclists, pedestrians), the spaces that they inhabit together (intersections, red lights, sidewalks), and the public policies that shape their interactions (new road designs, speed limit changes). When an activist locks up a ghost bike to commemorate the death of a friend, loved one, or fellow cyclist, they (re)situate the

space, thereby catalyzing a distributed, affective public response capable of breaking up the stagnant discourses that often emerge when a problem becomes normalized in public consciousness.

Emergent Rhetorics and the Public (Sp)heres of Discourse

Around the same time that Bitzer was penning his rhetorical situation, Jurgen Habermas was completing work on a similarly influential text about the historical emergence of the “public sphere.” Although Habermas published The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in

1962, it did not begin to circulate in American scholarship until it was translated to English in the early 1990s. Habermas’s central claim rests on his description of the historical emergence of the public sphere out of the bourgeois society of the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries.

This sphere, argues Habermas, was vital to the development of democratic ideals because it allowed for the formation of “public opinion” within an arena that encourages critical reflection about the actions and policies of the state. Habermas describes this newfound public sphere as an extension of activities previously confined to the household. In the newly founded reading rooms, salons, and public houses of early capitalist economies, “private people [came] together as a public” for the first time to debate issues of the day (27).

Habermas points out that the circulation of print newspapers began around the same time as the development of the first commercial markets in fourteenth-century Europe, explaining that market-based economies “required more frequent and more exact information about distant events” (16). Merchants organized and maintained these early public writing networks, thereby laying the framework for a system of information circulation that would prove vital to the development of “publicness” as a historical concept linked to the circulation of print text. For this reason, the development of the Habermasian public sphere is inextricable from the rise of capitalism. As individuals began to accumulate private property (and therefore private wealth),

they began to critique the prevailing power structures and political leadership. They did this primarily through 1) physical gatherings in public salons and coffeehouses (32-33), and 2) engaging in written exchange through the emerging circulation of print newspapers, books, and

“moral weeklies” (43). These socio-economic conditions allowed for the emergence of concepts like “public opinion,” which could now be wielded as a form of public rhetorical agency to check state power.

Habermas describes public opinion as emerging out of a dialectical process of critical debate between rational individuals. Public opinion played out in the “battlefield of ideas,” so to speak, with the prevailing opinion(s) being the most rational, presumably. For Habermas, rational debate was the great social equalizer: “The parity on whose basis alone the authority of the better argument could assert itself against that of the social hierarchy and in the end carry the day meant, in the thought of the day, the parity of ‘common humanity’” (36). In these places of informal public congregation (coffeehouses, etc.), individuals “disregarded status altogether”

(36). Although Habermas clarifies that this equality was not realized in actual practice, it nonetheless held great sway over how the concept of public discourse and debate evolved into a term that assumes an even playing field for each individual, regardless of social status or cultural markers like race, gender, sexual orientation, class, and ethnicity.

In linking the rise of publicness to the practice of critical-rational debate, Habermas is forced to pin the decline of the public sphere on the emergence of mass media manipulation, especially the rise of industries like advertising, public relations, and marketing, which

Habermas claims serve to polarize individuals into smaller groups based on feeling and belief3.

For Habermas, the degradation of the public sphere is linked to the shift from critical public reflection of culture to uncritical public consumption of culture (175). As institutions began to

replace people, Habermas claims that “private people [were] forced to have their publicly relevant claims advocated collectively” (176). With the emergence of global capitalism came a loss of individual and public agency; publics are no longer masses of people but rather pre- existing institutions with established beliefs, ideologies, and policies that can be purchased but not developed and formed via discursive exchange with other members of the public: “Whereas formerly the press was able to limit itself to the transmission and amplification of the rational- critical debate of private people assembled into a public, now conversely this debate gets shaped by the mass media to begin with” (188).

In Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere,

Christian Weisser admits that Habermas’s notion of the public sphere is problematic in its myopic view of “public opinion” as reducible to a specific historical moment and particular socio-economic strata. However, he notes that it is useful in articulating how “the public sphere is a site where the bracketing of difference is perhaps an important feature of public discourse”

(88). The public sphere is a place of commonality; although difference can never be elided in public rhetorical interaction, most common assumptions of the function of public discourse assume an arena of common concern, equal access, and shared language. The genres of public interaction (message forums, open letters, speeches, assembly meetings, etc.) work to establish a shared platform for rhetorical exchange. They are a means of “social action,” as Carolyn Miller describes them, creating a context for participating in agential public action directed at resolving a shared exigence.

For the most part, writing and rhetoric scholars have taken up Habermas’ concept of the

“public sphere” to focus on “public writing,” which Weisser defines as “written discourse that attempts to engage an audience of local, regional, or national groups or individuals in order to

bring about progressive societal change” (90). Weisser sees the field’s focus on public writing as a natural outgrowth of the historical tension between focusing on individual writers

(expressivism) and social forms of knowledge production (constructivism) (90). Public writing was seen as a way of addressing the primary concerns and pedagogical aims of each approach.

The point of public writing for Weisser is to get students to understand the vital role that discourse plays as a generative force within society: “When a student’s writing generates further public discussion or leads to some societal change, he or she comes to see how discourse is deeply implicated in the structures of power in a society” (92).

However, as Weisser points out, the genres of public discourse have grown stale. Like the habituated actions of stop-and-go traffic, public discourse is often routinized, predictable, and undesired. It lacks rhetorical oomph. Reading a letter-to-the editor or a widely shared Facebook post might provide new information or a new perspective on some important issue, but the reader rarely sees such texts as agents of change embedded into the material reality of everyday life (at least not yet).

Location-based rhetorical interventions like ghost bike installments are distinct in that they are designed not so much to sway individual minds (i.e. the logic of bourgeois capitalism) but rather to create and sustain a rhetorical space where members of a public can witness discourse affecting others. In her introduction to Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner

Relations, Diane Davis poses a question that highlights the irreducible connection between publicness and rhetoric: “What would it mean for our theories of social change or public sphere studies if it could be shown that the speaking subject is the product neither of self-determination nor of structural overdetermination but instead emerges, each time, according to a relationality and responsivity irreducible to dramatistic mappings?” (3). As Davis points at, relationality and

responsivity are vital components to public discourse. Thus, it is more important for public writing and rhetoric scholars to consider the elements through which this discourse can emerge rather than the ossified discursive structures (and their genre frameworks) that circumscribe difference from the outset. Communication and publicness arises from response, and response

(or even types of response) cannot be determined beforehand:

For there to be any sharing of symbolic meaning, any construction of a common enemy or collective goal, any effective use of persuasive discourse at all, a more originary rhetoricity must already be operating, a constitutive persuadability and responsivity that testifies, first of all, to a fundamental structure of exposure (Davis 3).

Ghost bikes expose a public not only to the specific argument being made (i.e. drive carefully) but to the very possibility of public persuasion itself. The argument itself is nothing new: drivers drive, pedestrians and cyclists get hit. “So what?”, we might ask, driving by in our comfortable, air-conditioned cars. “What am I supposed to do about it?” Ghost bikes engage with unsustainable, petrocentric infrastructure at the level of affect, evoking visceral, embodied responses from people accustomed to interacting with public issues through Habermassian critical-rational thinking.

In “Rhetoric and Event: The Embodiment of Lived Events,” Phil Bratta clarifies why rhetorical theory has traditionally bracketed embodiment from analyses of public discourse. He points out that the very term “public discourse” places emphasis on the verbal/textual components of public life and social interaction:

Rhetorical theory is rife with (implicitly or explicitly) privileging verbal, as well as alphabetic written, communication use for collective action because of the idea of clear claims, data, and warrants. These theories that connect rhetoric to democratic practice and civic engagement often subjugate or simply neglect the body due to the body’s lack of clear rhetorical features.

The “lack of clear rhetorical features” characterizing ghost bike rhetorics moves us out of those routinized discursive pathways that guide our thoughts, feelings, and actions in public spaces,

forcing us to interact with a location’s historical, cultural, and political contradictions as a felt

“event.” But if public change happens through events, then how do rhetors participate within and create a platform for public rhetorical exchange?

In her introduction to The Private, the Public, and the Published: Reconciling Private

Lives and Public Rhetoric, Barbara Couture distinguishes between “public expression” and

“public discourse.” For Couture, “public expression” is a mere display of public engagement, a kind of representation of private beliefs or actions made public (e.g. reality television, highly curated social media postings). Such public actions are certainly rhetorical, but they do not actively engage an audience in deliberation or public-identity-forming discourse. Rather, they merely present identities, opinions, and ideologies that a consumer-based audience can either accept or reject (6). Public discourse, on the other hand, is less a display and more “a conversation that may result in the speaker reconsidering his or her identity in light of what is learned about others and vice versa” (6 emphasis added). Public discourse must maintain open the possibility of identity formation (or reformation) in light of the public interaction taking place. However, when identity formation is viewed as private rather than public, public discourse merely becomes a place for stating and defending established beliefs (i.e. public expression) rather than working through them. As such, the public sphere is reserved for matters for “which there can be no disagreement” (11). In such a system, public opinions and identities may circulate, but they don’t change.

For Dobrin, the very distinction between “public” and “private” discourse elides the importance of location and obscures alternative “discursive possibilities” within different discursive moments. Discourse is inextricable from location; discourse is situated (219). In his chapter “Going Public: Locating Public/Private Discourse,” Dobrin elaborates a paralogic notion

of rhetoric, which he defines as the idea that “each moment of communicative interaction is singularly unique and that the ways in which we interpret our communicative moments are not codifiable or verifiable in any logical manner” (219). Public discourse is difficult (if not impossible) to analyze because there are far too many contingent variables that fluctuate from moment to moment; it is both “product and purveyor of social interaction” (220). The function of public discourse is to feed back in on itself. Thus, if it is cut off in this process, as in Couture’s notion of public expression, then publics can never engage in discursive maneuvers that correlate to any real social change.

Discourse shapes and is shaped by location: “Discourse is a place-based technology, a thing that is altered to the needs of a particular context, made by that context, and ultimately the very thing that makes that context” (Dobrin, 222). In other words, discourse is ecological. Not only in the sense that discourse is inextricable from specific locations (real or imagined, contemporary or historical) but that discourse participates in the construction of a complex system of mutually constitutive rhetorical interaction. The point of an AR intervention on cycling advocacy in a location like Jacksonville, then, is not to participate in or even to shape public discourse about this topic. Rather, the point is to situate information about this location in such a way that micropublic discourses might arise, ones capable of piercing through the petrocentric rhetoric and topoi of cycling deaths as unfortunate, isolated accidents between private citizens.

But just because public agency is dispersed, affective, and emergent, that does not mean it is incapable of engaging in political and social action. In their response article “‘Ouija Board,

Are There Any Communications?’ Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist

Subject, Or, Continuing the ARS Conversation,” Christian Lindberg and Joshua Gunn seek to complicate what they see as the straw-man version of postmodern agency erected by Cheryl

Gleiser in her 2004 report on the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies. Through a reading of Derrida,

Lacan, and Foucault, Lindberg and Gunn triangulate a postmodern notion of agency, claiming that agency is a radically contingent, “fragmentary” phenomenon dependent “on generative systems beyond the seat of an insular individual consciousness” (86). In her 2004 report, Gleiser claims that postmodernists declare subjectivity as an illusion, and in doing so ignore subjectivity completely. However, Lindberg and Gunn point out that critiquing the ontology of subjectivity is not the same thing as denying its existence and efficacy in the world (87). Thus, they seek to reorient discussions about postmodern agency away from the question “how ought we to understand the concept of rhetorical agency?” and towards a discussion of “where do we locate responsibility when agency is exercised?” (94).

The “Death Drive(r)s” ARC locates responsibility not in an external agent disconnected from the scene, but in the members of the public circulating within the location. Responsibility is both accepted and rejected as members of the public respond with disgust, repulsion, empathy, indifference, anger, and/or any combination of feeling to the mundane tragedies within our everyday public spaces. The kind of public audiences for whom ARCs are designed are localized and specific. As I discuss in further detail in my next section, the discursive strategies which previously served as reliable rhetorical pathways for navigating the politics of a space are made strange when the rhetorics of that space are amplified.

Rhetorical Invention as Amplification

Amplification is one of the oldest tricks in the book. Stemming from the Greek word

“auexisis,” meaning “growth” or “increase,” amplification, in its most general sense, simply refers to the process of adding more words to a speech or text in order to emphasize certain ideas, create repetition, and/or to clarify a point. Amplification can also refer to a stylistic technique of adding more information to a sentence or paragraph to maximize its rhetorical

efficacy. In his Handbook of Rhetorical Devices, Robert A. Harris describes amplification as the use of “repetition plus detail” in order to emphasize and/or clarify an idea. In this sense, amplification is a technique used by writers to make a text more specific and clear. It is not merely adding unnecessary words or being verbose.

The concept of rhetorical amplification dates to Erasmus, one of the first rhetoricians to explore amplification as a form of rhetorical invention. In his De Copia, Erasmus demonstrates that by articulating different versions of the same general idea or concept (even at the level of the sentence) writers not only expand their understanding of an existing idea but actively generate new ideas through language variation. Erasmus demonstrates this concept through his infamous two-hundred sentence variation on the phrase “Always, as long as I live, I shall remember you”

(Laib, 451). It is through this copia, or seeming rhetorical excess, that stylistic variation intersects with rhetorical invention. Or, as Gideon O. Burton describes it on “Silva Rhetoricae,” the “means for varying and repeating kinds of expression...overlap with means for developing ideas or content” (“figures of amplification”). Form and content have never been separate; concepts and ideas are themselves realized via their amplification through different words and their placement within different contexts.

Rhetors say the same thing in different ways in order to 1) maximize the clarity of their argument, and, in so doing, 2) persuade an audience to accept it. In this sense, amplification is a fundamental principle of effective rhetoric, referring in a very general sense to how writers arrange language in order to maximize their chances of achieving a particular rhetorical goal. As

Kenneth Burke remarks, amplification is akin to the use of a refrain in a musical composition. In

A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke describes amplification as “the saying of something in various ways until it increases in persuasiveness by the sheer accumulation” (69). Much like the refrain

of a song, amplification is repetition with a difference; the words (although the same) change as they are placed in different sections of a composition, whether textual or musical.

In his article “Conciseness and Amplification,” Nevin Laib discusses how composition pedagogy often participates in an unreflective glorification of “concision” that can have the unintended effect of promoting a paucity of thought and complexity in student writing: “We need to encourage profuseness as well as concision, to teach not just brevity but also loquacity, the ability to extend, vary, and expatiate upon one’s subject at length, to shape, build, augment, or alter the force and effect of communication, and to repeat oneself inventively” (443). Writing teachers are often wary of amplification because it can appear as an attempt by the student to merely fulfill the assigned word count (which it might very well be). Moreover, we often actively discourage repetition in student papers, stating that repetitive prose wastes readers’ time.

However, as Laib points out, amplification is an important component of rhetorical invention; as writers, we always repeat ourselves, but the trick with amplification is to learn how to “repeat oneself inventively.” Amplification “is not the addition of superfluous material to the text but an essential part of explanation itself, a basic skill of interpretation and inquiry, a means through which we explore and articulate what we perceive and what we mean” (Laib, 449 emphasis added). To repeat is never to repeat the exact same thing; and to extend or elaborate on an idea is always to have an element of repetition. Repetition and elaboration are two sides of the same coin; you can’t have one without the other. Amplification is not only a method of expanding existing ideas but a means of discovering new ones. Amplifying something is not taking the same thing and making more of it. Rather, like articulation, it is taking a particular quality of a thing (in the case of ghost bikes, ubiquity) and emphasizing it, thereby extending it into something new.

In On the Sublime, Longinus describes amplification as a kind of “dwelling,” indicating that amplification creates a rhetorical space of reflection for the reader/listener (117). By repeating an idea (even in different words), the reader is forced to confront its magnitude.

Amplification and magnitude are deeply intertwined. According to Aristotle, magnitude refers to the extent to which a rhetor communicates events or ideas that “can be easily embraced by the memory” (Farrell, 6). As Thomas B. Farrell describes Aristotelian magnitude, it is “a sort of inventional logic for what sort of perspective is needed to size up and take in actions and events”

(7). The “magnitude” of an argument cannot be so large that the audience to unable to ascertain its import and yet it cannot be so small that it is deemed of little significance. In this sense, magnitude refers to the ability of the audience to not only comprehend but to act upon the implications of an argument.

Ghost bikes create an affective opening for rhetorical action toward public concerns whose magnitude is normally far too expansive for individual people. Magnitude interacts with the rhetoric of ghost bikes in this way: the individual death is too small in magnitude. It is a death, and is mourned, but what is to be done? This single death is too small on its own, too circumstantial to specific people and events, to respond to. However, the public crises that ghost bikes seek to address, issues like suburban sprawl, petrocentric road designs, and aggressive drivers, are all too big in magnitude; a public has no response for these issues because they are not “easily embraced” in the same way as a ghost bike. Ghost bikes, when positioned as nodal links across the network of the city, map the affective responsiveness a public feels toward individual death onto the silent, routinized public values—i.e. petrocentrism—that caused them.

They map personal intensity onto public apathy.

We typically conceive of intersections as “non-places” (Auge). The intersection is common and pragmatic, perpetuating a perception of public interaction as tense and undesirable.

Ghost bikes disrupt the nonplace of the intersection by contradicting its functional imperative to safely and efficiently coordinate the mobility of citizens (cars, public transit passengers, cyclists, pedestrians, etc.) through a space. Although individual ghost bikes all look visually similar they all tell a different story in response to the questions they prompt in passersby: Were they hit by a drunk driver? Was the light at the crosswalk broken? Is this road safe for cyclists? The ubiquity of the ghost bike across the petrocentric urban landscape amplifies these personal deaths, connecting them to public concerns like drunk driving, outdated infrastructure, and car-centric road design. Ghost bikes rewrite mundane public spaces. In my next section, I describe how this connection between the personal and the public plays out within the context of the “Death

Drive(r)s ARC,” which attempts to create a digital public network of ghost bikes in the city of

Jacksonville, FL. Drawing on Ulmer’s theory of MEmorial, the project demonstrates how the ghost bike works to bring to light the unspoken sacrifices of petroculture, from pedestrian and cyclist deaths to suburban sprawl.

Beyond Exceptional Public Subjects

If you walk through any major American city for an extended period, you are likely to come across some kind of location-based text, such as a statue or a historical marker. Such texts teach the members of a community about the identity and culture associated with a specific place. For instance, visitors might look to them for answers to questions like: Who was here a century ago? What happened here in the 1960s? Where did this park get its name? Who died here last weekend? No matter the media used to “augment” a location—signs, monuments, statues, flyers—they come to serve as instructions for how a specific place should be “read” by those who inhabit it.

100

Physical monuments and memorials demonstrate the degree to which social and cultural memory is attached to physical spaces and objects, and that when a society wants to remember something—an event, a person, an idea—it installs material reminders of it within public spaces so that they are unavoidable in our everyday lives. They are material markers whose physical presence is not only intended to represent but to materially enact collective remembrance. In many cases, memorials are designed to (literally) get in the way of the quotidian activities of public life. The German artist Gunter Demnig, for instance, has been installing “stolpersteins”

(or “stumbling stones”) throughout Europe since the early 1990’s. For his project, Demnig placed small, concrete stones outside of the last freely chosen place of residency for those sent away to Nazi concentration camps. As memorials, stolpersteins are designed to be intrusive, to carve time out of people’s habituated routes as they walk by and “stumble” upon them. Such memorials are designed so that the memories of events that a society would rather forget or move past become embedded into public spaces and choreographed into a public’s mobility within a space.

Memorials, as Gregory Ulmer points out in Electronic Monuments, use this kind of public performativity to overcome “compassion fatigue” (xxxiv). They are the “external records of the civilization,” forcing recognition of the sacrifices that were made to maintain cultural values like freedom, equality, and civil rights (14). What differentiates a memorial from a

MEmorial, however, is the nature of the sacrifice being recognized. Memorials recognize official sacrifices (like war casualties); MEmorials recognize unofficial sacrifices (like traffic fatalities).

MEmorials rearticulate accidents “as sacrifice…[shifting] them from the private sphere of one- at-a-time individual, personal loss to the public sphere of collective values” (43). Ulmer continues: “What memorials are to ideals, MEmorials are to abjects. The place to look for

101

formless values is not in social narratives but in the habitus of behaviors” (43 emphasis added).

MEmorials intervene into habituated patterns of behavior, resonating at the register of bodily engagement and thereby connecting personal affect to public value.

Ulmer encourages MEmorialization as a rhetorical practice by offering a set of guidelines for designing a MEmorial. The first step “is to notice an abject loss that the community acknowledges is a problem but that is not accepted as a sacrifice on behalf of a belief or value structuring a group subject” (134). We do not often view pedestrian and cyclist fatalities as sacrifices that structure public and spatial identities. However, ghost bikes force us to recognize the public consequences of individual actions, thereby (per)forming “a mapping between the individual and the collective” (14). Ghost bikes are similar to Demnig’s Stolpersteins in that they are designed to be intrusive and uncomfortable, inserting themselves into the mundane space of the urban intersection, highway, or county road.

In his seminal essay “Publics/Counterpublics,” Michael Warner argues that authentic public discourses must contain emergent qualities, writing that a public “can only produce a sense of belonging and activity if it is self-organized through discourse rather than through an external framework” (415). Because it does not exist prior to discourse, a “public” is less an objective entity susceptible to persuasion than an emergent network of rhetorical acts (413). Of course, as Jenny Rice points out, public rhetorics always run the risk of devolving into more static and divisive genres of public deliberation (5). This subject position, which Rice terms the

“exceptional public subject,” obfuscates any clear path to effective public action and/or advocacy by residing between the boundaries of public and private life, thus sustaining a space of public discourse marked by apathy and distance.

102

Public subjectivities of exception are inextricable from the material structures that produce them, and, to a greater or lesser extent, all members of a society participate in this public subject position. Public spaces are sustained as mundane through discourses of exception, or an unconscious disengagement from the rhetoricality of one’s environment. As a member of a community of drivers, for instance, we might feel a weak connection to the consequences that our driving has on society as a whole, a feeling reinforced by discourses of self-exception (i.e. “I drive a fuel-efficient car,” “I vote for increased funding for public transit,” “I don’t drive under the influence,” “I have never hit a cyclist,” etc.). The problem is not that discourses of self- exception are untrue, but rather that they reinforce apathetic responses to public issues that absolve “us” from the issue: “I” have done nothing to create this problem, therefore, “I” am not responsible.

The sensorial experience of mundane spaces becomes normalized through repetition, thus weakening the public’s desire and/or ability to approach these spaces as unique, significant, and capable of change. Mundane public spaces, like an intersection, are designed according to functional concerns (e.g. driving) that override any aesthetics of dwelling. When we drive down a busy road, we perceive it in terms of its ability to help us accomplish a specific goal: moving from one place to another. The road is an interface for driving, and elements that conflict with the smooth functioning of this interface are quickly discarded and forgotten. Spacious interiors with A/C and radio insulate us from the noise and air pollution circulating within this space, shielding us from a sensorial engagement with the effects of petroculture and its material impact on public space. Physical ghost bikes function as a kind of intervention into a public’s perception of a space, forcing those who pass by them to acknowledge the sacrifices made on behalf of petrocentric road design. Ghost bikes, like any public monument, work rhetorically to shock the

103

quotidian activities of public life (e.g. driving), creating space for a moment of pause, reflection, and tragedy into speed-obsessed spaces. However, once they are removed, they no longer serve as cultural remembrance.

In order to create a critical space through which more engaged public subjectivities can emerge, Rice argues that we must take an approach to public rhetoric that “understands publics and their discourses as the best site for making interventions into material spaces” (7). To make effective rhetorical interventions into public issues, social advocacy must operate within the same discursive networks (digital as well as physical) through which disparate publics already

“intersect” rather than imposing unfamiliar “external framework[s]” (Warner, 415). The “Death

Drive(r)s” MEmorial invites stillness and contemplation, an affective posture in direct conflict with the material rhetoric of a busy street, which is a passageway, a space of motion, and any stillness that occurs within an intersection is forced and undesired. It seeks to subvert culturally normalized perceptions of a mundane public space. The application does not ask the user to do

(or to think) a specific thing. Rather, it merely attempts to invoke a sense of “spatial dissonance” between the information provided by the digital overlays and the mundane, petrocentric spaces upon which they are inscribed (Levine, 2014, p. 144).

Petrocentric spaces, particularly busy urban centers, force an activist label upon cyclists.

Unlike drivers, cyclists are vulnerable to even the most minor contact with a vehicle. As a result, cyclists are often forced to invoke a more aggressive attitude toward drivers for whom a minor fender bender or 15 mph crash is not a potentially fatal encounter. For a driver, this aggression is embedded into the car, which acts as an “armor” against the material reality of the road (Derrida,

8). The popular sketch comedy show Portlandia presents a parody of the cycling activist through the character Spike. In one of the more popular sketches, Spike is seen biking through the busy

104

downtown streets of Portland yelling “Bicycle rights!” and “Pull in your mirror!” at every driver within shouting distance. Like most of Portlandia’s characters, Spike is an endearing parody of hipster subculture, poking fun at the cyclist=activist trope. Similar to the reactions of most drivers to “overly aggressive” cyclists, Spike’s demands of drivers seem unnecessary and overbearing, particularly when he pulls up next to a fellow cyclist who seems to be riding on the road without any trouble. Overall, the sketch paints a portrait of the cycling activist who, like

Spike, is tough, loud, but ultimately harmless; in an actual battle of aggression between cars and bikes in a busy city like Portland, the biker loses every time.

An urban intersection is a continuous battle between cars, cyclists, and pedestrians as they all jockey for a transient territorial claim to this space. The affective stance of the urban intersection oscillates between attraction and repulsion: a position within this space is desired only insofar as it can be relinquished, or forgotten, as soon as possible. Because the physical infrastructure of petroculture requires the replication of the intersection across the urban landscape, this affective oscillation becomes routinized within the urban subject, and a rhetorical stance of forgetting is inscribed into the material discourse of public interaction. Consequently, the public’s predominant interactions with sprawling public spaces become unwelcome, insular experiences that allow its members to maintain rhetorical distance from the social and cultural consequences such spaces have upon the urban environment.

“Death Drive(r)s” promotes emergent public discourse through the juxtapositional logic of augmented reality. The application creates a perspectival shift for how motion and stasis interact within the public space of an intersection. Typically, when confronting an intersection, the public desires motion, and any form of stillness encountered within this space (e.g. stopping at a red light, a cyclist being struck by a vehicle, etc.) is unwanted. Whereas motion prompts

105

forgetting and erasure, reflection prompts remembrance and connectivity. Within the public space of the intersection, stasis is error and anomaly, a temporary rupture in the incessant motion of petroculture. Conversely, “Death Drive(r)s” inverts this motion/stasis hierarchy by superimposing digital versions of ghost bikes onto the physical space of the intersection. These electronic monuments promote stillness and reflection as desired states of being within the hectic, fast-paced spaces of petroculture.

When users view these areas through the mobile app, they see a digital ghost bike appear within the physical space of the intersection along with a link to this webtext. One of the key rhetorical affordances of AR technology is the interaction between physical and digital content.

Unlike virtual reality, which completely immerses the user in a digital world, AR utilizes the user’s physical context as a key rhetorical component of the experience. Ghost bike locations are typically busy intersections or roadways with little to no infrastructural support for cyclists. Site- specific augmented reality experiences like “Death Drive(r)s” operate at an affective, ritualized level for the members of a community. By participating in the material contingencies responsible for these cyclists’ deaths (e.g. broken crossing lights, poor road design, etc.), users of the application can reflect upon the broader social and cultural values perpetuated by these petrocentric spaces. Users who choose to engage with this electronic monument are participating in a practice of ritual as they move through space and honor the victims of petrocentric road design. “Death Drive(r)s” works against the normalization of dangerous roads and the pedestrian-shaming tactics of public safety initiatives. Unlike driving in a car, the public’s armor against petrocentric road design, the application forces users to “enact a different form of mobility” by “mediating their movement through mobile media and altering their sense of place”

(Frith, 46).

106

According to Walter Benjamin, the “aura” of an art object is intimately connected to place, being, and physical proximity. Benjamin writes that reproductions of original artworks lack “the here and now of the work of art—its unique existence in a particular place” (21). In many ways, AR seems antithetical to the “aura” of the ghost bike: in comparison to the haunting, uninvited materiality of the physical bike, the digital bikes in the “Death Drive(r)s” MEmorial seem ephemeral and unobtrusive. Unlike the physical bike, the augmented bike is non- compulsory, users can choose to see or not see it. To address this, “Death Drive(r)s” would

(ideally) utilize push-notifications to alert anyone within a predetermined radius that there was a digital ghost bike nearby. In this way, the digital (re)placement would work in a similar way to the physical ghost bike in that members of the public could not avoid knowing that death occurred at this location. Of course, mobile device users can determine if they want push notifications for specific apps, and anyone who didn’t want to know about a cycling death at a location could simply turn off notifications or choose not to download the app in the first place.

Public reaction to these hypothetical push-notifications reflect actual public reactions to the installation of physical ghost bikes: removal and silencing. Removing a physical ghost bike is like silencing the push-notifications that would alert the public to the abject sacrifices being made on behalf of petroculture.

The “apparition” of the digital bike augments the material rhetoric (car horns, screeching tires, speeding cars, etc.) of the city street, transforming the routine sights and sounds of a petroculture into signifiers of death. By augmenting these locations, “Death Drive(r)s” works to

(re)impose an aura of death onto the routinized imagery of petroculture. Because the digital and physical components of an augmented reality application mutually constitute one another, an element of dissonance is inscribed into the rhetorical core of the medium. The locations of ghost

107

bikes operate on the periphery of public concern: they are only noticed when they stop functioning properly and/or change in some way (such as when a ghost bike is installed).

In The Ecological Thought, Timothy Morton defines ecology as “all the ways we imagine how we live together” (4). In “ecological” terms, then, the urban intersection reinforces a public imaginary that conceives of “living together” as a contested and isolated experience that exempts

“me” from any feelings of ecological significance within this public space. “Death Drive(r)s” seeks to reshape “the ways we imagine how we live together” by providing a disjunctive space of public discourse that collapses the apathy-inducing distance between a cultural value (driving) and its effects (cyclist deaths). The application invites users to inhabit the public space of a cyclist’s death (typically a busy urban intersection) as a pedestrian or cyclist. Because they must be physically present at the location in order to access the augmentation, users of the app are encouraged to engage with the feeling of out-of-place-ness that comes from traversing a city like

Jacksonville as a non-motorist.

Conclusion

When a physical location is augmented with a digital memorial, both the location and the digital overlay participate in what Laurie Gries refers to as “mutual transformation” (56). Gries draws on the concept “mutual transformation” to describe rhetorical circulation as an ecological process that emerges when two or more rhetorical entities come into contact. In the case of the digital ghost bike, both the digital overlay and the specific location it seeks to articulate participate within emergent rhetorical configurations as users experience one in terms of the other. Moreover, the virtuality of the ghost bike reflects the relegation of cyclist and pedestrian casualties to society’s collective unconscious; these digital bikes (dis)appear as a MEmorial to the public’s unconscious acceptance of death every time we get behind the wheel of a car. In this

108

way, “Death Drive(r)s” reveals how a mundane public space like an intersection can operate as a site of public discourse, or a material-rhetorical space through which a society’s values circulate.

The emergence of digital, location-aware computing technologies like augmented reality are poised to transform a number of key concepts within writing studies and digital rhetoric, including “multimodality,” “public writing,” and “digital activism,” among many others.

However, if writing and rhetoric scholars are going to be leaders and innovators—rather than observers and critics—in transforming these terms, then we must continue to pursue research projects like ARCs that engage with emerging media and technologies at the level of production.

Notes

1 Ghost bikes are repurposed bicycles that have been spray painted white and placed at intersections where cyclists have been killed or seriously injured by a vehicle. The cycling advocacy organization ghostbikes.org maintains a website that documents ghost bike installations throughout the United States.

2 Petrocentrism naturalizes fossil fuel consumption and its effects on the environment. As we define it in our webtext, petrocentrism is the “monocultural dependence on fossil fuels...Petrocentrism can be contrasted with pluralist polyculture, which advocates for multiple perspectives, and, in the case of travel, denotes a host of alternative means of transportation that stand outside of, even in opposition to, the single-passenger, commuter automobile.”

3 Ulmer describes this shift as a move away from the literate binaries of true/false to the more affective and electrate binaries of attraction/repulsion toward the ultimate goal of “well-being” (“Introduction: Electracy”).

109

CHAPTER 4 COUNTERPUBLIC REMIXES WITH MOBILE AUGMENTED REALITY

Introduction

Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama Hope poster is one of the most widely circulated and remixed images in recent political history. From its use as an anti-Obama political advertisement to its function as a unifying symbol for transnational protests, Obama Hope has surfaced across a variety of media and genres as a platform for voicing political concerns, proving itself to be a highly adaptable visual icon for galvanizing public response. Obama Hope is “rhetorical” not only because of its persuasive power, as Laurie Gries suggests, but its ability to “organize and maintain collective formation”—to assemble, in other words, a diverse group of people for an even more diverse array of social, cultural, and political ends (11). If we read Gries’ claim about the galvanizing power of public images alongside Michael Warner’s theories of publics and counterpublics, we might say that the kind of circulation demonstrated through Obama Hope is the very rhetorical glue that holds “the public” together as a coherent socio-rhetorical phenomenon. To organize the collective actions of a disparate group of strangers, public texts must galvanize according to a “transparent and replicable” rhetoric (Warner 423).

Communicating messages of hope and progress throughout the 2008 presidential election,

Obama Hope was able to generate a “transparent and replicable” message that, in turn, played a significant role in “organizing and maintaining” a public of voters who responded to its message of positive political change.

However, as the poster’s simple political message and striking visual design combined with an emerging digital delivery network that operates according to a logic of remix and recomposition, it also galvanized public support against Obama, thereby demonstrating how powerful public images can be repurposed as sites of counterpublic resistance. According to

110

Warner, counterpublics are “constituted through a conflictual relation to the dominant public” and therefore must “fashion their own subjectivities around the requirements of public circulation” (423-24). As such, counterpublics often engage in a kind of ad hoc rhetorical strategy by remixing the textual and visual discourses of dominant publics as a way of refining and distributing their own counterpublic messages. The counterpublics that formed in response to Obama Hope ranged from conservative voters who read Obama’s message of “progress” as socialist propaganda to progressive activists who considered Obama’s campaign rhetoric as little more than pandering to neoliberal tropes of upward economic mobility. Although such counterpublics sought to disseminate very different messages about Obama Hope, they were similar in their reliance on visual remix as one of the primary rhetorical strategies for circulating rhetorics of resistance. What we learn from Obama Hope, then, is that although widely circulated public images “organize and maintain collective formation” of an intended public, they often simultaneously, and unintentionally, galvanize others to repurpose the “transparent and replicable” message of the image as a foil to support the production of their own counterpublic remixes (Warner 423).

For the purposes of this chapter, I define counterpublic remix as remixes created in response to a dominant public text (e.g. a highly televised speech, a company logo, a political slogan, etc.) that, as result of their circulation in digital and physical spaces, foster the formation of counterpublic identities. Drawing on counterpublic remixes created in response to Obama

Hope, I demonstrate how such remixes effectively galvanize counterpublics through their ability to isolate specific contradictions they see at play within dominant texts and the ideas, people, and/or events they depict. Counterpublic remixes rely on the viewer’s knowledge of the design aesthetic and public rhetorical function of the source text.

111

Like Barbara Warnick’s notion of parody as an intertextual phenomenon, creators of counterpublic remixes must “identify the relevant intertexts that enable a user to be able to understand what is being said” (105). As a form of intertextual parody, then, direct remixes position the audience as “a co-creator of meaning” (Loewe 8), thereby offering counterpublics a participatory platform through which they can “fashion their own subjectivities” through a shared act of rhetorical resistance (Warner 423-24).

In Michel Foucault’s estimation, acts of resistance against real and perceived power structures are always dispersed, emerging as a network of disparate moments and ruptures. He writes that “points of resistance are present everywhere in the network…there are a plurality of resistances, each of them a special case” (96). Counterpublic remixes of Obama Hope are each a

“special case” supporting an act of resistance to some aspect of the original. As such, each remix participates in a rhetorical engagement with a specific aspect of Obama Hope, thereby

“mobilizing groups or individuals in a definitive way” (96). Similar to the dominant publics through which they “fashion their own subjectivities,” counterpublics are created and sustained through ad hoc networks of intertextual circulation.

While data tracking technologies and methodologies are useful for analyzing and producing remixes of physical images, as Gries’ scholarship makes transparent, emerging augmented reality technologies are useful for analyzing and producing remixes of physical images. In this chapter, I present two uses for mobile AR for visual studies scholarship, and, using remixed and original versions of Obama Hope, I demonstrate how AR can function as a viable platform for analyzing and producing counterpublics remixes of widely circulated public images. By creating AR overlays for public images such as Obama Hope, I especially hope to demonstrate how mobile AR can activate what Robert Hariman and John Louis Lucaites refer to

112

as “engaged spectatorship,” or the process of “decontextualizing and recontextualizing in order to engage with different dimensions of the image, different perspectives on what it shows, and different conceptions of its audience” (29). Through AR, mobile writers can remix public images into dynamic nodes linking together a network of competing and overlapping counterpublic discourses.

Ultimately, this chapter claims that if visual studies scholars are going to “do” visual studies in an era of mobile computing, then we must begin to explore and exploit the rhetorical affordances of the various writing technologies—such as AR—that are beginning to emerge alongside it. However, we must avoid taking up mobile technologies as mere extensions of the logic of prior media forms (i.e. the personal computer). Rather, we must actively engage with the emerging rhetorics that such technologies afford us, such as the ability to remix physical images with digital media overlays. Moreover, in “making” digital texts through emerging mobile technologies like AR, we participate in an invention process not only for the text currently being produced, but for the medium itself. Or, as Sarah Arroyo puts it, “we learn technologies and new technological platforms simply through engaging with them.” Thus, when we create applications of mobile AR for visual studies scholarship, we are simultaneously “inventing” the visual, digital, and rhetorical possibilities of AR.

Analyzing Counterpublic Remixes

In their introduction to The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, Eduardo Navas,

Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough describe how “remix” was first popularized within New

York City’s disco and hip-hop cultures of the 1970s when DJ’s and musicians began to experiment with cutting and pasting audio tracks from records. Today, however, the term remix now refers more generally to “the act of using preexisting materials to create something new,”

113

whether splicing together YouTube videos to make an original movie, rearranging the letters in a poem, or even changing a few letters on a digital image (1 Navas et. al.).

In his chapter “A Rhetoric of Remix,” Scott H. Church builds from this definition to describe how writers and rhetors have always draw upon practices of remix for rhetorical invention. Church notes that one of the key rhetorical features of an effective remix is the rhetor’s ability to “[exploit and leverage] the audience’s understanding of the samples in their original contexts” (44). Although creating a remixed rhetorical object—whether a video, image, or print text—is necessarily the creation of “something new,” there are certain types of remix— such as those created in response to Obama Hope—that rely more directly upon a rhetorical interplay between the remix and the original. These types of remixes are most effective for galvanizing counterpublics because they not only reference a shared rhetorical encounter with the original, but they also reframe this past encounter through a shared critique. It is in this way that counterpublic remixes have the potential to “build common values” through practices of participatory recomposition (Ridolfo and DeVoss).

Writing and rhetoric scholars have used the concept of “remix” to rethink a number of key assumptions within the field, from the canon of delivery (Ridolfo and DeVoss), to the formation of knowledge via writing (Rice “Digital Aurality”), to the history of composition

(Palmeri). Although such applications certainly yielded generative insights, they collectively perpetuate a tendency within the field to use “remix” as a catch-all rhetorical framework for interpreting a diverse array of rhetorical practices and new media genres. In his article “Framing

Remix Rhetorically: Toward a Typology of Transformative Work,” Dustin W. Edwards points out that one of the effects of remix being applied to such disparate genres, modalities, and cultures is that the term “remix” has transformed into “a cumbersome, if not overwhelming,

114

concept,” thus becoming less useful as a theoretical and methodological framework for analyzing and creating remixed texts (42). In response to the generalization of “remix,” Edwards provides a typology that students and scholars can use as an entry point for engaging in different remix practices. Edwards four-part typology of remix includes:

• Assemblage: creating new texts out of a database of other texts • Reappropriation: altering existing texts to subvert meaning • Redistribution: circulating texts in alternate online spaces • Genre Play: texts that combine and/or subvert genre expectations

Although Edwards developed this typology through an analysis of a variety of media and genres, from YouTube videos to standardized tests, I use it in my final section as a rhetorical framework for creating counterpublic remixes through mobile AR. Categorization is not the only affordance of remix typologies. Remix typologies also provide generative models through which writers can create their own texts by combining and repurposing different categories of remix for alternate rhetorical ends. As I demonstrate in my next sections, one of the main rhetorical affordances of

AR technology for visual studies is providing an emerging digital-public platform through which mobile device users can create and access multimodal counterpublic remixes.

As Foucault writes, acts of resistance are “distributed in an irregular fashion: the points, the knots, the focuses of resistance are spread over time and space in varying densities” (96).

Moreover, not all acts of resistance are “a reaction or rebound” to a single message or image.

Many of the counterpublic rhetorics that circulated against Obama in his time as president were not direct counters to the message of Obama Hope specifically but are rather a network of disparate reactions against a more pervasive cultural narrative that the image comes to reinforce and represent. Such narratives, which I term “isotropic rhetorics,” have the potential to drown out these more distributed and complex counterpublic messages. However, by transposing the

115

typologies of remix outlined in this section into the multimodal affordances of AR, mobile writers can visualize these complex counterpublics and thus counteract the “isotropic” narratives that popular public images like Obama Hope may unintentionally perpetuate.

Public Images and Rhetorical Isotropy

“Isotropy” is a scientific concept used in the field of physics to describe substances or phenomena that maintain a uniform value regardless of their direction of travel. The term is a combination of the Greek words “iso” (meaning “equal”) and “tropos” (meaning “way”). An isotropic antenna, for instance, emits omnidirectional sound waves according to the same degree of intensity and duration.

However, isotropic antennas do not exist; they are merely a theoretical reference point used to calibrate actual antennas. Antennas are anisotropic, meaning they emit wave particles with uneven intensity that shift according to the direction in which they travel. “Isotropy,” in other words, is a theoretically uniform, but physically impossible, distribution of energy from a central source.

Isotropy is a useful conceptual framework for thinking about the rhetorical circulation public images, which, much like the isotropic antenna, are in theory designed to induce uniform public response but, in practice, instigate a range of counter-rhetorical effects. Certain public images work toward a theoretically uniform model of rhetorical distribution by bringing together complex events into the confines of a single frame and working to attune public action to a consistent rhetorical wavelength. For instance, images of three-year old Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy whose body washed ashore in 2015 after his family tried to escape a refugee camp, prompted international outrage over the growing Syrian refugee crisis. Tragic or striking public images in particular can be powerful rhetorical objects for galvanizing public action and shaping public perceptions about particular events, issues, and communities. In her book About to Die:

116

How News Images Move the Public, Barbara Zelizer points out that public images, particularly emotionally powerful ones, operate according to a subjunctive logic by focusing on “what could be rather than what is” (14). These kinds of images, she writes, “[situate] action within the hypothetical,” thereby working to activate potential action within a diverse public audience.

This future-oriented propensity of public images reinforces their isotropic function: public images strive to, ideally, establish a consistent wavelength of rhetorical energy with the aim of galvanizing a desired public response (e.g. outrage) and channeling it toward collective action (e.g. work toward global solution to the Syrian refugee crisis). To “organize and maintain” a disparate group of strangers, the image must galvanize according to a consistent, replicable, and uniform logic that maintains semi-uniform rhetorical force regardless of the context in which it is placed. Without a doubt, the images of Kurdi crystallized a powerful moment of global tragedy, and its circulation on social media helped galvanize a public identity united through shared feelings of anger and heartbreak. Indeed, during the height of the image’s circulation, refugee charity organizations reported donation increases of 70% in some cases (Henley, et.al.).

However, in the wake of his son’s death, Alan Kurdi’s father lamented the fact that despite the amount of global attention that the image of his son received, the death toll of Syrian refugees continued to climb (Dearden). In this case, the isotropic function of the image—galvanizing a public through a uniform rhetorical message—perpetuated a contradictory perception of the

Syrian refugee crisis as intransigent and potentially unsolvable. “If images of a dead child cannot move the world to action,” so this collective public logic went, “then what will?”

Political images like Obama Hope also strive for an ideal rhetorical distribution model akin to the isotropic antenna: they seek to create uniform rhetorical effects in a diverse public audience (i.e. vote for Obama). As Hariman and Lucaites point out, the idea that public images

117

are “limited to communicating specific information to a specific audience about a specific event” is one of the main misconceptions of the rhetorical function of public images (29). As a way of counteracting this misconception, Hariman and Lucaites propose the idea of “engaged spectatorship,” which they describe as “practice in selecting and reframing images within settings that are both personal and public, shared and subject to debate” (30). In other words, engaged spectatorship encourages the viewer to conceive of the public image less as an aesthetic object or individually authored social commentary and more as a node linking together disparate, and even conflictual, public discourses.

Although certainly not as shocking as images of death, Obama Hope functioned isotropically by attuning Obama’s voter base to a consistent message of political and racial progress. Similar to how images of Kurdi perpetuated public perceptions of the Syrian refugee crisis as unsolvable, political images like Obama Hope can also perpetuate unintended narratives about the events, people, and ideas they depict. Fairey’s original poster depicted a “deracialized” portrait of Obama, one that could capture his campaign message of equal opportunity for all

Americans, regardless of race1. Thus, although Obama Hope’s message helped Obama win the presidency, it also worked to perpetuate a “transparent and replicable” narrative of racial unification that may have worked to elide some of the criticisms that Obama faced from African-

American activists and community leaders throughout his presidency that he did not do enough to address issues of racial inequality.

Writers and activists such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kwame Rose, for instance, have cited

Barack Obama’s tendency to skirt racial issues and race-specific policies throughout his presidency. Moreover, others have claimed that Obama’s election as the first black president, although an important moment in establishing both real and symbolic racial progress, may have

118

unintentionally prompted revisionist perceptions of race relations in America. As African-

American Studies professor William A. Darity recently wrote, “For many white Americans

[Obama’s] election confirmed their belief that American racism is a thing of the past.” As Darity points out, there is a danger in Obama’s historic achievement being exploited to support racist, revisionist arguments that we live in a “post-racial” society. Darity writes that for many black

Americans, particularly those of his father’s generation who lived under Jim Crow-era racism,

“any criticism of Obama” was viewed as “bringing aid and comfort to white supremacists.”

Thus, there has been a tendency in some African-American communities to instinctively shield

Obama from any form of critique about his approach to race-specific policies.

Civil rights journalist Julia Craven claims that having a president who is shielded from criticism due to the symbolic power of his election “leaves us with nothing but the grand symbolism of having a black president, which, while important, doesn’t amend real problems facing black Americans — like police violence or the racial wealth gap.” Indeed, Craven refers to Obama as a kind of “deity” within many African-American communities whose symbolic power as the nation’s first African-American president “insulated him from criticism.” Through this, perceptions of support for Obama can take on a similar kind of revisionism (i.e. that Obama was unilaterally adored by all African-Americans). In turn, critiques of the Obama administration from prominent black writers and activists could potentially become eclipsed by the isotropic historical narrative reinforced by Obama Hope as a marker of America’s transition to a “post- racial” society.

In my next section, I demonstrate how AR can be used to intervene into this isotropic narrative, thereby providing an access point to the diverse array of black counter-rhetorics that began to arise throughout Obama’s presidency and into the burgeoning Black Lives Matter

119

movement. The augmentation in my final section models how the remix typologies discussed in my first section might be repurposed to foster more in-depth counterpublic remixes that have the potential to activate an “engaged spectatorship” of public images.

Producing Counterpublic Remixes

Digital activists have already started to experiment with the potential of AR technologies to remix visual culture. In 2011, for instance, a group of digital artists collaborated to create a counterpublic remix of Times Square in New York City. The project, known as the AR/AD

Takeover, was a smartphone application that allowed people to superimpose digital messages over physical advertisements (Tinnell “Computing en plein air” 76). One augmentation remixed an advertisement so that it simply displayed the word “Breathe,” thereby repurposing the commodification of public space for a public service message. According to the creators, the kind of counterpublic remix modeled in this project helps us to imagine how AR might be used to “transform, filter, and democratize the messaging in public space” (“AR AD Takeover”).

More recently, in early 2015, a group of undergraduate students at the University of

Pennsylvania created the “Brandkiller” AR application. Designed to be used with an optical display such as Google Glass, the application blocks any physical advertisements in the viewer’s line of sight. As these applications demonstrate, mobile AR has the potential to revolutionize how counterpublic remixes circulate in relation to visual culture.

In “Composition and the Circulation of Writing,” John Trimbur claims that delivery is an essential component of public discourse. Trimbur argues that we should stop thinking about delivery as a mere “technical aspect of public discourse” and more as “a democratic aspiration to devise delivery systems that circulate ideas, information, opinions, and knowledge and thereby expand the public forums in which people can deliberate on the issues of the day” (190).

Augmenting public images with mobile AR technologies offers a new kind of “delivery system”

120

for circulating counternarratives to the isotropic rhetorics such images can perpetuate. However, as John Tinnell points out, mobile AR as a platform for counterpublic remix is not likely to catch on as a mass medium until AR creators “become more attentive to matters of content creation”

(70). In other words, mobile device users are not likely to engage with AR as a medium unless there exist compelling AR experiences to engage with in the first place.

Thus, this section presents a model of how mobile AR can be used to circulate counterpublic remixes in relation to widely circulated public images. The augmentation in figure

5-1 overlays multimedia content that provides a more complex portrait of the counter-rhetorics that circulated in response to Obama’s approach to race relations throughout his presidency.

Figure 5-1. Mobile device screenshot of augmented reality remix.

This counterpublic remix combines the remix strategies introduced in the first section with the design techniques outlined in the Visualizing Information for Advocacy Handbook

(VIFA). Created by a team of designers and activists, VIFA is a free resource that provides design strategies for promoting advocacy initiatives. By combining these two strategies, mobile

121

writers can design more compelling counterpublic remixes that leverage the multimodal affordances of AR.

I used the three steps outlined in VIFA to create a three-phase augmentation of the

Obama Hope image: 1) Get the Idea, 2) Get the Picture, and 3) Get the Details. In the first stage,

“Get the Idea,” the purpose is to capture the audience’s attention and communicate a general stance on the issue at hand. This first phase aims to draw the user into the general tenor of the issue by presenting one of the core arguments levelled by Obama’s detractors and draw the audience into the conversation taking place about the racial politics of Obama’s presidency. This phase engages with the “reappropriative” category of remix introduced in figure two. Using static images and blocky text similar to the font-style of the original poster, the augmentation re- appropriates the message of Obama Hope through visual and textual overlays that “invert” the message of the original poster into a critique of Obama’s approach to race relations and race- related policies (Edwards 47).

According to the VIFA handbook, this initial “Get the Idea” stage should use visual design techniques like juxtaposition and contradiction in order to capture the problem in a more clear and succinct manner. At this stage, the AR overlays should not completely block the original image but rather engage in a subtle rhetorical interplay with its visual aesthetics so as to highlight the primary point of tension between the isotropic narrative of the original image and the counterpublic message of the overlay. As Scott H. Church points out, the rhetorical practices of remix—sampling, cutting, combining, etc.—extend as far back as the Greek rhetorician

Isocrates and his pedagogical practice of “imitatio.” Imitatio was the practice of “imitating” the speeches of famous orators in order to learn and adapt their rhetorical techniques to present day situations. However, Church is right to point out that, for Isocrates, imitatio was not just rote

122

copying but rather a “productive and inventive process” that allows rhetors to develop strategies of their own “through interpretation, variation, creativity, and novelty” (44). Similarly, in designing overlays for the “Get the Idea” stage of AR counter-remixes, writers should consider how meaning is created not by merely imitating but by reappropriating and responding to the rhetoric of the target image.

The next phase, “Get the Picture,” provides more in-depth information. According to

VIFA, this phase should present a more cohesive narrative to “help people to grasp [the] problem by understanding its context or scale, how it came about, how it compares to other issues, or how urgent it is” (74). Overall, the purpose of this phase is to provide enough background information that the audience will be enticed “to explore [the] issues further.”

Building from the tension created in the first phase, the “Get the Picture” phase overlays a short video that details Obama’s approach to racial issues throughout his presidency. Moving from Obama’s 2008 election to his post-presidential legacy, the video does not aim to be exhaustive but rather seeks to provide enough information so that the user can become familiar with the varied sides of the debate. In this way, the counterpublic remix presents a more detailed and informed portrait of the problem that was highlighted in the initial “Get the Idea” phase. This phase engages with the “redistribution” category of remix in modeling how AR can be employed as a mobile delivery platform for video content, thereby potentially reaching new audiences and cultivating collective action against the image’s isotropic narrative.

The final phase of the augmentation, “Get the Details,” should offer the user an entry point into the primary texts, digital resources, and/or online communities connected to the issue.

As such, this phase aligns with the “assemblage” category of remix in that it gathers together and redeploys “a combination of already-existing texts” into a single text (47). Unlike the previous

123

phase, which offered a linear narrative of the events leading up to the fraught relationship between Obama and prominent black activists, this phase merely assembles primary source materials for the user to navigate on their own. As VIFA describes this phase, “[t]he art in getting the details is to allow audiences to explore the evidence for themselves to find the stories that mean something to them” (96).

The multimodal materials in this final phase seek to provide nuance to the user’s understanding of the effects of Obama’s presidency on racial issues and public conversations about race. Whereas the previous phase presented a linear narrative of this emerging counterpublic, this final section seeks to splinter this issue into the network of public texts that through it is constituted. As Gries demonstrates in Still Life with Rhetoric, the circulation of the

Obama Hope image “spread desires for progress, hope, and change” (41). However, as many

African American leaders point out, it is vital that Obama’s election not be read as a substitute for continued efforts at social “progress, hope, and change.” Thus, this final phase of the augmentation works to extend the narrative of hope embedded in the target image into contemporary conversations about race.

Specifically, I created four digital buttons that, when tapped, trigger different critiques of

Obama’s approach to race relations. With Aurasma, I could include both video and audio materials in this final section of the augmentation. The button at the top, “Sharpton-West

Debate,” links to an Obama-era MSNBC debate between Al Sharpton and Cornel West. In the video, Cornel West argues that African-American communities’ hesitance to criticize Obama is being appropriated by “Wall Street oligarchs” who use the president as a “black mascot” to advocate for their own corporate interests. Al Sharpton responds that critiques like West’s place an unfair blame on the president for not resolving centuries-long issues of systemic racism. The

124

debate that ensues between Sharpton and West was indicative of a burgeoning divide over perceptions of Obama’s presidency within various African-American communities.

Moving clockwise, the second button triggers an interview with Kwame Rose, a leader within the Black Livers Matter movement. In the interview, Rose outlines his frustration with the

Obama administration, stating that he doesn’t believe Obama “has done enough for black people.” Rose goes on to describe the Obama administration’s lack of support for the Black

Lives Matter movement. Similarly, in her interview with Brooke Gladstone, Patrisse Cullors, one of the co-founders of Black Lives Matter, describes how Obama’s election negatively impacted public discourse, saying that people no longer feel the need to “have honest conversations about race” now that “we had overcome” the racial barriers of the past by electing a black president.

Together, these two interviews reveal the frustration that Black Lives Matter activists feel towards Obama’s approach to race relations more generally and to the BLM movement specifically.

The final button, “My President Was Black,” links to an article by Ta-Nehisi Coates that reflects on Obama’s racial legacy in the wake of a Donald Trump presidency. In the article,

Coates describes how Obama’s resistance to pursuing race-based policies reflected a larger ideology within liberal politics that remains wedded to the idea that we should focus less on issues of race and more on general “equality for all.” Of course, as Coates writes, the rising tide of far-right, white nationalist sentiment throughout the country is now making it all too clear that

“issues of race” should not be thought of as minor elements within the pursuit of a more just and equitable society. Rather, matters of race are integral to the function of a society at a systemic level, and to ignore them in favor of “equality of all” is to perpetuate the same injustices such generic policies seek to mitigate.

125

The overlay sequence presented in this section demonstrates the potential of mobile AR technologies to remix physical images into a delivery platform counterpublic remixes. By combining remix typologies with the design strategies outlined in the VIFA handbook, AR remixes can foster more engaged, informed, and participatory encounters with popular public images.

Conclusion

For Gries, “rhetorical transformation” is a “process in which things become rhetorical in divergent, unpredictable ways…as people and other things come into relations to achieve a variety of nuanced purposes” (Still Life 27-28). Mobile AR provides a new means for rhetorically transforming public images. Not only can writers re-mix, re-post, and re-tweet images in online spaces, but through the emerging affordances of the mobile internet, they can increasingly discover new avenues of visual creativity and remix as the physical and digital spaces of everyday life continue to converge.

This chapter has demonstrated the potential of mobile AR as a platform for analyzing and producing counterpublic remixes of public images. As the augmentation in my final section demonstrates, mobile AR offers a viable framework for activating more nuanced interactions between the isotropic narratives of certain public images and the counterpublics that form in response to them. However, this model is by no means exhaustive; as mobile computing begins to merge with ubiquitous and wearable technologies (e.g. optical displays, smart watches, etc.) our ability to access digital information across physical spaces and texts will continue to proliferate in ways that this chapter cannot anticipate. As such, visual studies scholarship must continue to develop new methodologies for analyzing and producing counterpublic remixes.

126

Notes

1 For further discussion on the deracializing undertones of the Obama Hope poster, see Fisher III et. al “Reflections on the Hope Poster Case,” p. 249.

127

CHAPTER 5 HISTORICIZING SPACES WITH MOBILE MEDIA

Introduction

Motor City; Paris of the Midwest; America’s Comeback City; Hitsville, USA. From its legacy as a center of industry and manufacturing to its roots as the cultural epicenter of hip hop, funk, and techno music, Detroit’s pliable identity is reflected by the many names that have been bestowed upon it. Woodward Avenue, which runs through the heart of downtown Detroit, serves as the de facto center of the city’s cultural legacy. Indeed, considering Detroit’s history as a powerhouse in the car manufacturing industry, the image of the road is fitting. Following Jeff

Rice’s work in Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, if we think of

Detroit as a web of competing, overlapping histories and identities, then Woodward avenue is a vital linkage within this complex network. A road is also a fitting metaphor for Detroit because it is not stable; one road might connect two completely different parts of town, separated based on religious, economic, cultural, or political affiliations. The road is volatile; it is has the potential to connect as well as disrupt. As Rice points out, Woodward avenue is often employed as a metonym for Detroit’s failures and successes, operating as a kind of “historical database” of the city. Indeed, Woodward has been ground zero for a number of historical events that have come to shape Detroit’s identity. From auto union worker’s strikes in the early 20th century to recent urban revitalization efforts to make Detroit a more traversable space for non-motorists,

Woodward avenue continues to pulse to the rhythms of Detroit’s cultural and political history.

In this chapter, I document the design and production of an augmented reality walking tour, Articulated Detroit, that I co-designed for the 2017 Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (ASLE) conference held in Detroit Michigan. The tour participated in the

ASLE conference as a site-specific panel taking place along a one-and-a-half mile stretch of

128

Woodward Avenue from Wayne State University to Detroit’s downtown center. In doing so, this project worked to not only provide a mobile digital archive with potential usage by local citizens beyond the conference event, but it also modeled for panel participants an emerging digital platform for curating local histories within public spaces. Although the tour was primarily composed of other academics, there were several participants who worked as communication directors for smaller municipalities, and the idea of creating mobile augmented reality history tours as part of their civic work held great appeal. In this way, the Articulated Detroit project demonstrates the viability of location-based digital writing as a way of connecting digital humanities work with public projects and community outreach initiatives.

I outline the general function and purpose of the Articulated Detroit project as a public digital humanities project. This section provides a general framework for other scholars interested in designing mobile history projects of their own. The main takeaway from this section is that articulating spatial histories is a process of curation that requires careful attention to how the modalities selected from digital archival materials—images, radio broadcasts, television footage, etc.—are working within and against the user’s location in physical space and the various material and visual rhetorics that are also participating within their experience of the space. My next section is then broken into a series of subsections, each of which corresponds to a particular Point of Interest (POI) accessible through the Articulated Detroit mobile experience.

Located at specific intersections and building locations on Woodward Avenue, these POIs demonstrate how Woodward operates as what Jeff Rice refers to as a kind of “historical database” of the city (56). Building from Rice’s insights about Detroit’s identity as a kind of ever-evolving palimpsest of historical events and fissures, I consider how mobile history tours such as Articulated Detroit provide a way of experience and enacting this networked archive as a

129

form of participatory embodiment. As users accessed different POIs, they move through the space differently; each user thus follows their own interests and curiosities as they participate in the construction of an ephemeral, personalized journey down Woodward Avenue as a conflictual site of history, conflict, and progress.

Ultimately, this chapter forwards the claim that to engage in digital humanities research about locations necessarily must include the publics that circulate through them. Thus, location- based digital humanities scholarship is always public digital humanities scholarship. In order for these “thick maps” to be realized and to have potential impacts on how a community participates within the rhetorical construction of a space, then those communities must be a part of the process itself, if not as co-creators and participants in the project then at the very least as a potential audience.

Writing Digital Mobile Histories

Articulated Detroit is an open access digital project within the city of Detroit, MI.

Designed and experienced through Aurasma’s mobile augmented reality creation interface,

Articulated Detroit is an interactive map of a walkable route that displays location-specific augmented reality (AR) overlays over the physical spaces and material structures of Woodward

Avenue. These AR overlays allow the user to visualize the complex spatial networks that make up the city of Detroit. Building from Jeff Rice’s work in Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network, this open-access public digital humanities project seeks to interrogate how an iconic space within Detroit operates as a complex historical archive that is in danger of being erased through a rhetoric of economic progress, gentrification, and homogenizing corporate citizenship.

130

This project is a part of the Trace Innovation Initiatives Augmented Reality Criticism

(ARCs) publication series. The Trace Innovation Initiative is a digital humanities research endeavor within the University of Florida’s Department of English. Trace ARCs employ mobile augmented reality technologies to catalyze public awareness and discourse in relation to pressing social, cultural, political, and environmental concerns. Designing a Trace ARC involves creating digital triggers using objects or locations—such as through GIS data or image scanning—that produce overlays with digital content (images, video, text, sound, etc.) made accessible through mobile device applications. Trace provides a collaborative digital environment where students and faculty from different departments and institutions can work together to build mobile applications for humanities-based research.

Articulated Detroit allows users to participate in a location-based public writing project from Wayne State University to the Detroit River. As they traverse this space, participants can access multimedia overlays explaining the rich cultural history of Woodward Avenue within the context of Jeff Rice’s spatial methodology, which lays out in Digital Detroit. Drawing on the work of spatial theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel De Certeau as well as emerging digital mapping technologies such as Google Maps, Rice attempts to rewrite Woodward Avenue, and by extension the city of Detroit, from a topos of ruin and decay into a networked site of

(hyper)linked rhetorical elements, each of which reveal a partial, personalized of perspective on the various social, cultural, and political discourses that constitute “Detroit” as a spatial phenomenon. Rice’s discursive tracing animates Detroit as a series of linked and contingent

“relationships” irreducible to any kind of static, essential identity (Rice, 6). Thus, Articulated

Detroit follows Rice’s advice by asking participants to scan the seemingly mundane “details”— street signs, abandoned buildings, graffiti, etc.— that constitute Detroit as a spatial phenomenon

131

(1). In so doing, we hope to visualize how the city of “Detroit” is not reducible to any kind of static, essential identity but rather emerges as the result of contingent relationships between and among human and non-human actors.

Articulated Detroit draws inspiration from previous location-based mobile writing projects such as the now defunct Urban Tapestries project. Urban Tapestries was a UK-based location-based mobile media project that allowed users “to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city.” Articulated

Detroit built from the participatory insights of Urban Tapestries by creating a web space and online forum for participants to document their experiences on the tour. Through this, we hoped to create an online database of tour participants’ individual journeys through the historical space of Woodward, showcasing how each participants’ traversal of this space is highly idiosyncratic.

Indeed, this idiosyncratic aspect of mobile history tours is an important rhetorical component to consider in the design process. This played out in the design of Articulated Detroit in that we created the multimodal texts for each POI so that they could be viewed in any order or even on their own. Thus, as each participant moves through the space differently and access

POIs in different sequences, they create a new historical narrative of Woodward, thereby potentially realizing novel connections between previously disconnected historical events and ideas.

Each POI is linked to a short two or three-minute video that plays after participants scan specific signs and images located along Woodward through the Aurasma application. Prior to the tour, we walked the panel route and took high-resolution pictures of potential trigger images located at areas that we wanted to augment. For example, for our POI about the Maccabees

132

building at Wayne State University, we used a large plaque with the Wayne State logo as a trigger for the video. This plaque served as an effective trigger image for the Maccabees POI because it was located at a sufficient distance for participants to still be able to view the

Maccabees building in its entirety.

Although the Aurasma software that we used for this project worked effectively enough that users were able to access most of the POIs, future iterations of this kind of project should consider using audio or GPS-based locative writing technologies. Although these kinds of technologies are becoming less standard in the AR industry, they are much easier to use in the development phase and they do not drain mobile device batteries as much as vision-based AR experiences. Moreover, GPS-based technologies do not have to be concerned with physical changes to trigger images, which can oftentimes get removed after the project has been created.

Ultimately, the Articulated Detroit project was a successful demonstration of the potential of mobile AR technology to curate and re-write the history of an iconic public space. By documenting the specific POIs used within various locations on Woodward Avenue, I hope to provide a model for how others might engage in mobile storytelling practices with AR.

Points of Interest

Maccabees

Much like Woodward Avenue, the Maccabees building has transformed alongside the historical events that took place within Detroit throughout the 20th century. Designed in the Art

Deco style by Albert Kahn, the Maccabees was constructed in 1927 and was listed to the

National Register of Historic Places in 1983. The building’s namesake comes from the fraternal organization Knights of the Maccabees, which later turned into the Royal Maccabees Insurance

Company.

133

The building served as the headquarters for WXYZ radio until 1959, best known for its nationally recognized programs The Lone Ranger and The Green Hornet. The Maccabees served as the headquarters for Detroit Public Schools from the 1960s to 2000.

Since 1966, the number of students in Detroit’s public-school system has plummeted from over 300,000 to just 47,000. According to an independent report by Loveland

Technologies, almost two-hundred Detroit public schools have closed in the last 15 years as students moved to charter schools and suburban school districts (Grover). Today, the outstanding debts of the Detroit public school system total over three billion dollars.

The Maccabees Building literally and figuratively contains what Jeff Rice refers to as the

“continuing topos of education’s demise” within Detroit. A choric reading of the Maccabees recognizes that the “story” of education in Detroit is not singular nor is it tied to a particular place, person, or event. Rather, it is multiple and overlapping, shaped by a wide array of social, political, and economic forces. Conceptualizing the narrative of Detroit’s educational history requires a networked logic, one that rejects the simplistic binary of success versus failure.

Rice uses the overlapping, complex histories embedded within the Maccabees building as

“a metaphor for rethinking the relationships between space and technology, rhetoric and networks.” In doing so, he hopes to explore alternative logics of Detroit’s future, one not tied solely to economic development and investment. He writes,

The city is populated by ruins, racial division, and undeveloped zones. These familiar maps confirm what we know about investment and despair; they do little to change how one imagines space in the age of the network; they do little to alter the interface the city operates within. Instead, they reinforce a print-based model of mapping dependent on referentiality (money equates renewal) and causality (investment will lead to salvation) or even spirituality (we have to believe in the future). (120)

134

By tracing the material rhetoric of Detroit as a choric rather than topoi driven-space, we can begin to conceptualize alternative histories and futures for Detroit, ones that move beyond the narrow framework of a town perpetually “on the rise.”

Fisher Music Center

The Fisher Music Center is the home of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Simply known as the Orchestra Hall when it was first constructed in the early 20th century, this building was eventually rebranded as Paradise Theatre in 1941, where renowned jazz artists such as Ella

Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington would perform.

Following heavy renovations throughout the 1970s, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra moved back into Orchestra Hall. n 2002, the building was renamed after Max Martin Fisher, a prominent Detroit businessman and philanthropist. Fisher’s philanthropic work throughout

Detroit is well documented in the Max M Fisher papers housed at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University.

In 2014, several members of the orchestra performed at the Ford assembly plant (“Detroit

Symphony Orchestra”). This performance represents the dual nature of Detroit’s identity as a site of both blue-collar labor and artistic expression. In placing the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in a manufacturing center, Ford engages in a folksonomic tactic that works to rearticulate the topos of the Ford factory from a globalized, corporate entity to a familiar, local space. Rice points out that

“categories serve the production of meaning” (74). In this case, Ford works to shift the category of the factory from the discrete Fordist logic of the assembly line to the fluid, interconnected logic of a musical performance. In the commercial, Ford is claiming that, much like an orchestra hall, the car factory is also a site of cultural production. As the flitting, airy notes of the trumpet intertwine with the melody of the French horn, the viewer witnesses a shift in the role of technology in Detroit, as the relationship between human and machine is rearticulated from an

135

antagonism (i.e. automation leading to loss of jobs) to a relation in which human and machine work together in concert.

1943 and 1967 Riots

During WWII, southerners headed north in search of jobs in busy wartime factories. In a ten-year span from 1933 to 1943, the number of black residents doubled in Detroit to 200,000, exacerbating racial tensions in the city. The sudden influx of residents put a noticeable strain on city resources, creating shortages in food, housing, and jobs (“Race Riot of 1943”). Detroit was a powder keg of social, racial, and economic tensions.

In February of 1943, a group of white protesters blocked black residents from moving into a newly completed public housing area. After two months of intense standoffs, black residents were finally able to move into their homes with the help of local police and state troopers. With tensions higher than ever in the summer of 1943, three black workers were promoted at the Packard Motor Company, setting off an impromptu strike by 25,000 workers.

After unsubstantiated rumors began to emerge that a group of black men had raped and murdered a white woman on the Belle Isle Bridge, black and white residents clashed on Woodward

Avenue. In the end, 34 people died in the 1943 race riots.

On July 23, 1967, the Detroit police Department raided an unlicensed bar on 12th street.

Discovering that the bar was filled with over 80 black people, they decided to arrest everyone present. As they waited for transportation to haul everyone away, an onlooker incited what would turn into four-day riot when he hurled an empty beer bottle at a police officer. Over the course of the next week, hundreds of fires were started throughout the city and many local businesses were looted and destroyed.

136

Eventually, the Army and the National Guard were called in to quell the violence.

However, because many of the Guardsmen were inexperienced militarily, they frequently engaged in unnecessary fire fights with local residents, fatally shooting 11 people. In the end, 43 people lost their lives and over 7,200 people were arrested in the 1967 Detroit riot, one of the largest and most deadly in US history (“Uprising of 1967”).

The 1943 and 1967 riots exposed many flawed assumptions about race relations in

Detroit at the time. With a prospering black middle class, it was easy for politicians and media outlets to applaud Detroit as a model of racial progress in the mid twentieth century. However, this wasn’t the whole story. As factories became more automated, black workers were often the first to be laid off to the point that by the time of the riot, unemployment among Detroit’s black population was double that of whites. Although many black southerners had found better lives for themselves in Detroit throughout the early and middle 20th century, there were mounting racial issues in the city, from housing shortages to segregation to systematic police brutality.

In many ways, the riots of 1967 were a rejection of Detroit’s status as a metonym for

America’s racial progress. Rice points out that such topos become expected, predictable, and common. However, there may be events, like a riot, that forces us to reexamine these assumptions.

Hart Plaza

Detroit’s identity is inextricable from the American car manufacturing industry. Detroit is home to major American car manufacturers such as Chrysler, General Motors, and Ford, and it is the birthplace of the assembly line model of manufacturing. As a result, Detroit’s economic wellbeing is intimately tied to the success of the car industry.

137

During the Great Depression, Ford was forced to let go two-thirds of its workforce as demand for automobiles declined throughout the country. In 1937, the United Auto Workers union organized 200,000 workers in Cadillac Square to protest the eviction of sit-down strikers from Chrysler (“Michigan autoworkers”). After other protests in Flint and a walkout in 1941,

Henry Ford officially recognized the right to collective bargaining for his employees by signing a contract with the United Auto Workers union (“Unemployed Detroit auto workers”).

As wartime agreements between union workers and employers began to wind down after

WWII, UAW workers organized a 1946 strike against low wages and rising unemployment.

Although the strike lasted over one-hundred days, it only resulted in an eighteen percent wage increase. Unemployment rates rose in Detroit throughout the mid twentieth century ultimately losing over 130,000 manufacturing jobs because of increasing globalization and automation. In

1970, Chrysler employees organized seventy-eight-day strike that led to a thirteen percent wage increase. From 1979 to 2011, sixty-one automotive manufacturing facilities have closed in

Detroit.

Car sales from the big three manufacturers plummeted in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In particular, companies were stuck with gas guzzling trucks and SUVs that many American households could no longer afford. Facing impending bankruptcy, Chrysler,

Ford, and General Motors secured a loan of over $80 billion dollars from the federal government.

The trajectory of Detroit’s success as a city is linked to the topos of the car industry as a

“lifeline”. Rice points out that by linking prosperity to cars and cars to Detroit, Woodward

Avenue, and by extension Detroit as a whole, becomes a site of reckoning, a kind of automotive holy route stretching from Highland Park to Hart Plaza. Rice explains: “Each factory located on

138

or near the avenue attracted workers believing in another mythology, the American Dream produced by assembly-line manufacturing” (64).

Assembly Line

In his famous song “One Piece at a Time,” Johnny Cash sings about an assembly line worker at General Motors who slowly steals enough parts from the factory to finally build a car of his own. Released in 1976, Rice points out that Cash’s tale reflected a systemic reality for many blue-collar workers at the time who could only “dream to be a consumer of the luxury

[they help to] create.”

Rice claims that “Those that searched out success and fortune in Woodward Avenue’s automobile plants found themselves replicated in the very machines they worked on” (65). The conflation of categories such as “worker,” “citizen,” and “automobile” work to form the topos of

Detroit as a city perpetually stuck in an assembly-line logic. In part, this topos claims that success for Detroit is within arm’s reach, but the city can never quite pull it all together. Much like the protagonist in Cash’s song, Detroit is left with the refuse of capitalist output, putting together its identity as a city piece by piece.

Today, we see other cultural images of Detroit as a city of resilience and perseverance.

Chrysler’s iconic Eminem commercial, featuring a cameo and music from local hip-hop artists

Eminem, builds on the narrative of Detroit as a city “on the rise” (“Chrysler Eminem Super Bowl

Commercial”).

Similarly, Chrysler’s 2011 commercial “See It Through” features images of Detroit with voice-over narration by Edgar Albert Guest, the Poet Laureate of Michigan. As a Chrysler 300 drives through the streets, Guest provides inspirational voice-overs from his poem “See It

Through.” In these cultural representations, Detroit is depicted as a socially and economically

139

diverse population all tied to the contradictory image of the car as a symbol of luxury and decadence on the hand and working-class values and economic instability on the other.

Merchant’s Row

Merchant’s row, also known as the Lower Woodward Avenue Historic District, was listed to the national register of historic places in 1999. As Detroit grew in population throughout the beginning of the 20th century, Merchant’s row quickly became a bustling commercial district, and by 1925, it had the busiest pedestrian crosswalk in the country at the intersection of

State and Woodward.

Today, the newly constructed M-1 Rail runs through the heart of Merchant’s Row, serving as one of the final stops on the streetcar’s route through downtown Detroit. The M-1 Rail is a unique collaboration between public, private, and philanthropic investors. The M-1, also known as the QLine, is streetcar that runs a loop from Detroit’s North End to Downtown. The

M-1 rail is expected to generate 3 billion dollars in economic investment in the metro Detroit area. The M-1 project participates in familiar themes about Detroit: the answers to Detroit’s troubles are massive economic investment, technological innovation, and high hopes for the future. For a city whose identity was (and still is) wrapped up in the fate of the car industry,

Detroit’s move to more sustainable forms of public transit might strike some as contradictory.

However, isn’t this the story of Detroit’s relationship to the automobile? Always fraught with tension, frustrations, and contradictions? Rice points out that “The importance of the network is not that information connects, but rather that the connections affect other connections” (70). The M-1 is literally a new way of connecting disparate parts of Detroit, one that aligns with the emerging narrative of the city as, once again, rising from the ashes as a progressive, innovative, and resilient city. In many ways, the story of Detroit is the story of other

140

American cities; they remain a virtual space, their “realities” intersecting in a network of artistic renderings, proposal documents, committee meetings, and cultural representations.

Conclusion

By engaging with Articulated Detroit, users generate novel connections between different

POIs and the visual and material contingencies embedded within specific locations along

Woodward Avenue. In this way, the Articulated Detroit project engages in what David Shepard,

Todd Samuel Presner, and Yoh Kawano describe as “thick mapping” or sometimes “critical mapping.” Thick mapping, as it is described by in their book Hypercities: Thick Mapping in the

Digital Humanities, is “the processes of collecting, aggregating, and visualizing ever more layers of geographic or place-specific data” (17). Thick mapping a location is a non-methodical methodology. The digital humanities projects produced through this process are co-created alongside the rhetorics, discourses, and communities of the locations that they attempt to map.

Thick mapping is less concerned with discovery of latent or subconscious truth about a location than the generation of a novel and diverse array of lenses through which the location can now be viewed, navigated, and conceptualized. As Amy Propen points out, spaces already “make possible particular ensembles of movements and intersections of mobile elements” (6). When spaces are then overlaid with thick maps of AR data, such as historical multimedia, they rearticulate the entrenched conceptual and material avenues of a space, thereby fostering new

“ensembles of movements” among the rhetorical actors that inhabit it.

141

LIST OF REFERENCES

“A Day Made of Glass.” YouTube, uploaded by Corning Incorporated, 7 Feb. 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38.

“A Day Made of Glass 2: Same Day. Expanded Corning Vision.” YouTube, uploaded by Corning Incorporated, 3 Feb. 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkHpNnXLB0.

“A Song for Portland.” Portlandia, 28 Jan. 2011.

“ADmented Reality - Google Glasses Remixed with Google Ads.” YouTube, uploaded by The Pop Culture Detective Agency, 5 Apr. 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mRF0rBXIeg.

“AR AD Takeover.” Vimeo, uploaded by Heavy, 2 Aug. 2011, https://vimeo.com/27216208.

Archer, Nate. “sara: augmented reality architecture application.” Designboom, 18 Jan. 2010. https://www.designboom.com/technology/sara-augmented-reality-architecture- application/.

Auge, Marc. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity. Verso, 2009.

“Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop.” Vimeo, uploaded by Keiichi Matsuda. 6 Jan. 2010. https://vimeo.com/8569187.

“Augmented Reality for Building Technology.” YouTube, uploaded by Daniel Kokonowski, 9 Sep. 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXqe2zSepQ4.

“JoinPad Augmented - XP.” YouTube, uploaded by JoinPad, 2 May 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yb1m3Nyanqg.

Anderson, M. T. Feed. Cambridge, Candlewick Press, 2002.

Avatar. Directed by James Cameron, Twentieth Century Fox, 2009.

Azuma, Ronald T. “A Survey of Augmented Reality.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, vol. 6, no. 4, 1997, pp. 355-385.

Barnett, Scot. “Psychogeographies of Writing: Ma(r)king Space at the Limits of Representation.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, vol. 16, no. 3, 2012.

Baum, Frank L. The Master Key. An Electrical Fairy Tale, Founded Upon the Mysteries of Electricity and the Optimism of Its Devotees. Bobbs-Merrill, 1901.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Edited by Michael William. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, Thomas Y. Levin, and Edmund Jephcott, Belknap of Harvard University Press, 2008.

142

Bitzer, Lloyd F. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 1, 1968, pp. 1-14.

Blackfish. Directed by Gabriela Cowperthwaite, CNN Films, 2013.

Borison, Rebecca. “Augmented Reality moves beyond gimmick to drive brand utility.” Mobile Marketer, 5 Aug. 2013. https://www.mobilemarketer.com/ex/mobilemarketer/cms/news/software- technology/15879.html.

Bolter, Jay David and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. The MIT Press, 2000.

Brammer, Gunner. “3 Articulated Streamer Fly Styles that Simply Get ‘er Done.” Flymen Fishing Company, 12 Oct. 2015, https://flymenfishingcompany.com/blogs/blog/47154625-3-articulated-streamer-fly- styles-that-simply-get-er-done.

Bratta, Phil. “Rhetoric and Event: The Embodiment of Lived Events.” Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture, vol. 19, 2015.

Braun, Catherine C. Cultivating Ecologies for Digital Media Work: The Case of English Studies. Southern Illinois UP, 2014.

“Better present & sell your building projects through augmented reality.” Augment. http://www.augment.com/augmented-reality-architecture/.

Brittenham, Skip and Brian Haberlin. Anomaly. Anomaly Publishing, 2012.

Brooke, Collin Gifford. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Hampton Press, 2009.

Buchanan, Matt. “Glass Before Google.” The New Yorker, 8 May 2013. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/glass-before-google.

Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. University of California Press, 1969.

---. Permanence and Change: An Anatomy of Purpose. University of California Press, 1954.

Burton, Gideon O. “figures of amplification.” Silva Rhetoricae. http://rhetoric.byu.edu/Figures/Groupings/of%20amplification.htm.

Campbell, Stu. NAWLZ. 2008. https://www.nawlz.com/.

Carter, Chris. “Pokémon Go advanced strategies: Turn off AR.” Polygon, 19 Jul 2016. https://www.polygon.com/pokemon-go/2016/7/19/12229694/turn-off-ar.

143

Carter, Joyce Locke. “Making, Disrupting, Innovating.” Sailing the Four Cs: My Year of Living Dangerously as CCCC Chair, 22 April 2016. http://joycelockecarter.com/CCCC/mdi/.

Cash, Johnny. “One Piece at a Time.” One Piece at a Time, Columbia, 1976.

“Chrysler Eminem Super Bowl Commercial – Imported from Detroit.” YouTube, uploaded by Chrysler, 5 Feb. 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKL254Y_jtc.

Church, Scott H. “A Rhetoric of Remix.” The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies, edited by Navas, Eduardo, Owen Gallagher, and xtine burrough, Routledge, 2015, pp. 43-53.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “My President was Black.” The Atlantic, January/February 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/01/my-president-was-black/508793/.

Couture, Barbara, and Thomas Kent. The Private, the Public, and the Published: Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric. Utah State University Press, 2004.

Craig, Alan B. Understanding Augmented Reality: Concepts and Applications. Morgan Kaufman, 2013..

Crowley, Sharon. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. U of Pittsburgh P, 2006.

Cullors, Patrice. Interview with Brooke Gladstone. “The Mistrial of Michael Slager.” On the Media from WNYC, 7 Dec. 2016, http://www.wnyc.org/story/mistrial-michael-slager/.

Darity, William A. “How Barack Obama Failed.” The Atlantic, 22 Dec. 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-barack-obama-failed-black- americans/511358/.

Davis, D. Diane. Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010.

DeLuca, Kevin. Image Politics: The New Rhetoric of Environmental Activism. Routledge, 2005.

---. “Articulation Theory: A Discursive Grounding for Rhetorical Practice.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 32, no. 4, 1999, pp. 334-348.

“Detroit Symphony Orchestra Performs at Ford’s Michigan Assembly Plant.” YouTube, uploaded by Ford Media, 22 Jul. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lRWpn1k4k.

Dhillon, Sunny. “Stop referring to Pokémon Go as augmented reality.” VentureBeat, 14 Jul. 2016. https://venturebeat.com/2016/07/14/stop-referring-to-pokemon-go-as-augmented- reality/.

144

Dobrin, Sidney I. Postcomposition. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press. 2011.

---. “The Occupation of Composition.” The Locations of Composition, edited by Keller, Christopher J., and Christian R. Weisser. State University of New York Press, 2007, pp. 15-36.

---. “Going Public: Locating Public/Private Discourse.” The Private, the Public, and the Published: Reconciling Private Lives and Public Rhetoric, edited by Barbara Couture and Thomas Kent, Utah State University Press, 2004.

---. “Writing Takes Place.” Ecocomposition: Theoretical and Pedagogical Approaches, edited by Christian R. Weisser and Sidney I. Dobrin, State University of New York Press, 2001, pp. 11-25.

Doctorow, Cory. Down and out in the Magic Kingdom. Tor, 2003.

Dourish, Paul, and Genevieve Bell. Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing. The MIT Press, 2011.

Dsouza, Clyde. Memories with Maya. Clyde Dsouza, 2013.

Edbauer, Jenny. “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 4, 2005, pp. 5-24.

Edwards, Dustin W. “Framing Remix Rhetorically: Toward A Typology of Transformative Work.” Computers and Composition, vol. 39, 2016, pp. 41-54.

Engelking, Carl. “Archaeologists See and Smell the Past with Augmented Reality.” Discover Magazine, 13 March 2015. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/crux/2015/03/13/archaeologists-augmented-reality/.

Erasmus, Desiderius. “Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style (De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo).” 1512. Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, edited by Craig R. Thompson. University of Toronto Press, 1978.

Esquire. “Augmented Reality Issue.” Dec. 2009.

“Ex.” High Maintenance. HBO, 21 Oct. 2016.

Farrell, Thomas B. “Sizing Things: Colloquial Reflection as Practical Wisdom.” Argumentation, vol. 12, no.1, pp. 1-14.

Fisher III, William W. Frank Cost, Shepard Fairey, Meir Feder, Edwin Fountain, Geoffrey Stewart, and Marita Sturken. “Reflections on the Hope Poster Case.” Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, vol. 25, no. 2, 2012.

145

“FirstBank – Get Back to the Real World.” YouTube, uploaded by FirstBank, 18 Apr. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV8WAMCoPdI.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Penguin Books, 1990.

Freeman, John Craig. “Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos.” 2012 https://johncraigfreeman.wordpress.com/border-memorial-frontera-de-los-muertos/.

Frith, Jordan. Smartphones as Locative Media. Polity, 2015.

Garden. Gotan. 8 Jan. 2016. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.Gotan.Garden&hl=en.

Geisler, Cheryl. “How Ought We to Understand the Concept of Rhetorical Agency? Report from the ARS.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 3, 2004, pp. 9-17.

Gibson, William. Spook Country. G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2007.

“Goggle - Project Dangerous Glasses.” YouTube, uploaded by HappyToast. 5 Apr. 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma8NbpCvSwo.

Greene, Jacob W. “Introduction to Mobile Augmented Reality Development in Unity.” The Programming Historian, 24 July 2016, http://programminghistorian.org/lessons/intro-to-augmented-reality-with-unity.

Greenfield, Adam. Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. New Riders Press, 2006.

Gries, Laurie E. Still Life with Rhetoric: A New Materialist Approach for Visual Rhetorics. Utah State University Press, 2015.

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. 1964. MIT Press, 1991.

Hall, Stuart. “On Postmodernism and Articulation: An Interview with Stuart Hall.” Journal of Communication Inquiry, edited by Lawrence Grossberg, vol. 10, no. 2, 1986, pp. 45-60.

Hansen, Mark. “Ubiquitous Sensation: Toward an Atmospheric, Collective, and Microtemporal Model of Media.” Throughout: Art and Culture Emerging with Ubiquitous Computing, edited by Ulrik Ekman. The MIT Press, 2013, pp. 63-88.

Hariman, Robert, and John Louis Lucaites. The Public Image: Photography and Civic Spectatorship. The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Harris, Robert A. A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices. Virtual Salt, 19 Jan. 2013, http://www.virtualsalt.com/rhetoric.htm.

146

Henley, Jon, Harriet Grant, Jessica Elgot, Karen McVeigh, and Lisa O’Carrol. “Britons rally to help people fleeing war and terror in middle east.” The Guardian, 3 Sep. 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/sep/03/britons-rally-to-help-people-fleeing- war-and-terror-in-middle-east.

Her. Directed by Spike Jonze. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2013.

Hidden Creative. “The Future of Augmented Reality.” YouTube, uploaded by Hidden Creative, 1 Dec. 2008. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnRJaHZH9lo.

Hoffelder, Nate. “NPR Pits Robot Reporter Against Journalist, When They Should Have Had Them Work Together.” The Digital Reader, 20 May 2015. https://the-digital- reader.com/2015/05/20/npr-matches-robot-reporter-against-journalist-when-they-should- have-had-them-work-together/.

“How Guys Will Use Google Glass.” YouTube, uploaded by Dartanion London, 1 Mar 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UjcqCx1Bvg.

“HYPER-REALITY.” Vimeo, uploaded by Keiichi Matsuda, 16 May 2016. https://vimeo.com/166807261.

“InSite Gettysburg.” InSite Gettysburg. 7 Feb. 2018. http://www.insitegettysburg.com.

Invizimals. Novarama. 12 Oct. 2010.

Iron Man. Directed by Jon Favreau. Paramount Pictures, 2008.

Jones, Madison and Jacob Greene. “Augmented Vélorutionaries: Digital Rhetoric, Memorials, and Public Discourse.” Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, vol. 21, no.1, fall 2017.

Kelly, Kevin. “The Untold Story of Magic Leap, the World’s Most Secretive Startup.” Wired, May 2016. https://www.wired.com/2016/04/magic-leap-vr/.

Kent, Thomas. Post-Process Theory: Beyond the Writing-Process Paradigm. Southern Illinois University Press, 1999.

“Kinect for Windows Retail Clothing Scenario.” YouTube, uploaded by KinectforWindows, 4 Dec. 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr71jrkzWq8.

Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Verso, 1985.

147

Laib, Nevin. “Conciseness and Amplification.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 41, no. 4, 1990, pp. 443-459.

Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford University Press, 2005.

---. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard University Press, 2004.

---. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Harvard University Press, 1999.

Lelinwalla, Mark. “Volkswagen Employees Appear To Be Using Google Glass in Factory.” Tech Times, 25 Nov. 2015. http://www.techtimes.com/articles/110662/20151125/volkswagen-employees-appear- using-google-glass-factory.htm.

Levine, Paula. “On Common Ground: Here as There.” The Mobile Story: Narrative Practices with Locative Technologies, edited by Jason Farman, Routledge, 2014.

“Living History at Union Station.” YouTube, uploaded by UnionStationKC. 21 Oct. 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RDsa3KbNAk.

Liszewski, Andrew. “Anyone Can Be a Mechanic with This Brilliant Augmented Reality App.” Gizmodo, 27 May 2013. https://gizmodo.com/anyone-can-be-a-mechanic-with-this- brilliant-augmented-509999571.

Loewe, Drew M. Review of Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web, by Barbara Warnick. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, vol. 12, no. 2, 2008.

Longinus. “On the Sublime.” Classical Literary Criticism, edited by T.S. Dorsch, 1965.

Grover, John and Yvette van der Velde. A School District in Crisis: Detroit’s Public Schools 1842-2015. Loveland Technologies, 2015. https://makeloveland.com/reports/schools.

Lundberg, Christian, and Joshua Gunn. “‘Ouija Board, Are There Any Communications?’ Agency, Ontotheology, and the Death of the Humanist Subject, Or, Continuing the ARS Conversation.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly, vol.35, no.4, 2005, pp. 83-105.

Lunden, Ingrid. “AR Startup Magic Leap Raises $793.5M Series C At $4.5B Valuation Led By Alibaba.” Techcrunch, 2 Feb. 2016. https://techcrunch.com/2016/02/02/ar-startup-magic- leap-raises-793-5m-series-c-at-4-5b-valuation-led-by-alibaba/.

Lutero, Leo. “Augmented Reality Book Requires No Apps or Glasses.” Psfk, 23 Feb. 2016. https://www.psfk.com/2016/02/augmented-reality-book-kinect-projection.html.

148

“Magic Leap | Demos: Everyday Magic with Mixed Reality.” YouTube, uploaded by Magic Leap, 20 Oct. 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw0-JRa9n94.

Malabou, Catherine. What Should We Do with Our Brain? Fordham University Press, 2008.

Mathies, Daven. “Augmented Reality Comes to Neurosurgery with Tech Developed by Leica.” Digital Trends, 6 Aug. 2016. https://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/leica-captiview-ar- brain-surgery/.

Maughan, Tim. Paintwork. Tim Maughan, 2011.

McCorkle, Ben. Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study. Southern Illinois UP, 2012.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.” McGraw-Hill. 1964.

Metz, Rachel. “Google Glass is Dead; Long Live Smart Glasses.” MIT Technology Review, vol. 26, Nov. 2014, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/532691/google-glass-is-dead-long- live-smart-glasses/.

“Michigan autoworkers win strike for union rights, 1936-37.” Global Nonviolent Action Database, 3 Feb. 2011. https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/michigan- autoworkers-win-strike-union-rights-1936-37.

Miller, Carolyn. “Genre as Social Action.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 70, 1984, pp. 151- 167.

Miller, Ross. “AP’s ‘robot journalists’ are writing their own stories now.” The Verge, 29 Jan 2015. https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/29/7939067/ap-journalism-automation-robots- financial-reporting.

Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2012.

Murray, Joddy. Non-discursive Rhetoric: Image and Affect in Multimodal Composition. State University of New York Press, 2009.

Navas, Eduardo, Owen Gallagher, and Xtine Burrough. The Routledge Companion to Remix Studies. Routledge, 2014.

Palmeri, Jason. Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

Pokémon Dream Radar. Nintendo. 23 Jun. 2012.

149

Pottinger. “Abbey Road Revisited.” Netpage. Feb. 2013. http://www.pottinger.com/uploads/1/9/5/1/19512909/130222_abbey_road.pdf.

Prenosil, Joshua. “Bruno Latour is a Rhetorician of Inartistic Proofs.” Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers, Southern Illinois UP, 2015, pp. 97-114.

Presner, Todd et al. HyperCities: Thick Mapping in the Digital Humanities. Harvard University Press, 2014.

“’Project Glass: One Day…’ What the world might look like through Google’s glasses.” The Washington Post, 28 Mar. 2012. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/video- demonstrates-google-glasses-229/2012/04/04/gIQA7mTevS_video.html.

Propen, Amy D. Locating Visual-Material Rhetorics: The Map, the Mill, and the GPS. Parlor Press, 2012.

Reynolds, Nedra. Geographies of Writing: Inhabiting Places and Encountering Difference. Southern Illinois UP, 2004.

Rice, Jeff. Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network. Southern Illinois University Press, 2012.

---. “The Making of Ka-Knowledge: Digital Aurality.” Computers and Composition, vol. 23, 2006, pp. 266-279.

Rice, Jenny. Distant Publics: Development Rhetoric and the Subject of Crisis. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.

Rickert, Thomas. “The Whole of the Moon: Latour, Context, and the Problem of Holism.” Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers, Southern Illinois UP, 2015, pp. 135-50.

---. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013.

---. “Invention in the Wild: On Locating Kairos in Space-Time.” The Locations of Composition, edited by Christopher J. Keller and Christian R. Weisser. State University of New York Press, 2007.

Rieder, David M. Suasive Iterations: Rhetoric, Writing, and Physical Computing. Parlor Press, 2017.

“Race Riot of 1943.” Detroit Historical Society, 2018. https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/race-riot-1943.

150

Roscorla, Tanya. “Augmented Reality Meets Music Education.” Center for Digital Education, vol. 22, Aug. 2013. http://www.centerdigitaled.com/news/Augmented-Reality-Meets- Music-Education.html.

Sánchez, Raúl. “In Terms of Writing as Such.” Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin, Routledge, 2011, pp. 24-34.

“Scopis Augmented Reality: Path guidance to craniopharyngioma.” YouTube, uploaded by Scopis Surgical Navigation, 23 Nov. 2012. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4emmCcBb4s.

“See it Through – Chrysler 300 TV Commercial.” YouTube, uploaded by AutoMotoNewsTV. 21 Nov. 2011. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGD--bDcpnQ.

“Sight.” Vimeo, uploaded by Robot Genius, 2012.

Sirc, Geoffrey. “Serial Composition.” Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication, edited by Stuart A. Selber. University of South Carolina Press, 2010.

“Sixthsense: integrating information with the real world.” MIT Media Lab Fluid Interfaces Group. http://www.pranavmistry.com/projects/sixthsense/.

Skwarek, Mark. “Augmented Reality Activism.” Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium, edited by Vladimir Geroimenko, Springer, 2014, pp. 3-29.

Slack, Jennifer Daryl. “The Theory and Method of Articulation in Cultural Studies.” Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, Routledge, 1996, pp. 112-27.

Smith, Stacy Vanek. “An NPR Reporter Raced a Machine to Write a News Story. Who Won?” NPR: Planet Money, 20 May 2015. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/05/20/406484294/an-npr-reporter-raced-a- machine-to-write-a-news-story-who-won.

“StreetMuseum.” Museum of London. https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/Resources/app/Dickens_webpage/home.html.

Stross, Randall. “When the Software is the Sportswriter.” The New York Times, 27 Nov. 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/business/28digi.html.

Suba, Randell. “Google Glass Explorer Attacked by SF Bar Patrons for Not Respecting Their Privacy.” Tech Times, 26 Feb. 2014, http://www.techtimes.com/articles/3785/20140226/google-glass-explorer-attacked-by-sf- bar-patrons-for-not-respecting-their-privacy.htm.

151

The Minority Report. Directed by Steven Spielberg. Dreamworks, 2002.

The Playroom. Sony Interactive Entertainment, 15 Nov. 2013.

The Terminator. Directed by James Cameron. Pacific Western, 1984.

Tinnell, John. “Grammatization: Bernard Stiegler’s Theory of Writing and Technology.” Computers and Composition, vol. 37, 2015, pp. 132–146.

---. “Computing en plein air: Augmented Reality and Impressionist Aesthetics.” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, vol. 20, no. 1, 2014, pp. 69–84.

---. “Techno-Geographic Interfaces: Layers of Text and Agency in Mobile Augmented Reality.” Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman, edited by Dennis M. Weiss, Lexington, 2014, pp. 69-87.

---. “All the World’s a Link: The Global Theater of Mobile World Browsers.” enculturation: a journal of rhetoric, writing, and culture, vol. 12, 2011.

Trimbur, John. “Composition and the Circulation of Writing.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 52, no. 2, 2000, pp. 188-219.

Trex, Ethan. “How Does the Magic Yellow First-Down Linke Work?” Mental Floss, 3 Feb. 2018. http://mentalfloss.com/article/27009/explaining-magic-yellow-first-down-line.

Tuters, Marc and Kazys Varnelis. “Beyond Locative Media: Giving Shape to the Internet of Things.” Leonardo, vol. 39, no. 4, pp. 357-363.

Ulmer, Gregory. Electronic Monuments. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Ulmer, Gregory L. and John Craig Freeman. “Beyond the Virtual Public Square: Ubiquitous Computing and the New Politics of Well-Being.” Augmented Reality Art: From an Emerging Technology to a Novel Creative Medium, edited by Vladimir Geroimenko, Springer, 2014, pp. 61-78.

“Uprising of 1967.” Detroit Historical Society, 2018. https://detroithistorical.org/learn/encyclopedia-of-detroit/uprising-1967.

Underkoffler, John. “Pointing to the future of UI.” TED, 12 Oct. 2016. https://www.ted.com/talks/john_underkoffler_drive_3d_data_with_a_gesture.

152

“Unemployed Detroit auto workers conduct Hunger March to protest Ford Motor Company’s policies, United States, 1932.” Global Nonviolent Action Database, 3 Mar. 2013. https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/unemployed-detroit-auto-workers-conduct- hunger-march-protest-ford-motor-companys-policies-un.

“Urban Tapestries: an experiment in location-based wireless co-creativity.” Urban Tapestries, 24 Feb. 2005, http://research.urbantapestries.net/pervasivecomputing.html.

Vatz, Richard E. “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric, vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 154-161.

Vincent, James. “Google Glass Isn't Dead, It's Being ‘Made Ready for Users,’ says Eric Schmidt.” The Verge, 23 Mar. 2015, http://www.theverge.com/2015/3/23/8276661/google-glass-not-dead-yet-eric-schmidt.

Vinge, Vernor. Rainbows End. Tor, 2006.

“Visualizing Information for Advocacy.” Tactical Technology Collective, 2014.

Walker, Janice R., et al. “Computers and Composition 20/20: A Conversation Piece, or What Some Very Smart People Have to Say about the Future.” Computers and Composition, vol. 28, no. 4, 2011, pp. 327-46.

Warner, Michael. “Publics/Counterpublics.” Quarterly Journal of Speech, vol. 88, no. 4, 2002, pp. 413-25.

Warnick, Barbara. Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web. New York: Peter Lang, 2007. Print.

Wassom, Brian. Augmented Reality Law, Privacy, and Ethics: Law, Society, and Emerging AR Technologies. Elsevier, 2015.

Weiser, Mark. “The Computer for the 21st century.” Scientific American. September, 1991.

Weisser, Christian R. Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere. Southern Illinois University Press, 2002.

“Wonderbook: Book of Spells.” London Studio. 13 Nov. 2012.

Zelizer, Barbie. About to Die: How News Images Move the Public. Oxford University Press, 2010.

153

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Jacob Greene is an English Ph.D. candidate specializing in writing studies and digital rhetoric. His research explores the use of mobile media as a location-based writing technology.

His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Florida Genealogist, Programming Historian,

Kairos, Enculturation, and Composition Studies.

154