A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day
Conceived in the 1960s, Walt Disney’s original plans for his Experimental Prototype Community of ... more Conceived in the 1960s, Walt Disney’s original plans for his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT) outlined a utopian laboratory for domestic technology, where families would live, work, and play in an integrated environment. Like many of his contemporaries, Disney imagined homes that would attend to their inhabitants’ every need, and he regarded the home as a site of unending technological progress. This fixation on “space-age” technology, with its promise of domestic bliss, marked an important mid-twentieth-century shift in understandings of the American home. In A Small World, Davin Heckman considers how domestic technologies that free people to enjoy leisure time in the home have come to be understood as necessary parts of everyday life.
Heckman’s narrative stretches from the early-twentieth-century introduction into the home of electric appliances and industrial time-management techniques, through the postwar advent of television and the space-age “house of tomorrow,” to the contemporary automated, networked “smart home.” He considers all these developments in relation to lifestyle and consumer narratives. Building on the tension between agency and control within the walls of homes designed to anticipate and fulfill desires, Heckman engages debates about lifestyle, posthumanism, and rights under the destabilizing influences of consumer technologies, and he considers the utopian and dystopian potential of new media forms. Heckman argues that the achievement of an environment completely attuned to its inhabitants’ specific wants and needs—what he calls the “Perfect Day”—institutionalizes everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice.
In theory, academic publishing is about active participation in a community of schol ars. In prac... more In theory, academic publishing is about active participation in a community of schol ars. In practice, academic publishing is about gaining status by getting something printed in the most static venue possible. At its worst, the Journal is an insider's club where gatekeepers tag select works for limited circulation, and scholars hum bly submit to this hierarchy. For cultural studies scholars, many of whom make a great show about their "radical" politics, the limitations of the print journal should provoke some reflection. Instead of asking how we as scholars actively participate in replicating the economy of prestige at the price of knowledge, we get comfort able with the culture of the Academy. We start to believe our own hype. As a project, Reconstruction takes its own shape as material and criticism is added, changing the meaning of what came before and creating new possibilities for things to come. Because of its collaborative nature, Reconstruction should allow us to reconsider the concept of the "organic intellectual," allowing many types of intellectuals from many traditions and non-traditions to insert themselves into aca demic discussion. But more importantly, Reconstruction contains the potential for intellectual projects that are themselves organic in their growth-living cultural texts which are not subject to the authority of individual scholars. As such, the concept of scholarly "authority," which is bound up in the concept of authorship, is surpassed by a vital, evolving, intellectual movement: no one voice speaks, instead there exists a chorus of articulated thought.
¶ 1 This essay is part of the third iteration of the anthology. Since public review and commentar... more ¶ 1 This essay is part of the third iteration of the anthology. Since public review and commentary help scholars develop their ideas, the editors hope that readers will continue to comment on the already published essay. You may also wish to read the draft essay, which underwent open review in 2017, and the project history.
Publishing digital anthologies and databases, testing out new models of distribution, exhibition,... more Publishing digital anthologies and databases, testing out new models of distribution, exhibition, and preservation, and building interdisciplinary collaboration not only between traditional academic disciplines but also between distinct international communities, one might think of electronic literature as the research and development wing of the digital humanities. This chapter will situate these three projects within an emergent institutionalization of network-based creative community in electronic 4
If, as Jacques Derrida once claimed in a New York Times interview, 'Everything is a text... more If, as Jacques Derrida once claimed in a New York Times interview, 'Everything is a text' (Smith, 1998), then, of course, we are correct to seek methods of textual analysis appropriate for those media we choose to scrutinize, including those texts contained within the entire ...
Post-Digital Debates and Dialogues from the electronic book review
The lively dialogue among the contributing authors, ebr's longest-serving and newly appointed... more The lively dialogue among the contributing authors, ebr's longest-serving and newly appointed editors, and the engaged and interested audience, which accompanied the Post-Digital / Dialogues and Debates book launch in September 2020, is an interesting insight into the recent debates on the multifaceted ramifications of digital disruption and the ways in which it has transformed our society, culture, and aesthetics. The discussion throws some light as well on the always fascinating history of the early electronic literature initiatives which had laid the groundwork for what eventually turned out to become the whole new field of intermedia literary practice and the sub-discipline of trans- and interdisciplinary academic inquiry. The authors of the mammoth 2-volume anthology recruit from the variety of contexts and offer diverse looks at the post-digital condition of our contemporaneity.
Electronic Literature as a Sword of Lightning
Leonardo Electronic Almanac: Mish Mash, 2011
Bouchardon, S., Heckman, D. (2012). «Digital Manipulability and Digital Literature», Electronic Book Review, août 2012
Serge Bouchardon and Davin Heckman put the digit back into the digital by emphasizing touch and m... more Serge Bouchardon and Davin Heckman put the digit back into the digital by emphasizing touch and manipulation as basic to in digital literature. The digital literary work unites figure, grasp, and memory. Bouchardon and Heckman show that digital literature employs a rhetoric of grasping. It figures interaction and cognition through touch and manipulation. For Bouchardon and Heckman, figure and grasp lead to problems of memory - how do we archive touch and manipulation? - requiring renewed efforts on the part of digital literary writers and scholars.
A Small World
E-Ject: On the Ephemeral Nature, Mechanisms, and Implications of Electronic Objects
In his post on Empyre, Michael Angelo Tata coined the term, eject. Alluding to Walter Benjamin&... more In his post on Empyre, Michael Angelo Tata coined the term, eject. Alluding to Walter Benjamin's notion of an artifact generated from the technological innovation of mechanical reproducibility, Tata suggested that the e-ject creates a culture industry by making ...
Navigating the Starless Night: Reading the Auto/Bio/Geography; Meaning-Making
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Books by Davin Heckman
Heckman’s narrative stretches from the early-twentieth-century introduction into the home of electric appliances and industrial time-management techniques, through the postwar advent of television and the space-age “house of tomorrow,” to the contemporary automated, networked “smart home.” He considers all these developments in relation to lifestyle and consumer narratives. Building on the tension between agency and control within the walls of homes designed to anticipate and fulfill desires, Heckman engages debates about lifestyle, posthumanism, and rights under the destabilizing influences of consumer technologies, and he considers the utopian and dystopian potential of new media forms. Heckman argues that the achievement of an environment completely attuned to its inhabitants’ specific wants and needs—what he calls the “Perfect Day”—institutionalizes everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice.
Papers by Davin Heckman