Undergraduate thesis in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University.
April 2024
also in the Brown Digital Repository
ABSTRACT: This thesis argues that the work of contemporary writer Tan Lin proposes, through the figure of “ambient textuality,” an intervention into existing theories of “ambience” by performing a relational, varyingly attentive or non-attentive experience of the world as fundamentally structured by systems of signification. Theories of ambience have emerged amidst global paradigms that increasingly destabilize the boundaries of the “self”: particularly, the increasing ubiquity of networked computational technologies and the horrors of climate change and the end of the Anthropocene. They generally propose an alternative to the problem of the transcendental subject through a dissolution of the subject-object boundary via a primordial, pre-linguistic state of phenomenological unity with one’s environment. This theoretical foundation, however, I argue, produces an opposition between materiality and language that only reinforces the same metaphysical binary between "nature" and "culture" that these theories ostensibly aim to resolve. I thus turn to Lin’s “ambient textuality,” analyzing his works Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010) and The Patio and the Index (2011) as two different iterations of the same logic of reading, which appears as a systemic, de-hierarchized, non-individual process of supplementary substitution between signs, predicated upon a constitutive absence. Grounding a theory of ambience in the inextricability of metaphor and materiality, I argue, might help us to uncover a more productive critical and (eco-)political potential in the concept of “ambience.”
WIRTING IMOGESOn DALL-E 2, text(?) & image(?), Vilém Flusser, translation/metaphor/gibberish
The College Hill Independent
March 2024
You Never Render The Same River Twice: On Lawrence Lek's game engine worldsOn the game engine as cinematic medium, worldbuilding, Lek's "Sinofuturism trilogy," Alexander Galloway, playing, idling, looping, equilibrium, tools
Syntax
December 2023
writing + design
Narrative reflection on X bot @Unsecured_CCTV
The College Hill Independent
October 2023
On Tan Lin's Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking (2010)
The College Hill Independent
September 2022
Autofiction and Recovery: Tao Lin's Leave Society
On Tao Lin's Leave Society (2021)
The College Hill Independent
December 2021
