Embodiment of Stories in Hybrid Environments Narrative Art in the Age of Social Networking and Locative Media

Abstract:   - Philology and criticism usually apply to literary works that have been written and published or literary systems as actual genres. That is, literary studies generally focus on past or present state of the art but they hardly offer predictions, prefiguring forms that will play a role into the future development of cultural landscapes. Making a remarkable exception in respect to the norm, the present contribution aims to forecast potential development in storytelling based on locative media. That is, as part of a more general inquiry on the Ecology of the Novel, it will investigate potential literary applications based on Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS) or similar geocoding standards. In a few years narrative artists and storytellers’ communities will be likely writing or taping stories to be broadcasted by locative media mining 2.0 websites for contents delivered by Location-based media on GPS or GIS enabled portable wireless devices. Textual narratives as podcasted stories will invade laptop computers and mobile phones, providing readers and listeners with pertinent references or analogical interferences aimed to enriching natural environments. Presences triggered by the mirror matching of references entailed by symbolically encoded narratives, both in audio and written text formats, will infest urban and rural environments, forests and deserts, islands and hills, mountains and beaches, enhancing sensory experiences of perceived landscapes. So, questions arise. What formats may be forecasted as the standards ones when it will come to the implementation of socially shared narrative art with locative tagging? Will these new narrative standards reshape interactions between subjects and environments? Moreover, while providing a permanently operative level of interaction between narrative contents and natural environments, will geocoded stories play crucial role in the literary system? Will eventually the novel be doomed to marginality or even extinction because of the rise of socially-networked locative narratives? Rather, will the novel outlast this technological revolution too?