Speaker: Gabriele Salciute Civiliene @GabrieleSC
Affiliation: King’s College
Title: VR Ethnography of Sound in William Faulkner across Languages
Abstract: The proposed symposium presents the case studies that showcase and explore the ethnographic and experimental uses of narrative in Extended Reality (XR) as in reconstructing cultural landscape based on literature, building brands in affective ways, and exploring the migration of literary imaginaries through sound. The symposium addresses the role of epistemic and affective affordances of XR in creating and communicating new insight into narrative forms, whether in fiction or advertising. It seeks to provoke the discussion of how our approaches to each subject considered here could be transformed beyond the disciplinary boundaries.
Long abstract
In this talk, I will discuss the epistemic role of sound in the VR Ethnography and Literature across Languages (VRELL) project that explores sound depicted and evoked in relation to the image of barn in William Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury. As it does, it deconstructs the interpretation and the resulting shifts in the depiction of the barn and the resulting sound ecologies in the translations of the novel. Premised on the idea that literary texts are experiential rather than textual artefacts, the project challenges the logocentric modes of literary representation with and as words, as used in the data-based visualizations of texts. The acoustic treatments of texts are not rare as in writing music to a poem to turn it into a song. Yet it is not common to analyze a literary text in acoustic ways and expect that sound will be a more revealing and useful means of literary analysis than words. The project uses the medium and storytelling of VR to explore literary imagination and the associated sound in experiential ways. To foreground the acoustic dimensions and its cultural variations in literary reading, the project uses the immersive medium of VR to emplace culture and period-specific sounds in visual ways. The project takes artistic risks to deconstruct the original text and its translation in the act of listening to the text rather than reading it. While it experiments with the acoustic dimensions of narrative forms to reimagine literature through sound, the project also asks in what ways we could carve a new epistemic role for VR to reinvent the discipline of literary studies where literary translation is treated as a document of ethnographic and anthropological significance.