TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE]: Locating Narrative Resonance in Transatlantic Communications Networks
This paper locates narrative resonance in transatlantic communications networks through a discussion of one web-based work, TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], a computer-generated narrative dialogue which propagates across, beyond, and through transatlantic communications networks. These networks engendered by generations of past usage come to serve as narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away.
Critical to this discussion is the notion that communication networks are what they do. Communications may impart narrative, and, at the same time, may constitute the network through which that narrative communicates. Documents, letters, packets, ships, telegraphs, telephones, radios, televisions and digital networks both communicate and are communications. In TRANS.MISSION [A.DIALOGUE], transatlantic communications networks serve as narrative structures for an ongoing narrative dialogue resonating between the United Kingdom and Atlantic Canada. This dialogue resonates in a space between places separated by time, distance and ocean, yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration. Narrative resonance may be understood here as the prolongation, amplification and distribution of narrative, produced by a place vibrating in sympathy with a neighbouring source of narrative resulting in a sympathetic vibration between two coastal locations.
