from Anne: Jody asked "If the sky were the limit...?"

If the sky were the limit.... it'd be a full vr/cave environment in which people could experiment with moving words around by hand, words that responded in different ways when touched, "printed" argumentative texts that twitched when touched, that flowed into movies suggesting other connotations or showed specific histories behind the arguments, arguments whose logical structures glowed behind the words, words that morphed into other sorts of visualizations and v/v. Arguments you could climb up like mountains or slide down like Alice, textured arguments. I'd like for words to be touchable/physical at the same time that their histories were attached to them.

Perhaps I'll steal a whole lot of felt letters from a Montessori school and attach photographs of their etymologies and particular historical uses to them.

:-)

But your questions, Jody, make me think that our still semi-concrete, preliminary ideas play off each other, in ways we can kick off from, perhaps: I am interested in visualizing the materiality of words; Madeleine in visualizations in a more general way (I hope this is a fair representation, Madeleine); and you in what we aren't showing by the particular choices we would make as we move toward the more concrete.

I am hoping for some sort of installation where all those questions/tensions play off each other at once. Perhaps there are printed banners of our questions on the walls -- big -- with room for people to write responses to the questions as they are contextualized by whatever we install.

Our roles -- as people in the space responsible for the setup -- seem to me up for grabs. We could set up an installation that "ran itself," so that we were each there just to answer questions. Or we could give short presentations to contextualize our work. Or we could be performing continually. Or...

But I guess I am hoping that we come up with something integrated, where our concerns/questions fold into each other, make some integral experience within the room, an experience that raises the questions we hope but that also gets people thinking more concretely about the issues we've each raised. (So the Montessori reference above might be more appropriate than I thought...) (And there is nothing to preclude us documenting the whole thing in multiple ways, and producing something to go on the NCTE website, which they would love, or into Kairos, something in which we deconstructed our documentation process, to encourage viewers/readers to ask the questions you posed, Jody.)

I'll end this too-late after-too-many-papers-responded-to-today message with the comment that the only truly concrete picture in my head of what I want to do is of some writing projected really small up against a wall so that people have to get up close and bend down or sit on the floor to read it.

PS -- I'll be at MLA in SF at Christmas, so I can scope out the particulars of the Hilton, and so can ask if we could be put into a particular room or space that would be most conducive to our desires.