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During
my years in Japan teaching English as a second language,
I discovered that telling ghost stories and discussing
the idea of ghosts served as an effective method to
initiate longer and more involved discussions about
culture, visual metaphor, media image exchange, history,
language, and narrative. In the following years, I have
found many ways to weave similar discussions about ghosts
into my university new media and communication courses,
except now we connect ghosts with the concepts of cultural
transmission and transformation begun by writers and
critics such as Walter Benjamin, Barthes, Ong, and continued
into current work by recent hypertext and new media
scholars.
The second essay in this hypertext
cluster gives readers an overview of how the technologies
that we are inventing will eventually come together
into a single creation, a new form of interactive theater
that we call the CompuObscura. In his essay (Innovation)
I briefly touch on some of the technical aspects of
how the CompuObscura works, while also offering details
on some of the common scenarios we imagine will eventually
take place inside the device.
The third essay in this hypertext
cluster (Illumination)
provides a brief discussion of how all this theory and
technology development work has been integrated
into a series of new media courses. The third essay
also shows how we have connected the Lumiere Ghosting
Project and development work on the CompuObscura into
a diverse range of courses from many different academic
disciplines at Cal Poly.
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