Symbioverse

A section of introductory writing submitted for my Annual progression. Designed as a navigation tool and thinking aid as I shape my ideas.

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Entrance Hall and Introduction to the Mind Palace

This is an introduction to a developing synthesis of literatures and practices, designed to situate my activities in a broader community of scholarship and to support my exploration of the materiality of time in literature and the archive. Spiralling outwards from its critical centre in information design and data poetics, as an ongoing programme of research, I plan to build a case study that demonstrates the translational value of the anarchive as a non-linear repository of experiences, through practice, as a ‘way of doing’ (Manghani, 2021). I aspire to show how a poetological approach to designing and communicating literary themes might inspire more emotionally resonant tools and methods for designers and scholars working with the communication of temporal data, and in so doing, satisfy the ‘Triple S scheme’, a framework that considers a real-world context (the ‘site’) for research, how it relates to a community of validation and existing bodies of knowledge (how it is ‘situated’) and what object or new knowledge is produced as a result (an ongoing ‘situating’) (Kaszynska et al., 2022).

As both a subject and a material, time governs all human activity, and our experiences of it, collective and individual, have acted as the engine of design for thousands of years. Throughout our days and nights and the circularity of seasons on earth, to the ever-widening cosmological scale of moving stars and planets, the observance of time has evolved from its early links to natural cycles into more linear conceptions now fundamentally integrated with our complex technological and philosophical conditions. Modern Newtonian representations of time order our lives in the current day. Ticking clocks are both companions and captors of cultures and designed landscapes. However, like poetry, the experience of time remains within the territory of that uniquely human gift, perhaps our greatest – the metaphor, which ‘carries meaning across the oceans that divide us.’  (Griffiths, 2012). Artists and designers have explored this in various forms.  From early epics to contemporary storytelling, time’s passage and impact on human experience remain an open-ended topic of exploration. Within our vast literary traditions, William Wordsworth’s epic autobiographical poem, The Prelude, mediates the temporality of memory, nature, and the self. It illustrates the poet’s intellectual development and serves as an example of a densely layered textual archive rich with image, sensation and sound, an artefact of time thickened physically through revision and expanded continually by contemporary readership. It is a work of profound temporal elasticity and ‘ongoingness’ (Sandilands, 2012). These are memories forgotten and recalled, reimagined, and relived – considered a masterpiece and a ‘portrait of the artist as a village.’  (Sampson, 2022).

For the duration of this work, I am a researcher, communicator, and co-storyteller with Wordsworth Grasmere. Yet I have entered a literary field of very deep, storied specialisation at a time where the radical spirit of Romanticism is increasingly challenged through commodification and the conservatism of privileged audiences (Sampson, 2022).  Journeying with the Wordsworth Trust in my second year has allowed me to better understand the historical strata of politics and place as I focus on building relationships with its custodians and become more entangled in its rhythms and its ‘meshwork’; to ‘walk, breathe and know’ as a material investigation (Ingold, 2012). All within the same environ which produced The Prelude, though out of phase and influenced in different ways by the changes in the world over 200 years. However, as I continue to confront the poem’s scope and hold space for the vastness of the Wordsworthian canon, I increasingly recognise the complexity of tying together thoughts from multiple scholarly fields. Much lies beyond what I can practically scope out within the time constraints of the PhD. Initial searches produced reading lists of hundreds, if not thousands, of articles, books and previous artistic works to wade through, and as such, attempts at producing a review have taken on many iterations since the project’s inception. What began as an act of casting a net into a sea of collections has evolved into an effort to bring architecture to the different seeds of information gathered. In the early stages of this process, I looked to plant forests from these heirlooms. Should the writing proceed as a walk through a forest? Or spin like a wheel? Or be presented simply as a report with chapters? 

In May of this year, I spent ten days at Wordsworth Grasmere and took up residence in a room overlooking Dove Cottage, the historic home of William and Dorothy Wordsworth from 1799 – 1808. 

During my stay, I became curious about exploring memory games in my practice and connecting them to my growing interest in graphic notation and other alternative visualisations of text and music. As a designer that writes and makes music, I am ever interested in phenomenologically connecting the sonic and the visual. And so, as an exercise in learning a section of the poem, I set up a piano and my small mobile recording rig and attempted, through song, to memorise the opening lines from Part I of the 1799 two-part Prelude. Putting 18th-19th century poetic language to melody proved challenging. I pulled the lines apart, testing them against my ability to extend my breath in different ways. As I sang the lines and sounded them out, a comfortable melody emerged. I liked to imagine that this mode of recitation played with the temporality of the poem, and in response, I made drawings of the lines and their shapes. Even now, months later, I can recall the ‘shape’ of this earworm and sing it without needing a prompt.

Dick Higgins, the theorist and co-founder of the Fluxus art movement, might have called these types of visualisations ‘an unknown literature’ or ‘pattern poetry’, which is ‘not the story of a single development or of one simple form, but the story of an ongoing human wish to combine the visual and the literary impulses, to tie together the experience of these two areas into an aesthetic whole’ (Higgins, 1987, pp 4). In a 2018 article for The Paris Review, writer Aysegul Savas proposes that Wordsworth himself employed for his poetry what I would also argue is a similar speculative memorisation and visualisation tool, although in a more imaginal form. Savas names this it ‘celestial mind palace’. She goes on to describe how, in his Preface to The Excursion  published in 1814, Wordsworth outlines the hope that his total poetic legacy might take a designed, navigable form – that of a Gothic Church, where the Prelude could function as the antechamber to a larger, as yet unfinished work, The Recluse, and the Excursion as another side-chamber. 
The remainder of his poems might then ‘have such connection with the main Work as may give them claim to be likened to the little cells, oratories, and sepulchral recesses, ordinarily included in those edifices’ (Wordsworth, 1814).   Although The Recluse remained unfinished and The Prelude was never published in the poet’s lifetime, it is evident that Wordsworth was thinking ecologically and visually across time, producing ‘imagines agentes’, or ‘images that act’ (Fabiani, 2019).  Rooms were assigned ideas and spatialised into form. Savas further illustrates how such cathedrals of the mind have been used by artists and writers to access higher consciousness since before The Renaissance.  As tools of translation utilised throughout the Romantic era, they were useful in holding together such metaphysical concepts as time, nature, and the boundlessness of the imagination, which Wordsworth would describe in Book IV of The Prelude as ‘something evermore about to be.’  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a critical contemporary of Wordsworth, was also notable for using diagrammatic notations to visualise relationships and philosophical ideas, intermingling the abstraction of dreams and mathematical theorems with the topography of the fells and ridges of the Lakes  (Colley, 2024). 

As I have engaged with my learning, I have thought much about feeding my writing into an imaginative but navigable ‘shape’, what I have been taught to think of as a ‘narrative donkey’ (Barker and Pepler, 2024). In so doing, academic writers producing projects in Art and Design have used visualisations and constructs such as labyrinths (Quin, 2017), rivers and rot (Halcrow, 2022), dance choreographies (Parker, 2020) and even forests, or ecologies of practice (Sanz, 2019).  Following Wordsworth’s example and working with the concept of a mind palace felt ambitious but appropriate for this particular moment in the project. Consequently, I have imagined for this draft of writing an image of a structure, an eclectically styled building with rooms connected by corridors of varying lengths. It is a place for movement and sensing. Time within is antientropic, tricksy and non-conforming. Musical echoes fill passageways, characters move freely between rooms, and poems hang as tapestries on walls. 

On a practical note, I acknowledge that the abstract, the felt or the intuited must be balanced with precision and objectivity to fulfil the particularities of the PhD. To this end, this literature review is also designed to be a hyper-focused survey of key texts and practices located at the very narrow intersection of Romantic literature, archival studies, data visualisation and ecological systems thinking. In conducting this review, I acknowledge the breadth of these fields but look to home in on critical contributions most relevant to the objective of my study. I will assert that this project is not a problem-solving contribution as much as it is a provocation and practice. The literatures I have selected have been chosen to intersect, like rooms and corridors, yet in research terms, fulfil precise criteria: their direct relevance to the artistic communication of time in a literary archive, their impact on the field of data visualisation for digital humanities, and their contribution to the development of scholarship on anarchiving as a creative, processual methodology of translation. 

In scoping the fields above, the most recent scholarship is cited where possible. This is most relevant as it concerns timely political, ethical, and social debates produced by existing anarchival practices. Researchers investigating the anarchive have explored varying aspects and departure points depending on their ambitions for their work. These projects look to disrupt existing archival narratives or, conversely, feed archival traces forward into new nodes of research-creation. Once one recognises the anarchive as fundamentally connected to process and time, its presence becomes suddenly apparent in every artistic inquiry, haunting the edges of what it means to question, design, resist and remember. To demonstrate this, these aspects will be discussed in-depth alongside a detailed analysis of the anarchive’s benefits and limitations.

Including older sources proves equally essential to this study. For example, several vital scholarly texts on The Prelude are dated before 1985 and are still highly relevant for understanding the affordances of the poem. Additionally, concerning the nature of time, critical breakthroughs continue to be made and a multi-perspective approach to the materiality of time is useful. A pluriversal, nuanced interweaving of theoretical approaches and cultural contexts will be presented. This will feed into relevant practice reviews demonstrating how time has been shaped graphically, sonically, and experientially, finding its final speculative framing in the pataphsyical potentiality of the digital.  

Considering the extensive chronology and the various source materials outlined, I have organised the review thematically into five rooms, framed and connected by the theme of time. Each room will highlight a selection of literature chosen to inform the project’s methodological framework. 

In room one, I enter the antechamber of Wordsworth’s temporal explorations with an introduction to the Prelude as a literary archive of experience. I expand on the “spot of time” as a key entry point into the text and as a microcosm of the poet’s broader engagement with time. 

With a closer understanding of the text and its potential affordances, I move into room two to explore the anarchive as a non-linear approach to surfacing the “warm data” in literature. 

In room three, the review takes a deeper scope across the philosophy of time and embodiment. I situate anarchival practices, explored in the previous section, within existing critical discourses that support the notion of the anarchive as subversive and optimistic, with a focus on performance, process, and the emergent, rather than on static preservation.

In room four, the focus shifts to artistic methodologies specific to my practice, and how multimodal translations of The Prelude support engagement with the archive.

In room five, I synthesis key learnings from each of the previous rooms, with implications for creative practice and temporal visualisation. 

The review will conclude with a summary of theoretical and methodological contributions, exiting the mind palace with a forward-looking statement proposing prospective avenues for informing future design practices. 

Additionally, although broader subtopics, such as consciousness, graphology, and the philosophy of mind, may be less extensively explored, these areas are essential for building a unique knowledge gap for the project. They are revisited in relation to the development of practice, and a more comprehensive reference list is provided at the end of each section for further reading.