About this Volume
Digital Designs on Blake
This volume of Romantic Circles Praxis Series includes contributions by Ron Broglio, David M. Baulch, Marcel O'Gorman, Nelson Hilton, Joseph Byrne, Adam Komisaruk, Steven Guynup, and Fred Yee.
Digital Designs on Blake brings together recent and more seasoned Blake scholars who have worked in new media. Contributors explore how new media representation of William Blake's work provides a heuristic for another mode of inquiry into Blake's complex verbal and visual texts. The volume looks at Blake's designs as well as new media and critics' refashioning of Blake's texts. Essays include readings on Blake and 3-D environments, Blake and Heidegger on technology, gaming as a method of thinking, and digital performance in Flash and MOOs.
The text is encoded in HTML, but features no frames and a limited use of tables. It will work best with Netscape 4.0 or Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher or a comparable browser; earlier browsers may not display everything properly. Because you may enter and exit these files along multiple paths, you may need to use the back-arrow button on your browser to return to your starting point. The full text of the volume, like all hypertexts in the Romantic Circles Praxis Series, is fully searchable.
The essays and other files were marked up in HTML by Joseph Byrne at the University of Maryland. The volume cover and contents page were also designed and marked up by Joseph Byrne.
For Joseph Byrne's essay, images copyright c 2003 The William Blake Archive. This project is supported in part by a William Blake Archive Reproduction Grant for Graduate Students.
About the Romantic Circles Praxis Series
The Romantic Circles Praxis Series is devoted to using computer technologies for the contemporary critical investigation of the languages, cultures, histories, and theories of Romanticism. Tracking the circulation of Romanticism within these interrelated domains of knowledge, RCPS recognizes as its conceptual terrain a world where Romanticism has, on the one hand, dissolved as a period and an idea into a plurality of discourses and, on the other, retained a vigorous, recognizable hold on the intellectual and theoretical discussions of today. RCPS is committed to mapping out this terrain with the best and mo st exciting critical writing of contemporary Romanticist scholarship.
About the Contributors
Ron Broglio is completing a book project called Technologies of the Picturesque. This current essay on Blake is part of a second project called Blake and The Fold that examines the dynamic of Blakean characters and space using Deleuze and Whitehead.
David M. Baulch is Associate Professor of English at the University of West Florida. He has written articles on Blake, Coleridge, and Thomas Lovell Beddoes and is currently working an edition of Beddoes' The Bride’s Tragedy as well as a book on Blake.
Marcel O'Gorman is Director of the Electronic Critique Program at the University of Detroit Mercy. His work ranges essays on William Blake, to kinetic digital media installations, to a book on the future of the humanities (E-Crit: Digital Media, Critical Theory, and the Humanities, University of Toronto Press, 2005).
Nelson Hilton is Professor and Head at the Department of English, University of Georgia. He is the author of Literal Imagination: Blake's Vision of Words (1983) and Lexis Complexes: Literary Interventions (1995). He began the Blake Digital Text Project in 1995 (www.english.uga.edu/wblake) and for the last four years has helped to develop the Electronic Markup and Management Application (<emma>: www.emma.uga.edu/cocoon/emma/home).
Joseph Byrne is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Maryland. He is also a site manager at Romantic Circles.
Adam Komisaruk is Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University and owner/moderator of the NASSR-L. He is the author of articles on "Monk" Lewis, Mary Shelley, Thomas Rowlandson, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake and Lord Byron. His works-in-progress include a study of sexuality and the growth of the middle class in British Romanticism.
Steven Guynup is a visual artist and programmer, is one of the most controversial developers of virtual spaces in the world. Steve's works confront ideas and issues that represent the bleeding edge of three dimensional design. A nine-year veteran in Web3D, he has presented at SIGGRAPH in 1998, 1999, 2000, 2003 and 2004, won awards from Blaxxun and the Contact Consortium, and recently worked with 1996 Ars Electronica winner Andy Best on his Iceborg Project. Currently he is pursing a Doctorate in Communications and Design at the University of Baltimore. He can be reached at: steve_guynup@hotmail.com.
Fred Yee is a visual artist and graphic designer who currently resides in New Jersey. His cover designs for Holt, Rinehart and Winston's Elements of Literature 2005 series received recognition in the 18th Annual New York Book Show (Bookbinders Guild of New York). He has served on the panel of the New York State Council on the Arts, Visual Arts Program (1998, 1999). He has curated several exhibitions and his works are in collections across the state.
