Abstract
This paper proposes to redefine the letter as a form of telepresence, a term famously coined in 1980 by MIT Marvin Minsky and now used both in the professional world and the academia, in order to refer to feelings of presence in distant spaces and/or with distant people, experienced through technology, mostly computers and VR tools. The paper suggests that the modest, “low-tech” letter has long offered a vast array of resources of telepresence, starting from ancient times (in all major epistolary cultures, from the West to China). Based on the remarkable progress of epistolary history in the last 40 years, this paper compares epistolary telepresences with contemporary ones, focusing on four themes: 1. Materiality. As physical objects, letters have unique affordances: personal handwriting and signature, physical transmission, unique tactile and sometimes olfactive (perfume) sensory qualities. 2. Embodiment: in letters, the body has long been incarnated through detailed verbal description (ekphrasis), adding images (drawings embedded into the text, portraits, analogue photographs), and the voice imagined through reading aloud. The distant recorded or transmitted voice has been the major modern innovation. 3. Rhythm: Modernity’s repeated (and often not kept) promises of “death of distance” and “real time” have epistolary precedents: the letter, associated with postal systems, has long been seen as the acme of fast transmission. 4. Address: despite the hype about a digital “blurring of borders”, epistolary cultures have long filled it the spectrum between face-to-face dyad and widely addressed dissemination.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
TELEPRESENCE, MEDIA HISTORY, EPISTOLARY, EMBODIMENT, SPACE-TIME COMPRESSION, ADDRESS
