Corina MacDonald

http://www.traktion.com

DJ Cyan & Virtual Bodies
- Festival DJ - Electronic Music Performance -
Ambient Opening Event Wednesday October 17 at 5pm at Gallery Yergeau and performing Virtual Bodies for the Closing Night Party Saturday October 20 after midnight at Le Savoy

Border crossings: context and the social practice of genre on the web
> an essay

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which the medium of the web
alters notions of genre, community and border and how the spatial metaphor informs
our understanding of these changes. We consistently evoke spatial metaphors to
describe our relationships to networked information resources, conceptualizing a
framework of spaces and architectures requiring navigation. Within this analogy,
border resources are those which mediate between the fluctuating center and periphery
of context in any information space. It is the establishment of context which allows us
to meaningfully traverse and interpret the fluid interstices of meaning that occur in such
spaces. In the analog world, document features serve as border resources in such
familiar forms as page layout, typeface and tables of contents. These enable delineation
between genres and communities. In the digital realm, border resources have often
borrowed from their analog antecedents in form and function; however, it is evident
that this simulation is superfluous in a medium which continues to reveal unprecedented
contexts. My goal is to explore the nature of digital border resources and their relation to
emerging genres in the networked environment.