It Must Have Been Dark by Then: An Artist Interview with Duncan Speakman

Abstract

This chapter is one of three artist interviews in this book. The Ambient Literature Research Project commissioned three works of ambient literature, and these works form the core of the practice-based research around which this book defines and constructs ambient literature as a scholarly field. In this chapter, Duncan Speakman discusses ambient literature narratives as compositional, created with a grammar borrowed from cinema as well as literature. He describes his work as non-site specific, layering text, both audio and print, music, and geo-location onto the urban environment—any urban environment—occupied by the reader. Speakman also describes the making of the work, including the close collaboration with the work’s narrator and dramaturge, Tineke De Meyer.