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Landscape, and its relation to place identity, is a powerful tool for visualizing and making legible the effects of environmental change. So often the operations of resource consumption and conservation occur in a way that shapes and changes particular regional landscapes. This is significant in an era where inspiring audiences and policy-makers to respond to unsustainable resource use and environmental change is difficult, but where we are still compelled to care for particular elements of place as they relate to identity. In this article we examine how resource use and landscape change are communicated through Irish films, where the interactions of place identity and landscape are central. A key through line argument is how landscape is an important vehicle for expressing anxieties and contexts for resource interdependency; another is how elements of local and regional identity compete and interact with global concerns, such as climate change or globalization, in complex ways. We analyse these interactions to demonstrate how energy resource use and environmental change are linked, highlighting ‘small nation’ tensions concerning geographic identity and resource ownership that are relevant to real-world energy transitions and apply much more broadly.

[in]visible belfast was a research-driven indie alternate reality game (ARG) that ran for 6 weeks during the spring of 2011 in Belfast and was subsequently adapted, 5 years later into a fictional documentary for BBC Radio 4. The ARG is a participatory and dispersed narrative, which the audience play through. The text expands outward across both physical and digital platforms to create a mystery for the players using everyday platforms. The ARG is a product of media convergence and at its heart transmedial, defined by its complexity and modes of participation. The fictional radio documentary which remediated the ARG into a more simple linear structure, but possibly a more complex narrative form, retells parts of the story for new audiences. The premise of [in]visible belfast – the game and later the documentary – is itself an adaptation of writer Ciaran Carson’s novel The Star Factory (1997): a postmodern adventure through the complex psychogeography of Belfast. A trail through the labyrinthine text, which paints the history of Belfast in poetic prose. This article will map the concept’s journey from novel to game to radio, contextualising its development within its political and urban landscape and charting the remediation of the narratives as they fold out across multiple media and complex story arches. The article will draw together ideas from previous publications on ARG, transmediality and complex textualities from the authors and reflect on the textual trajectories that the remediation of the narrative has taken from the original book, through the ARG, into the radio documentary. Building upon recent approaches from environmental philosopher Tim Morton and games theorist Ian Bogost, the authors argue that Belfast’s history propels medial adaptations of a particular kind, characterised by a ‘flat’ ontology of space and time and a sort of diffuse and dark urban experience for designers/producers and players/listeners.

In recent decades, Belfast writer Ciarán Carson has emerged as one of the most inventive of contemporary literary voices, in part for his unique style of textualizing space. Driven in some ways by the very specific technological challenges of the conflict zone of Troubles-era Belfast, Carson’s poetry and prose are marked by what we might describe as tech paranoia—but, in a constructive poetic answer, his texts create new logics for using tech materials, machines, and high-tech spaces in ways that privilege creativity. It is no coincidence, notes literary and technology theorist Katherine Hayles, that “the condition of virtuality is most pervasive and advanced” where centers of power are most concentrated and conflicted intersections most frequently occur. Carson’s oeuvre illustrates the point, employing the technology of the printed page to simulate and process the zone of conflict in new, postdigital ways. This article poses Carson’s texts as ideal for exploring issues that connect regional identities, technology, and the arts—including highly topical issues around terrorism and nationhood—that are highly relevant for contemporary students of literature.

This paper addresses the question, how can sustainable energy projects increase engagement from consumers using interactive media communications? To this end, a systematic literature review was conducted in order to synthesise findings across four major disciplines, with the goal of identifying current and imminent challenges, as well as potential solutions, to engaging consumers with sustainable energy projects in the era of interactive media. The authors propose a Socially Dynamic Communications Framework (SDCF) that can be used organisationally to address core challenges and generate solutions within a single iterative cycle. Initial findings indicate that consumer behaviours are most likely to be influenced through strategic social interactions using diverse, networked platforms, in order to be meaningful in contemporary social and technological contexts. Furthermore, this type of interaction is likely to become integral to future energy delivery systems, making interactive, online engagement with energy initiatives an important area for investigation. While many organisations may cite a lack of control in digital and social media as a risk justifying avoidance, the majority of engagement and marketing literature emphasise the greater risk inherent in not engaging effectively online.

In recent years, there has been a growing area of research focused on points of convergence between scientific and humanities discourses, with methods of interpreting cultural products drawing increasingly on other disciplines and vice versa. Ecological readings of cultural materials would be included here, ecological not in the traditional sense of environmental criticism, but rather focused on the elements of network relations as they play out within the living systems of cultural works. This chapter will examine the ways in which podcasts can share structural and epistemological affinities with ecological processes, engaging the conversational science podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind (STBYM) as a case study. I will argue that STBYM, known for its elegantly produced discourse around complex material, with episodes like ‘Meet Your Bacterial Masters’ and ‘The Habitable Epoch’, exemplifies a growing trend toward epistemologically complex methods of approach to cultural processes.

Christian Fuchs's Social Media is an important contribution to the introductory literature available on the topic. Fuchs's approach is, as the title suggests, critical from the ground up, and in th...

This article constructs a transmedia topology of the Making a Murderer text, mapping the ecologies of interaction, participation and creation with and of the text by the audience. Firstly we explore the mixed textualities of the series delivered through the streaming service Netflix. We then expand the analysis to consider the wider transmedial textualities and trace the thresholds of the transmedial text to investigate new approaches to analysing transmedial work in the context of non-fiction media forms. We explore the relationships between the core series and the participatory engagement in the production of the text as a whole which includes online engagement, active investigations, and the production of a wide range of new material in response to the core series. Here we define transmedia topology as a tracing of what we could call the geography of the text, as defined by its features and boundaries (or lack thereof).\ud \ud We situate the series as a piece of Complex TV, but explore how the series invites active participation from the audience; through its structure, complexity and form. The article maps the series textual connections with more traditional documentary form, and more experimental transmedial approaches, relating it to Alternate Reality Games. We consider (at the time of writing and publication) the tangible, real world outcomes of the text and the audiences participation in the production of the text.\ud \ud This mapping situates the text within a number of media discourses to understand its media geneology and explore its textual trajectories. This mapping explores both the 10-part series, and the wealth of paratextual material as a text together, mapping the connections between the documentary series and the emergence of a transmedial textuality that is owed largely to audiences and the textual terrain.\ud \ud Also translated to Spanish: Hook, A., Barrios-O'Neill, D., & Mairs Dyer, J. (2019). "Una Topología Transmedia De Making A Murderer" In N. Golubov (Ed.), TV Ficciones: Reflexiones Criticas Sobre Television Estadunide (pp. 67-93)

A variety of critics and theorists have demonstrated how approximations of chaotic principles occur in literary systems and texts. Across disciplines, this set of approaches has emerged concurrently with the arrival of increasingly powerful computing technologies.\ud \ud This paper examines the novel Exchange Place by Ciaran Carson, applying Katherine Hayles’s concept of ‘chaotics’ to the text to read for established chaotic features including unpredictability, complex forms, nonlinear relationships and multi-scalar representations.\ud \ud Foregrounding interactions between chaotics as proposed in the 1990s and contemporary post-digital environments, I highlight three distinguishing elements of Exchange Place, which are explained and illustrated through close reading, that reflect an evolving, 21st-century chaotics; I’ve termed these pulsating subjectivity, mercurial body-text, and collective mind.\ud \ud Crucial to this discussion are evolutions in subjectivity in the post-digital age, where bodies and texts have become deeply embedded with, and within, technological networks. The result is a new horizon of textual strategies and effects that privilege network-ecologies of personhood over individuality and coherence; Exchange Place is a quintessential illustration of this literary horizon.

As energy systems integration deepens to support the development of a cleaner and more intelligent energy infrastructure, it will be increasingly important for consumers to better understand their relationship to energy systems and to take more proactive roles in managing energy. Foregrounding the importance of systems comprehension, we argue for the strong potential of interactive games to be helpful in engaging consumers in sustainable energy practices, as they can demonstrate complex system dynamics through simulation-based experiences. Focusing on interrogations of engagement and social change posed by gaming theorists and designers, and using several flagship interactive games as points of reference, we discuss the elements of game space that make it capable of simulating complex systems and large-scale implications of energy decisions richly and effectively. We discuss social, technological, and narrative elements of game play, pairing a theoretical investigation with a practical exploration of how energy related games can link with data in the real world, with particular emphasis on the emerging Internet of Things. Our conclusions emphasise the importance of game simulation toward the longer-term goal of cultivating more complex patterns of interaction and cultural analysis around energy use; this is based on the assertion that energy, a social resource, must be managed in ways that are equally social.