Belonging- Media Rich E-Book

Experiments in Interactive Online Publishing with Atavist

Belonging is a collaborative ethnography about what it means to belong in San Francisco in the year 2011 through the form of a media-rich electronic book.  Using phenomenology as a point of departure, this project depicts spaces of belonging.  To ascertain the borders of belonging in an urban community, it takes shape from images, videos, sounds, and text.  It is about how belonging is embodied, how it is felt and how it is experienced.  Integrating media forms such as sounds and videos into a traditional text environment provides unique apparitions and vibrations of belonging for interaction with reader. This project acknowledges that belonging is about the roles we embody as we negotiate the relationships that constitute a given place. In this understanding, San Francisco is just as much a given set of relationships, as it is a physical, topographical city sensed in honking horns, seagulls, and fog rolling in during the afternoon.  It is a subjective experience of a place, a declaration of time experienced in a multi-sensory ethnography and conceptual cartography of a city.

Seen here are photographic stills of the project which was selected as an early experiment of the Atavist publishing platform. Many thanks to my friends Chiraag Bhakta, Faye Chao, Rebecca Cross, Jeremy Dalmas, Margaret Eisenberg, Anne Griffith, Reo Jones, Andre Karpov, Andres Lopez, Tobias Womack, Claudia Wheeler-Rappe, Pete Trachy, and Lucia Volk for participating in this project. You all inspire me deeply.