From Voice to Environment: Authorship in Spatial Collage
Proposal Type
Individual Talk
Location
Narratives & Worlds
Start Date
July 2026
End Date
July 2026
Abstract
What happens to literary authorship when narrative is constructed not through sequential sentences, but through fragments arranged in navigable space? This paper examines interactive 3D collage environments composed of images, audio, text, and spatial objects. I argue that in such works, authorship becomes relational and emergent rather than singular and declarative—not only in reception, but in the process of composition.
The works discussed are created using the Community Game Development Toolkit (CGDT), a no-code framework designed to enable individuals and community groups to assemble collage-based interactive worlds without specialized technical training. Across a growing body of projects developed with diverse community partners, artists, and students in varied regional and institutional contexts, the toolkit has supported the creation of spatial narrative environments that weave together personal memory, speculative futures, and experimental intimacies. In the act of arranging lived experience alongside imagined artifacts, archival materials, and audiovisual fragments within digital space, unexpected relations arise: a memory reframed by proximity to a speculative object; forms of intimacy produced through the juxtaposition of personal materials and fragmentary representations of lived-in environments. These effects are not scripted in advance but develop through iterative placement, adjustment, and reconfiguration during the making process.
Through close readings of selected projects, I show how spatial arrangement functions as a literary device. Meaning develops through adjacency rather than linear progression, and authorship operates less as the delivery of a unified voice than as the staging of conditions in which fragments interact beyond intention. The resulting works model authorship as an environmental condition: the creator composes a field of relations whose narrative qualities unfold through the dynamic interplay of elements.
Grounded in sustained creative practice, this paper positions spatial collage as a distinct form within electronic literature—one that reframes authorship as relational, processual, and emergent.
From Voice to Environment: Authorship in Spatial Collage
Narratives & Worlds
What happens to literary authorship when narrative is constructed not through sequential sentences, but through fragments arranged in navigable space? This paper examines interactive 3D collage environments composed of images, audio, text, and spatial objects. I argue that in such works, authorship becomes relational and emergent rather than singular and declarative—not only in reception, but in the process of composition.
The works discussed are created using the Community Game Development Toolkit (CGDT), a no-code framework designed to enable individuals and community groups to assemble collage-based interactive worlds without specialized technical training. Across a growing body of projects developed with diverse community partners, artists, and students in varied regional and institutional contexts, the toolkit has supported the creation of spatial narrative environments that weave together personal memory, speculative futures, and experimental intimacies. In the act of arranging lived experience alongside imagined artifacts, archival materials, and audiovisual fragments within digital space, unexpected relations arise: a memory reframed by proximity to a speculative object; forms of intimacy produced through the juxtaposition of personal materials and fragmentary representations of lived-in environments. These effects are not scripted in advance but develop through iterative placement, adjustment, and reconfiguration during the making process.
Through close readings of selected projects, I show how spatial arrangement functions as a literary device. Meaning develops through adjacency rather than linear progression, and authorship operates less as the delivery of a unified voice than as the staging of conditions in which fragments interact beyond intention. The resulting works model authorship as an environmental condition: the creator composes a field of relations whose narrative qualities unfold through the dynamic interplay of elements.
Grounded in sustained creative practice, this paper positions spatial collage as a distinct form within electronic literature—one that reframes authorship as relational, processual, and emergent.
Bio
Daniel Lichtman is an artist, researcher and community practitioner based in NYC. Lichtman’s work explores how communities can use the tools of game design and visual art to tell stories about their culture and heritage, and imagine possible futures. Lichtman’s framework for interactive storytelling, the Community Game Development Toolkit, is used by community members, artists and researchers internationally. Exhibitions and publications include Oral.Pub; ELO '25 (Toronto); ICIDS; ICA, London; Ammerman Center for Art and Technology; BRIC, The Bronx Museum and The Queens Museum. Lichtman is Assistant Professor, and Program Coordinator, of Game Development and Emerging Media at St. John’s University, New York.