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Welcome to my Mystory blog project. Before explaining the project, allow me to introduce myself.

My name is Jake Riley. I am a PhD student at the University of Florida specializing in rhetoric, composition, and writing/media studies. I received my bachelors degree at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, majoring in English with a minor in Philosophy in 2010. Recent research interests include the rhetoric of ‘Big Data’ as well as exploring the relationship between writing and ‘art’ through analysis of early Mesoamerican writing systems and contemporary art practices. I write frequently on contemporary theory and continental philosophy at my other blog, Videre Spectare, which I began early in my graduate career.

Click my picture to begin my FAMILY discourse. 

(A word about the navigation of this “widesite.” Whiles some of the elements of the Mystory (pages, normal links) are easy to find in order to progress, some links are contained within the images I use. Some links to later parts will take you back to earlier parts. This is an attempt by me, the author, to show that the Mystory is not a linear narrative, but about the overall pattern of conductive logic enacted in Electracy.)

Read on for more information on the invention of the Mystory Project as well as the work of Greg Ulmer.

The Mystory project was initially proposed by Greg L. Ulmer in his book Teletheory. The Mystory project was most formalized in Ulmer’s 2000 book, Internet Invention. The Mystory, in a nutshell, provides us with a way to invent/discover a pattern in our lives that reveal to us our orientation in the world. The logic of the Mystory takes seriously the idea that our identities are constructed through various discourses that we interpellated into at an early age. These discourses are Family, Community, Entertainment, and Career.

The Mystory proceeds by constructing narratives, using a variety of media, that stand in for ways in which we are composed by these discourses. Within these narratives/images, we use a conductive logic to identify a repeating signifier that occurs across these discourses which holds them together. This repeating signifier structures the pattern in our lives. We are less concerned with the “meaning” of the signifier. Rather, taking our cue from psychoanalysis, we might say that we are “subjected” to this (seemingly) arbitrary signifier. Alternately, we might say that the signifier gathers our experiences, keeping in mind the specific Heideggerian use of the word in his later work on the four-fold.

The pattern will allow us to construct a simulation of what Ulmer calls an “image of widescope.” The image of widescope reveals the individual’s “signature style of learning and making anything.” The bet is that if we can simulate our image of wide scope, it will show us how we find ourselves in the world and our attitude/mood toward this positioning. Ideally, we can use this knowledge to help us understand our fundamental approach to problems that occur both in our own professions/disciplines and larger problems of public policy. This latter task is laid out in more detail in Ulmer’s companion volume to Internet Invention called Electronic Monuments.  The Mystory is the first step to becoming an egent, the form of collective agency that will emerge in the burgeoning apparatus of Electracy, alongside literacy and orality.

This is my third seminar with Greg Ulmer. Although we did not compose Mystories in the previous courses, we did use the blog medium in conjunction with the Prezi  to compose unique experimental media projects. Our instructions were derived from 5 texts which made up the elements of the CATTt.

The first project addressed an “accident” which instrumentalized reason has not yet been able to adequately addressed. My ‘accident’ was the process of mountain top removal.

The second project drew our primary theory instructions from Greg Ulmer’s most recent text, Avatar Emergency. In this project, we used the structure of the Tarot Spread to address our relationship with a local Gainesville problem Ulmer has been working on for years with the Florida Research Ensemble: The Koppers Superfund site.