Setting up
The process of designing, drafting, and rehearsing the installation took place over ten months, with staging practice at our homes, our offices, and in vacant classrooms. We found that our practice necessarily had to adhere to the instantiatory demands of a theory of “installation rhetoric,” i.e., we could not simply juggle image, sound, and text on our screens—we needed to move cameras, reposition physical elements, immerse ourselves physically in our own text in order to approximate what future viewers/readers might encounter. We had to, that is, put ourselves quite literally in someone else’s position. To us, it seemed a clear instance of what Linda Flower (1979) might have called “reader-based prose” a decade or more ago; and yet, this “reader basis” was a much more physical, embodied rhetorical task than she might have imagined. Certainly, it brought to light for us the necessarily material register of new media texts. It also quite easily moved us into a rich understanding of collaboration, not just with each other, but with “outsiders” we asked to watch, read, critique, and inhabit Visceration during the set-up process.
