Arising out of the work of Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, Walter Ong, Jacques Derrida and Gregory Ulmer, among others, it is widely thought there are three stages in the history of human communication: the oral, the literate and the electronic. Nonetheless, debate is ongoing over the integration, ordering and the substantive separation of these stages. An upshot of these debates is that each stage is loosely allied to a particular socio/political structure: hunter/gatherer or tribal societies, nation states, and globalisation respectively. In the current alloying of ‘electronic communication’ and ‘globalisation’ though there is a rising interest in what is termed ‘new regionalism’, or regionalisation, even regionality. Accordingly, Chora-Logic: Electracy as Regional Epistemology examines the possibility of an emerging conceptual alliance (and through reference to two Australian regions a sometimes embodied and situated one) between the embryonic communicational infrastructure of electracy and the age-old spatial scale of the region, a relationship that might just come to represent a means of rethinking the civic and the psychic, the commercial and governmental frameworks of an electro-energised global skein. It may also be a way of reinvigorating a study in the relation of the body (in its capacity as a citizen-subject) to the nation state, especially as all these entities are increasingly though ambiguously constituted in and through globalisation. The method of synthesising and antagonising these relations between electracy and regionalism is through the philosophy of chora, Plato’s conception of embodied place as found in the middle section of the Timaeus, coaxed along by a range of interpretations of this important genesis myth in Western philosophy. In particular, chora is taken up in the work of Gregory Ulmer as a key method in the ongoing conceptualisation of an electrate epistemology. Arising out of these concerns Chora-Logic is an experimental re-configuration of the sovereign, abstracted and disembodied citizen-subject of the Cartesian mould (a significant psycho-political mooring of the literate national character) to one situated both in the virtual density and multidimensional actuality of a particular place (organically conceived of herein as an idiosyncratic mix of psychic, domestic, workplace, local and regional proximities), but whose both [dis][embodied] self-knowledge and world-knowledge are now increasingly realised by access to an electronically arbitrated global/regional polis. In sound-bite terms, the bumper sticker could just as easily proclaim the following inversion: ‘Think and feel chora-logically, act globally’. Finally, the nucleus of Chora-Logic: Electracy as Regional Epistemology is a risky praxis whose experimental eddy (in both formal and content terms) spins within the current ambivalence, uncertainty and fast-paced change in electronic communicative arrangements (electracy), as these are themselves wrapped in the psychic and socio-political variabilities of spatial affiliation, all of which are symbiotically entwined regardless of the historical period and/or the geographical context.

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My dissertation introduces the notion of "augmented authorship" and applications for prompt engineering with generative neural networks inspired by Gregory Ulmer's theories of electracy (2003) to the interdisciplinary fields that teach writing and rhetoric. With the goal of inspiring the general practice of electracy, I introduce prompt engineering as practice in flash reason (Ulmer 2008; 2012), a new collective prudence emerging from the apparatus of electracy. By situating electracy and flash reason as threshold concepts in writing studies, and by aligning principles of electracy with ACRL and NCTE digital literacy frameworks, I demonstrate how prompt engineering across modalities can help students meet digital literacy goals, before providing accessible models or "relays" in the form of AI-coauthored texts, course modules, and aesthetic models deployed in the game world Roblox.

Internal+/-External Terrains is a meditation on the nature of electronic creativity, primarily from a production point of view. It seeks to arbitrate and synthesise a range of skills, attributes and ideas that might constitute the field of electronic aesthetics. It does this from the perspective of electronic artists, and the socio/economic/cultural system they increasingly serve. The aesthetics of electronic production, as looked at through the framework of electracy, serves as a model through which to locate some specific shifts in both self-making, and capitalism, in both their Post-Fordist, and globalising manifestations. Internal+/-External Terrains is a meditation on the re-conceptualisation going on in electronic meaning-making, as it is currently happening at the interfaces of the psyche, the politico-cultural domain, and in the techno-aesthetic apparatus of its production. Through the compilation of a possible program in electracy (of its various aesthetic components as used in production), along with a brief outline of the electronic artist, Internal+/-External Terrains situates both, as role-model and epicentre, of an increasingly accepted mode of abstraction: Radial-Logic©. And it is this omnidirectional form of abstraction currently lighting the cyber-cohering logic of an already arrived future.