Qmail is a Mystory - an
experimental, and rather esoteric genre of digital rhetoric invented
by the postmodernist academic Greg
Ulmer. The concept of a mystory is intentionally vague, but
generally the mystory seeks to combine “problem-solving in
general,
and inventive thinking in particular, with all the discourses one
knows” in order to “record the obtuse meanings of
information in
each of the institutions of the maker’s experience.”
These institutions are what Ulmer calls
“popcycles” and he has identified four such cycles:
Family
Community
Career
Entertainment
In the mystories that I have read,
these guidelines have resulted in a weird mixture of theory, personal
remembrance and puns. As if an academic was jamming or improvising on
her keyboard in the same way that a jazz musician would on his
trumpet. Ulmer argues that the mystory works to encourage invention
rather than interpretation - and that this is best done
through
some of these means:
allegory remakes
aesthetic reasoning aphoristic writing remixes
dreamwork mood assemblages
associative logic atmosphere collages
intuition identification altars
arguing by conduction
Qmail was created (rather than merely
written) as an assignment for a course on Digital Rhetorics that I
took in the autumn of 2005. It is a remix, rehash or remake of my
life as Don Quijote in the form of a webmail interface. The emails
are composed of different thoughts, inventions and ideas as well real
elements from proper emails from family and friends. It could have
been bigger. But as it is, it is more of a stylistic experiment,
testing the rhetorical and temporal elements inherent to the email
form of expression.
I use all four of Ulmer's suggested pop cycles, though it is worth
noting that "career" has been transformed into "ambitions" or "dreams"
- as my career doesn't seem to have started yet.
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