|
INTERACTION
The communicative room, or the narrative stage, is created in
the intersection between the moving image and the audience. This room
has expanded with digital media and the communication between the computer
and the user. On this stage the linear narrative elements of the moving
image has been given a new range of possibilties, the ”story”
of old media have been expanded with the ”story world” of
new media and a whole set of interactive possibilties.
The
term interactive have constantly been redefined and developed during the
last decade. To understand the nucleus, the core, of interaction, we can
quote programmer, gamedesigner and author Chris Crawford from his book
Understanding interactivity: ”interaction: a cyclic process
in which two actors alternately listen, think and speak.” (1)
Crawford have designed and programmed several textbased storyworlds, among
them Erasmaton and Erasmaganza.
Expanding his basic view on interaction as a communication tool between
actors on to the computer / user relation, Crawford reaches this conclusion
on how the process is set up:
”User
interface focuses on optimizing the communication between people and
electronic devices. Interactivity design adresses the entire interaction
between user and computer. While it shares much with user interface,
interactivity design is distinguishable by its inclusion of thinking
in the process of optimization.” (2)
Essential
in this definition of interaction is Crawfords belief that there must
be an element of active reflection to constitute a real communication
with the computer. An interactive process that could – using a broad
definition – be seen as an analogy to the way the montage constructs
meaning in in movie making.
4.1
Interactor and writer
The narrative structures and theories developed in digital media are to
a large extend based on interaction. Each application or project in new
media need to define how the interaction is set up. In the project SPEED
we focused on how the viewer could create a personal and unique experience
navigating in a see of media. Our model was developed using a definition
on the role of the interactor formulated by Janet Murray: ”...the
interactor is the author of a particular performance within an electronic
story system”(3) , with the important distinction that the
narrative world of SPEED isn´t a storyworld but a model for creating
an experience from a specific narrative content.
With Murrays definition of the interactor as a form of writer / creator
of his / her experience, follows: ”Authorship in electronic media
is procedural. It means writing the rules by which the texts appear as
well as writing the texts themselves. It means writing the rules for the
interactor´s involvement, that is, the conditions under which things
will happen in response to the participant´s actions.”(3)
Or to put it in our context working with a pre-concieved content –
the writer creates the storyboard and the content, but the actual reading
/ experience takes place when the user shapes his / her path through the
narrative world.
The purpose
of interaction in a narrative context differs totally from that in an
information context, the usefullness – or how to reach a desired
result. In the world of fiction, to create an experience is central –
how does the artistic creation cooperate with the communication, how and
in what degree can the audience act as a co-creator of the experience.
A writer / creator of a narrative world can be seen as the cartographer
who delivers the actual impressions of a landscape in the form of a map,
the interactor explores this map. The choices the explorer makes decides
what kind of experience he / she creates: a distinct, crisp and clear-sighted
walk through a naked desert or a wet, turbulent ride on a roaring river
of emotions.
Research
into methods of shaping interactive narrative works in digital media have
exploded during the last years of the computer era. In this paper we choose
to study the model concieved for navigation in a documentary movie material
by Michael Murtaugh for ”Jerome B. Weisner: A Random Walk through
the Twentieth Century” (4), an interactive narrative about the founder
of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT.
The issues Murtaugh formulates and describes in his preparatory work for
the production, ”The Automatist Story Telling System” back
in 1996, is fundamental and still relevant for penetration the problems
and theories evolving in the field of digital narrativity.
4.2
Automatic association
When embarking on the build-up of an interactive map for his work, Murtaugh
makes an introductory distinction about the role of the user / audience,
his focus is on how to influence the narrative path rather than the creation
of a string of events that constitutes the experienced story. ”The
Storytelling System is a kind of ”editor in software” or ”narrative
engine” - a computer program capable of constructing responsive
narratives based on the content and description provided by an author.”
(5)
The programming model is based on association, the term ”automatist”
refers to a method the surrealists used to create art build on the free
associations in the subconcious, the automatist creation. ”...the
approach uses keywords as a means of indirectly defining potential links
between materials. During the presentation process, keywords function
in parallel, pushing and pulling the narrative toward and away from specific
pieces of content.”(5)
Key words expresses emotions, problems and statements like – art
revolt, melt a stone, bear pit, recovery – words based on themes
expressed in the content rather than events. Based on choices among these
keys, the Murtaughs system links up and screens moving images from the
database of interviews, reflections and statements. ”The fundamental
units of structure are not events to be expressed but expressions themselves
in the form of discrete units of content. Instead of characters interacting
in an environment that is literally the ”story world”, individual
expressions interact in an environment that is the process of storytelling.”(5)
To create a deeper experience by using emotions and association to trigger
narrative content, is one method to formalize the narrative structure
build on other parameters than logic. The formalization of the narrative
tools is a crucial part of research in digital narrativity.
4.3 Narrative tools
Tools in interactive narration differs from those used in traditional
dramatized fiction — ”exposé - conflict - peripeti
– closure ” — a formal, linear structure based
on dramatic tension. This way of constructing a story from the beginning
to the end describes a movement forward towards a goal, this model is
referred to as aristotelian and goes all the way back to the structures
used in greek drama and oral storytelling traditions.
The narrative elements used in interactive media is different, mainly
because of the absence of linear, forward movement in the creation of
the story. Murtaugh uses a different set of tools — ”intention,
immersion, structure, response, guidance”.
In his paper he reviews these tools from the narrative aspect, puts emphasis
on the fact that interactive storytelling still is an open field were
no rules are pre-written; a new media creates its own set of rules, or
rather conventions, in close affiliation with the development of technology.
Some of Murtaughs
conclusions are fundamental and seems – in todays context - almost
- superficial- – ”In the interactive narrative, immersion
relates to how well the Storytelling System engages the wiever in the
diegesis rather than in the mechanisms of its construction.”
(5) But the point he makes is still valid; the exploration of the navigation
can be an obstacle for the desired insight in the story, or to use proper
interactive lingo : The interactive map can be more immersive than the
world it describes.
This interplay between tool and experience, structure and immersion, can
be seen as the foundation for how to dramatize when creating an interactive
narration. To navigate through a see of media demands some sort of map
or instruction, the user of the system should know, or be able to understand,
how he / she can approach and discover the narrative.
To embark
upon this interplay, you need to create an overall context, an allurement
or attraction, a mysterium to solve, a secret to discover, an experience
to share.
Professor Glorianna Davenport at MIT Media lab have made groundbreaking
research through the institutes Interactive Cinema Group, were Murtaugh
was a member, for more than a decade. In an attempt to summarize the role
of the tools in the universe of interactive narrativity, she concludes
that it is the underlying thematic motives in the narrative that should
rule the creation of an interactive process.
”The
wonder of being an "interactive multimedia" author today lies
in the discovery, the effective surprise of the creation. The author
only has a limited ability to previsualize a project before it becomes
a functioning system. I encourage designers to throw convention to the
wind, not to dismiss visual intensity of a presentation, but rather
to disregard -- in the beginning -- decisions about buttons and mouse
clicks and menus and branching, and concentrate on finding an underlying
structure which can be driven procedurally and presented with a rich
dimensionality.”(6)
4.4
Absence of closure
In Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray focus on a central aspect of interactive
storytelling, the absence of a preconcieved closure. In a traditional
structured aristotelian story all movement are directed to such a point,
in the interactive world, this point rarely exists. ( This, for obvious
reasons, is not true in a game context were goals are of a different nature
like gamepoints, puzzlesolving and / or creation of power).
”Electronic
closure occurs when a work´s structure, though not its plot, is
understood. This closure involves a cognitive activity removed from
the usual pleaures of hearing a story. The story itself has not resolved.
Instead the map of the story inside the head of the reader has become
clear”.(7)
From a traditional
story point-of-view the absences of closure and a given ending is equal
to a narrative failure, a sign of hesitation, indetermination. In an interactive
narrative Murray see this absence as an asset; thus we can restart, focus
on theme, transform the story, make it as a caleidoscope, experience the
content from other aspects than the preconcieved. Seen in this context,
the multidimensionality of the story is more important than the authors
intentions, the clue or the moral is a process with the user / interactor
as an active part.
Michael Joyce, author of hyper-text work ”Afternoon”, makes
in a remark on closure a point of the fact that the readers are in control.
”When the story no longer progresses, or when it cycles, or
when you tire of the paths, the experience of reading it ends.”(8)
This remark
could be taken from a sociological study of how the modern mediaconsumer
uses the remote control in front of the tv-set. When the story no longer
is absorbing, change channel, go for other excitements. The writer Douglas
Rushkoff makes a remark in his essay ”The End of the Story”
over how the digital technology creates a totally new relationsship with
experiencing a story. ”The people I call ”screenagers”,
those raised with interactive devices in their media arsenals, are natives
in a mediaspace where even the best television producers are immigrants.”
(9)
Rushkoff argues that todays young digital generation never envisions themselves
as passive consumers of political solutions or messages, in all fundamentals
their view of the world is freedom of choice; the computer have tought
them that everything can be manipulated. That fiction, storytelling, is
a field where everyone creates their own version, in a constant state
of transformation and movement between identities and content.
This fragmentisation is not equal to collapse of meaning, instead, new
potential meaning is created parallel with the growth of digital media.
4.5
Digital aestethic – a ”floating” condition
In the new narrative context made possible by digital technology, we need
to investigate how to create immersion, how to define the quality of the
term. In her essay ”Digitally – approximate aesthetics”,
Anna Munster makes an attempt to describe the specific communicative means
new media art uses, how meaning is created in the aestethic interplay
between human-computer.
”Digital
art is partly dependent upon what it offers us specifically and uniquely
as it effects us through its `blocs of sensation´. The `bloc´
or zone according to Deleuze and Guattari, designates a relational area
of sensibility, the indeterminate feeling of sensate participation in
the material world, organic or inorganic: `Life alone creates such zones
where living beings whirl around, and only art can reach them and penetrate
them in its enterprise of co-creation. This is because from the moment
the material passes into sensation, as in a Rodin sculpture, art itself
lives on in these zones of indetermination. They are blocs.´”
(10)
With the
aid of Deleuze / Guattari terminology, Munster formulates the nature of
the aestethic experience in a digital context, examines the artistic process
at work in digital art. She concludes that the artistic strategy closest
to the computers functionality is the assemblage, an meaningfull experience
arise in constant movement between immersion and reflection, ”between
experience and contemplation”.
The ”zones” created by this movement are the nodes were the
aestethic experience is born. Munster notes that these zones are approximate,
floating, almost impossible to discover and this reflection leads to a
reasoning where the mechanical functions of the computer and the bodys
reaction in front of the screen and keyboard, also are protagonists in
the aestethic interplay.
”When
it comes to considering what kind of aesthetic experiences digital art
work offer us we need to consider the hypermediation of the technology
itself through a range of media machines (video, television, print,
photography) and the speeds through which they engage us with the technology.”
(11)
The conclusion
Munster arrives at are that digital art cannot be seen as an clearly defined
aesthetic field, all traditional media are active in the process filtered
by the computer. All media aestethic are active in the relational aestethic
created by digital art.
In the final
chapter of ”Hamlet on the Holodeck” entitled ”New Beauty,
New Truth”, Janet Murray follows a similar line of thought:
”The
computer is chameleonic. It can be seen as a theater, a town hall, an
unreaveling book, an animated wonderland, a sports arena, and even a
potential life form. But it is first and foremost a representational
medium, a means for modeling the world that adds its own potent properties
to the traditional media it has assimilated so quickly.”
(12)
The term
”digital stage” represents in Murrays resoning an open narrative
condition where the key word is chameleonic. The investigation and creation
of new narrative universa opens an ocean of possibilities, limited only
by the computers ability to represent and / or dissemble our image of
reality.
In the creation
of SPEED we regonized the need of understandable interactive tools to
experience the narrative content, in the same time we searched for means
of reaching beyond, or under, the structurally codeable story. Our ambition
was to examine if the narrative could expand along paths we could not
visualize. A term for this would be the sublime, an urge to reach beyond
cultural fields and gameplays and arrive at an experience that we cannot
programme or define.
A possible strategy for this would be to free the narrative paths from
any form of logic and hand over guidance to elements of chance.
(1) Crawford, Chris Understanding Interactivity Chapter One ”What
Exactly IS Interactivity?” http://www.erasmatazz.com/Book/Chapter%201.html
2001-04-24
(2) ibid
(3) Murray, Janet ’The Aesthetics of the Medium’ s.153, Hamlet
on the Holodeck (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusets 1997)
(4) ’Jerome B. Weisner: A Random Walk through the Twentieth Century’
http://ic.www.media.mit.edu/JBW/ 2001-04-24
(5) Murtaugh, Michael ’The Automatist Storytelling System’
(1996)
www.media.mit.edu/people/murtaugh 2001-04-24
(6) Davenport, Glorianna ”1001 Electronic Story Nights: Interactivity
and the Language of Storytelling.”. (Conference Paper) Language
and Interactivity conference, Australian Film Commission. Sydney, Australia.
(1996). http://ic.media.mit.edu/Publications/Conferences/StoryNights/HTML/gidAus1.html
2004-10-11
(7) Murray, Janet ’The Aesthetics of the Medium’ s.174-175,
Hamlet on the Holodeck (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusets 1997)
(8) ibid.
(9) Rushkoff, Douglas ’The End of the Story. How The TV Remote Killed
Traditional Structure’ Fall 1997 issue of Telemedium, The Journal
of Media Literacy http://danenet.wicip.org/ntc/TELEMED.HTM 2001-04-24
(10) Munster, Anna ’Digitally – approximate aesthetics’
CTHEORY THEORY, TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE VOL 24, NO 1-2 Article 93 14-03-01.
http://www.ctheory.com/ 2001-04-26 Citat ur Munster´s fotnot –
”This is Deleuze and Guattari's description of the grouping of sensations
into affectual moments that occur in aesthetic experience. See, G. Deleuze
and F. Guattari, "What is Philosophy?", H. Tomlinson trans,
Columbia University Press, New York, 1994, pp.173-4.”
(11) ibid.
(12) Murray, Janet ’New Beauty, New Truth’ s.284, Hamlet on
the Holodeck (The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusets 1997)
THORE
SONESON 2001
|
to
top |
