Week 9.
LECTURE
A lot of talk about how we will get jobs. Adrian emphasises the soft skill-set, as opposed to the hard skill-set–i.e. being a great editor rather than just being a “whiz” with Final Cut). We can make money from selling our expertise and our knowledge. We can’t make money from selling widgets we make. It won’t work anymore. People won’t pay for it. We are entering a soft skill-set economy where skill/knowledge is the most valuable asset.
A question about why we are studying such a limited program (Korsakow). Adrian agrees that Korsakow is extremely limited. He talks about how it would be far more successful it it had an online model/system like a blog service platform where you can add the vids and keywords online and the system generates the K-film on the fly.
At one point, Adrian was stressing the disparateness of language and cinema/image. He went so far as to say something about how you can edit six shots together in any sequence and it will still have meaning, whereas you cannot do this with six words. I disagree with this. I don’t think any six shots edited together in any way will make any more sense than six words edited together in any way.
READING
This week’s reading, Plotting the Database, examines interface and narrative. It underscores the importance of interface for interaction.
Luers describes an interface as a “spatial narrative device”–“a map that changes with the user’s navigation in time”.
Luers compares plot and interface, considering that they perform similar roles of providing interaction and cohesion in their respective domains (time and space). However, he identifies where they clash – the pleasures of story.
“Plot delights, puzzles, frustrates and excites through a selective revealing and concealing of information over time.”
It is this missing data that Luers deems integral to the narrative experience. A plotted interface “withholds as much as it reveals”.
Luers mentions Manovich’s work. Manovich writes that database logic flips the relationship between syntagm and paradigm (narration and story-world). Paradigm (“multiple relational aspects of story elements”) becomes visible in a database, and syntagm (“narrative sequence”) is suppressed.
“Story is generally organized through absence. Put another way, absence is presence. That seems very much at odds with computer data. But think of the problem this way: absence is a kind of aperture.”
– Norman M. Klein
Luers goes on to liken interface design to production design in movies–mise-en-scene to “mise-en-page”.
Interface is important for narrative, because narrative emerges as an effect of navigation.
Luers also stresses the recent cultural shift to the database. He contemplates the future for narrative – “If our communication technologies continue to impose a database logic on our everyday lives, what happens to narrative logic and plotting?”