Introduction

This week we invite you to consider how your project might position itself within digital simulation and/or environmental narratives.

It is also now time to consider the multi-platform nature of your digital narrative, and the different distribution and marketing strategies you might consider.

Your tasks:

• Read and watch the lecture material.
• Identify which type of ‘environmental narrative’ your project most aligns with (depending on your project, this may be a bit of an arbitrary exercise, but have a go anyway in the spirit of exploration): evocative, enacting, embedded or immersive (NB: These concepts are elaborated upon below).
• Come to class having identified a concept from any of the flipped lectures so far that most closely applies to the digital narrative you are developing.
• Make notes on the multi-platform marketing and/or distribution of your project.
• Most importantly: bring to class your ideas for what you might make for your EPOC.

Pre-digital simulations

As noted earlier in the course, narrative is an ancient form of communication and has been with us for thousands of years (if not longer).

Simulation, as a form of communication, also has a long history. Here are some examples of pre-digital simulations.

A doll that closes its eyes when it is horizontal	A crane that lifts a bucket when you turn its wheel	An orrery that models the relative positions and motions of the planets and moons in the Solar System.
The diorama was a pre-cinematic form of entertainment invented by Louis Daguerre, the inventor of the photographic plate.	It consisted of huge translucent paintings of famous places and used lighting effects to create the illusion of movement and change.	Effects included changing weather conditions, atmospheric effects, shifting day to night, and making figures appear and disappear within the scene.

The modern-day museum diorama is a descendent of this form of simulation.

Videogame simulations

Gonzalo Frasca argues in Simulation VS Narrative: Introduction to Ludology (2003) that the narrative model limits our understanding of videogames. He contends that videogames are not narratives but simulations.

Frasca’s broad definition of simulation:

1. a simulation is a model of a system
2. a simulation reacts to certain stimuli according to a set of conditions, rules or procedures.

 A simulation is never going to be identical to the system that it is modelling – often it is a much simpler system. 

Red Dead Redemption (2010)	Grand Theft Auto V (2013)	Assassin’s Creed Unity (2014)

For instance, the desert environment in Red Dead Redemption is far simpler than a real desert, it still retains some of its behaviours (for instance, it has a day/night cycle, and you can fall off bridges and cliffs).

Simulations as story machines

Frasca claims that a videogame is bigger than a single story. In fact, a videogame is a dynamic system that can produce many different stories, depending on the player’s actions.

In the same way that a kaleidoscope is not a collection of different images but a device that produces images, a videogame is a system that produces a variety of stories.

In Game design as narrative architecture Henry Jenkins argues that although games and stories have profound differences, game designers and critics can learn a tremendous amount through studying older storytelling media, such as films and novels. Jenkins believes that game designers should be understood less as storytellers and more as narrative architects: “Game designers don’t simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces” (2004: 120 – 122). According to Jenkins, narrative architecture, or environmental storytelling, in games can be achieved in four different ways:

 Evocative spaces

A certain place can evoke narrative associations by drawing on a pre-existing genre tradition (for instance the haunted house) or work (for instance Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865))

American McGee’s Alice (2000)	Fearful Tales: Hansel And Gretel Game (2013)	Silent Hill: Homecoming (2008)

 Enacting stories

A series of locations can stage narrative events (here a plot is organised spatially in the form of a world full of obstacles and aids to the progression of the story)

Red Dead Redemption (2010)	Far Cry 3 (2012)	Call of Duty: World at War (2008)

Embedded narratives

Narrative information can be embedded in the mis-en-scene of a location (as in the classic detective story model, where the player assembles a narrative history through uncovering clues)

L. A. Noire (2011)	L. A. Noire (2011)

Emergent narratives

The player can use the resources provided to design their own worlds (for instance, The Sims (2000))

Minecraft (2009)	SimCity – Cities of Tomorrow (2013)	The Sims 2 (2004)

Machinima

Those filmmakers without 3D animation skills may be interested in creating environments within online virtual worlds such as Second Life and Kaneva. These environments can be used to create machinima. Machinima are digital films made using real-time computer graphics engines. machinima artists, sometimes called machinimators, use video games (such as The Sims) or simulated worlds (such as Second Life) to create their film clips. As derivative works, machinima could violate the copyright of the videogames used to create them. However, In 2003, Linden Lab changed their license terms to allow users to own their works created in Second Life. Electronic Arts, the makers of The Sims, encourage users to create and share their own Sims’ narratives using the in-game camera. Screenshots and video footage of The Sims games can be broadcast freely, as long as the machinimator does not attempt to make money from its broadcast.

The Sims 3 Machinima – Madness – Best Of

The Sims 3 Machinima – Fascination

MetaPhore

Standby

Multi-platform (and transmedia) storytelling.

It used to be that most stories were told using a single medium, such as a book or a movie. At a later date, particularly if the story was a very popular one, it might have been adapted for another medium. So comics might have been adapted for television, or novels might have been adapted into films and so on. In general, when a narrative is adapted for different media channels, its basic story elements (characters and plot) are retained in the new format.

One of the first transmedia productions was The Blair Witch Project (1999) a docufiction or ‘found footage’ film. The story concerns the disappearance of three students in the Black Hills woods near Burkittsville, Maryland. The students disappear while they are making a documentary film about the legend of the Blair Witch. A year later their documentary footage is found buried under the foundations of an old house. The Blair Witch Project movie consists solely of this ‘found footage’ whilst the website presents additional material about events that happened before and after the disappearance of the filmmakers.

Blair Witch (clips)

Blair Witch (website) 

Transmedia storytelling is a very different approach in which a narrative is designed from the ground up to exist in multiple complementary modules across multiple channels. In other words, the narrative modules are like pieces of a puzzle that fit together to create a unified whole.

“Transmedia storytelling represents a process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience. Ideally, each medium makes it own unique contribution to the unfolding of the story.” (Jenkins 2011).

Ideally, as Jenkins points out, a transmedia storyteller will exploit the strengths or affordances of each medium to their best effect. For instance, a game module of the narrative might simulate one aspect of the narrative as a dynamic system, whereas a cinematic module of the narrative might represent another segment of the narrative in a visually spectacular and highly plot driven form.

Since transmedia narratives are distributed across different media and comprise a persistent universe, they can often be misconstrued as real rather than fictional. This was the case with Orson Welles War of the Worlds (1938), and also The Truth about Marika (2007), a narrative produced for Swedish television about the disappearance of a young woman. Many people believed Marika was a real person and helped search for her. Understandably, they were not happy when they found out that the story was a fiction.

The truth about Marika (participative drama)

Notable features of transmedia narratives are:

Multiple media – the narrative exists in different modules across more than one medium (usually 3+, often combining live events with traditional media).

District 9 (2009) marketing involved billboards banning non-humans – see Henry Jenkin’s discussion of District 9.

A timeline of Dexter’s transmedia elements

Narrative expansion- the different modules expand, or add to, the core narrative and its story world, past or future, points-of-view (focalisers).

The Office webisodes: The Accountants

Doctor Who – A Finding Freeflow Case Study

Narrative continuity – the modules are closely integrated and consistent with the core narrative (the canon).

The Holocron continuity database is the database used internally by Lucas Licensing to keep track of all of the fictional elements created for the Star Warsuniverse, and contains elements from nearly every officially sanctioned Star Wars product. Some statistics from the database – the database currently contains 8,742 characters and 3,419 planets.

Transmedia: Multichannel Storytelling Transcends Platforms

Narrative participation – the narrative is at least partially participatory, so that the audience can participate in the unfolding or creation of the narrative.

The Spiral

The Spiral Facebook page

The Spiral case study

Game features – the narrative often contain some gaming elements and a playful sensibility.

Dexter Interactive Investigation: Start Here!

Rabbit holes – the narrative contains at least one public point of entry through which the audience find clues or pieces of the story (the rabbit hole).  For instance, the film A.I. (2001) had a credit for Jeanine Salla as ‘Sentient Machine Therapist’ hidden among the credits for Spielberg and the actors, along with a phone number. These were the initial clues that lead players into the world of The Beast (2001) , an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) set in the A.I. movie universe. Here is Jay Bushman’s recollection of the game.

Cheese holes – the narrative contains spaces in which the audience is encouraged to create or contribute content.

“Cheese hole design is about recognizing the opportunities within the story … Cheese holes are the places where you would like or will actively steer an audience to create content, perhaps in the form of back story, additional characters, ancillary storylines, Rashomon-style alternative perspectives or around artifacts from the storyworld. It doesn’t necessarily mean disruption to impact the storyline.” (Alison Norrington, quoted in Miller 2014, p. 168)

Cheese holes often form on social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and on blogs. A Yahoo! Group titled The Cloudmakers was created by players of The Beast. The Cloudmakers sorted out information from the game and created elaborate flowcharts of in-game activity.

Further exploration:

Transmedia Documentary Storytelling

Finally, this is all of consideration for your proposals and EPOCs, in preparation for an industry where “Other design ecology factors that influence the creation and design of transmedia projects include institutional ones, such as the rise of funding bodies, arts organizations, broadcasters, studios and the like mandating cross-platform, cross-media, 360, and multi- platform projects” (Dena 2009, p. 52).

References:

District 9 (2009)

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The Spiral (2012)

The Truth about Marika (2007)

War of the Worlds (1938)

Dena, C 2009, Transmedia Practice: Theorising the Practice of Expressing a Fictional World across Distinct Media and Environments, PhD Thesis, University of Sydney

Frasca, G 2001, Simulation vs Representation, Ludology.org.

Frasca, G 2003, ‘Simulation vs. Narrative: Introduction to Ludology’, Wolf MJP & Perron B (eds) Video/Game/Theory. Routledge

Jenkins H. 2011, Confessions of an Aca-Fan (blog), available at http://henryjenkins.org/

Jenkins, H 2004, ‘Game Design as Narrative Architecture’, in Wardrip-Fruin, N. and Harrington, P. eds. First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 2004, 118-130

Miller C. H. 2014, Digital Storytelling: A Creator’s Guide to Interactive Entertainment, Focal Press, Mass. Available RMIT Library http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=806308&site=ehost-live&scope=site

This week we’re going to look a bit further into participatory practices and the history of participation in art, media and documentary. This site gives a bit of an overview of participation over the last century.

YOUR TASK
Flipped lecture: come to the tutorial with an example of a participatory project that you find interesting, successful, problematic or inspiring for your own project.

Please read at least one of the following – making notes of any interesting points or questions you have.
Strategies of Participation: Sandra Guadenzi
Documentary Ecosystems: Collaboration and Exploitation: Jon Dovey
Toward a Theory of Participatory New Media Documentary: Patricia Zimmermann

And for a manifesto on the importance of collaborative and participatory documentary practices, this list by Reece Auguiste, Helen De Michiel, Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz, and Patricia R. Zimmermann outlines a number of considerations and questions about these practices and spaces.

Participatory art

Art that involves some kind of audience participation or collaboration is not a new phenomenon. In 1910 the Italian Futurists began holding art performances in which they confronted audiences with inflammatory political texts, poetry, music and visual art. At the Teatro Lirico in Milan one evening in February 1910, the author of the Futurist Manifesto, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, provoked the audience into throwing fruit at him by crying ‘Long live war, sole hygiene of the world!’.

Gerardo Dottori’s ink-sketch Futurist Serata in Perugia (1914)

The French Dadaists held similar events where they attempted to provoke audiences into hurling food at them. These artists sought to engage the working classes in artistic performances in order to break the aristocracy’s monopoly on culture. They also wanted to devalue the art object as a marketable commodity.

YARD (1961), Allan Kaprow

In the 1960s in Europe and the US artists held less overtly political performances that demanded audience participation, known as ‘Happenings’. These events were designed to challenge conventional views of art and everyday life. For instance, Allan Kaprow made YARD (1961) in the sculpture garden of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. It consisted of hundreds of used tyres covering the ground in no particular order. Visitors were encouraged to walk on the tyres, and to throw them around as they pleased.

In the past two decades, collaborative art practices have both undergone significant development. Whilst participatory art practices traditionally occurred on the fringes of the art world, since the 1990s they have become a fully-fledged art genre. The art historian Claire Bishop writes that public participation in art projects is now a near global phenomenon, reaching from the Americas to Asia and Europe (2012).

Some recent examples of participatory art:

They shoot horses (2004), Phil Collins

Collins held a disco-dancing marathon for teenagers in Ramallah. “Collins paid nine teenagers to dance continuously for eight hours, on two consecutive days, in front of a garish pink wall to an unrelentingly cheesy compilation of pop hits from the past four decades. The teenagers are mesmerizing and irresistible as they move from exuberant partying to boredom and finally exhaustion.” (Bishop 2005)

References

Bishop, C. 2005. The social turn: Collaboration and its discontents. Artforum.

Bishop, C. 2012, Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso Books, New York.

Dottori, G. 1914, Futurist Serata in Perugia

Kaprow, A. 1961, YARD (installation)

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WEB 2.0

Just as audience members have moved from observing to participating in art works, online users have moved from viewing web pages to actively generating web content. The term Web 2.0 describes those websites that:

• allow users add their own data
• collect user data as a side-effect of their use of the site (O’Reilly 2005).

The phenomenon of audience participation in web publishing has been described as the ‘network society’ (Castells 2000) and ‘participatory culture’ (Jenkins 2009). This new culture encourages online participation by having:

• “relatively low barriers to artistic expression”
• “strong support for creating and sharing one’s creations”
• and cultivating social connections amongst its members (Jenkins 2009, p. xi).

Web 2.0 sites are designed to make publishing text, photos, videos or tags both easy and socially rewarding. Users socially reward others for publishing material by:

• commenting
• tagging (labelling)
• liking
• linking (making a connection between personal web pages)
• retweeting or reposting (republishing with attribution) their contributions.

The Wisdom of Crowds

When a large group of people participate in an online activity, they are thought to form a collective intelligence that is superior, in terms of problem-solving and creativity, to the intelligence of any single group member. This concept is described as ‘the wisdom of crowds‘ (Surowiecki 2004), and the ‘hive mind’ (Kroski 2005). Crowdsourcing, which can be described as the request for ideas, content and labour from a large group of online participants, is thought to harness this superior collective intelligence and has become a commonplace feature of the web.

Crowdsourcing is frequently used to invite and enable the public to participate in art projects (Howe 2006) and is a strategy employed by a number of high-profile artists (Jenkins 2014). Online crowdsourced art has emerged as “a significant development across the entire artistic spectrum, from visual arts to music to creative writing” (Literat 2012).

A prominent example of a visual artwork that utilises crowdsourcing is The Johnny Cash Project (Milk 2010). The project website invites people to trace, by hand, a single frame of the film clip for the Johnny Cash song “Ain’t No Grave”. People rate the most popular frames and these are joined together to form an ever-evolving animation.

Using a similar approach the composer Eric Whitacre has crowdsourced several choral compositions as part of his Virtual Choir project (Whitacre 2009-2014). Utilising the video-sharing platform, Youtube, Whitacre sent out a call for participation in his composition Lux Aurumque. Participants filmed their own performances, uploaded them, and Whitacre edited them together. The finished composition comprised individual recordings by 185 singers from 12 countries.

The avant-garde artists who created participatory artworks in the previous century have strongly influenced those producing crowdsourced art. As Bishop explains, the authors of participatory artworks tend to have a common desire to subvert traditional relationships between the art object, the artist and the audience (2012). Crowdsourced artworks are also seen as a means of challenging traditional ideas about authorship and creativity (Literat 2012) and democratising art production (Stoddart 2009). Like offline participatory artworks, crowdsourced art works aim to build community through collaboration and sharing (Xiao 2009a) and to offer participants liberating vehicles for self-expression (Literat 2012).

Further research:

Examine audience engagement strategies in the following Idfa DOCLAB winners:

Serial (2014): http://serialpodcast.org/

Alma – the webdocumentary (2013): http://alma.arte.tv/en/webdoc/

Examine models of audience support examples in the following crowdfunding sites: Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/), Kickstarter (https://www.kickstarter.com/) – search for ‘documentary’, ‘webseries’ etc.

References

Bishop, C 2012, Artificial Hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship, Verso Books, New York.

Castells, M 2000, The Rise of The Network Society, Blackwell Publishing, Hoboken, N.J.

Howe, J 2006, ‘The rise of crowdsourcing’, Wired magazine, issue 14.06, pp.1-4.

Jenkins, H 2009, Confronting the challenges of participatory culture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass.

Jenkins, H 2014, ‘Rethinking “Rethinking Convergence/Culture”‘, Cultural Studies, vol. 28, no. 2, pp. 1–31

Kroski, E 2005, ‘The hive mind: Folksonomies and user-based tagging’, InfoTangle Blog, accessed April 2, 2014, from <http://web20bp.com/13z2a6019/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/The-Hive-Mind-Folksonomies-2005.pdf>

Literat, I 2012, ‘The work of art in the age of mediated participation: Crowdsourced art and collective creativity’, International Journal of Communication, vol. 6, p. 23.

Milk, C 2010, The Johnny Cash Project, accessed April 2, 2014, from <http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/‎>

OReilly, T 2005, ‘What Is Web 2.0’, O’Reilly Network, accessed April 29, 2014, from <http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html>

Whitacre, E 2009-2014, Eric Whitacre’s Virtual Choir, accessed April 2, 2014, from <http://ericwhitacre.com/the-virtual-choir>

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AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION 

Storytelling is no longer just about transmission, it is also about engagement. We are all competing for attention in an information saturated society. According to some reports you have less that eight seconds to engage someone online before they click away. Storytelling for the 21st century has to include a narrative that draws our attention and a strategy of community engagement.

Advertising, public relations, marketing and journalism are converging. Traditional advertising doesn’t work any more. The world is saturated with advertising images and the public are highly suspicious of any company making unsubstantiated claims about their products. Public relations and marketing are now about opening a conversation with consumers and connecting with them in a more honest, transparent and authentic manner. In this regard, marketers can learn a lot from storytellers and journalists.

On the other hand, storytellers and journalists now have to think more like businesses and seek new ways to get a return on their investment (ROI). In other words, they need to find new ways to capitalise on the time, energy and resources they expend creating their content. In finding, engaging their audience and profiting from their audience, they need to think more like marketers.

Different levels and types of participation

Elan Lee, of 42 Entertainment and Fourth Wall Studios, was one of the earliest designers of alternate reality games (ARGs). An ARG is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, and often involves multiple types of media and game elements. In 2004 he created I Love Bees, an ARG designed to promote the Xbox game Halo 2 (2004). I Love Bees was modelled on Orson Welles 1938 radio play, War of the Worlds. It was a six-hour radio drama broadcast over thousands of payphones around the world. Every time a phone was answered, that portion of the audio was then unlocked on the I Love Bees website.

Lee groups users into three categories: Casual, Active and Enthusiastic. The group at the bottom of the pyramid (Enthusiastic) are the ones who participate wholeheartedly in Lee’s alternate reality games. The Casual and Active groups watch from the sidelines and are occasionally inspired to join the Enthusiastic group. As Lee puts it: “Cause they’re watching, like ‘Oh my god, these guys are going out in hurricanes and answering payphones!’ And you have all that insanity. And what happens is that triangle grows, because people from the top, every once in a while they trickle down to the middle. And people at the middle level start to trickle down to the bottom level. And that bottom level grows when there’s more core players doing more and more and more, the whole triangle grows because now there’s more to be entertained by.”

Here is a chart of different types of online participators, put together by Forrester Research (2008):

Forrester’s Social Technographics data classifies consumers by country, gender and age via this social technology profile tool.

Videogame players

The game designer Tracy Fullerton identifies the following types of player:

1. The Competitor: Plays to best other players, regardless of the game
2. The Explorer: Curious about the world, loves to go adventuring; seeks outside boundaries – physical or mental
3. The Collector: Acquires items, trophies, or knowledge; likes to create sets, organize history, etc.
4. The Achiever: Plays for varying levels of achievement; ladders and levels incentivize the achiever
5. The Joker: Doesn’t take the game seriously – plays for the fun of playing; there’s a potential for jokers to annoy serious players, but on the other hand, jokers can make the game more social than competitive
6. The Artist: Driven by creativity, creation, design
7. The Director: Loves to be in charge, direct the play
8. The Storyteller: Loves to create or live in worlds of fantasy and imagination
9. The Performer: Loves to put on a show for others
10. The Craftsman: Wants to build, craft, engineer, or puzzle things out (Fullerton 2008, p.90)

As Fullerton points out, there are many other types of player not mentioned in this list, some of whom are not well served by today’s video games.

Not every player likes the same challenges or experiences. People have a variety of needs and interests and it is important to consider the type of person you are designing for. For instance, what types of interactivity might you design for your user? Here are some characteristics of interactive activities that you could experiment with:

1. Tests of skill – users like to test how good they are at something.
2. Competition – users like to test their skills or wits against others.
3. Cause and Effect – users like to find out what will happen when they perform a certain action. This allows them to work out the answer to a question through trial and error.
4. Feedback – using a simulation is like having a conversation: you perform an action and you receive immediate feedback on how you went.
5. Incentives and Rewards – users like achievable goals and payoffs.
6. Levels of Difficulty – users like the focused tension they experience when attempting a difficult challenge. When they overcome the challenge they experience a feeling of achievement and release. It’s a bit like climbing a high mountain.
7. Repeatability – when aspects of a simulation are repeatable, users feels in control. You could undermine this feeling of control by introducing elements of randomness.
8. Level of Randomness – users know what will happen but not where or when. This builds a sense of tension.

Profiling your ideal audience

Can you characterise the ideal viewer/user of your digital narrative? Here are some (but by no means all) user/viewer characteristics that may be relevant to your audience:

• Age – children, teenagers, baby-boomers, young adults, over 65, in their thirties
• Gender – mostly male, mostly female or both in equal numbers
• Social group – family with young children, seniors
• Language – English as first language, English as a second language
• Education – school, college, university, post-graduate
• Expectations – what they expect based on their experience with similar websites or games
• Existing knowledge – If non-fiction, how much they already know about the content? If a game, what similar games are they familiar with? If an animation, what other animations are they familiar with?
• Web and computer experience – low, medium, high
• Device – Mac/PC, mobile, console, small/large monitor, other?
• Software – OS, latest software updates, browser software and version
• Internet speed – slow, standard, fast
• Location – local, national, international, urban, regional, remote
• Where – home, school, work, library, public spaces, in transit (car/plane/train)
• When – during work hours, during a lunch-break, after the children are in bed, weekends, at night, early morning
• Why – to be informed, complete a task, seek an answer, buy something, entertainment, training
• Learning preferences – visual (learns by reading and watching), auditory (learns by listening and speaking), kinaesthetic (learns by doing)
• Income – what can they afford to buy? what are they willing to pay for?
• Work attributes – employee, home duties, shift-worker, academic, professional, business owner, executive, carer, unemployed, volunteer, specific industry sector

References

Fullerton, T 2008, Game Design Workshop, Second Edition: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games (Gama Network Series), Morgan Kaufmann, Massachusetts.

Forrester Research 2008, Forrester’s North American Media & Marketing Online Survey, http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2007-06-10/chart-who-participates-and-what-people-are-doing-online

Ipsos MediaCT 2015, 2015 Essential Facts about the Computer and Video Game Industry, Entertainment Software Association. Available: http://www.theesa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/ESA-Essential-Facts-2015.pdf

Phoebe 2010, Elan Lee wants you to convert part of your life into the storytelling experience, http://workbookproject.com/culturehacker/2010/07/27/elan-lee-the-rolling-stone-interview-part-ii/

Further reading:

Morse T 2014, ‘All Together Now: Artists and Crowdsourcing’, ARTNEWS, http://www.artnews.com/2014/09/02/artists-and-crowdsourcing/

Situationist International: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SvdWk8zRrI

Lots coming out of the theatre tradition, Jason Mailing et al: http://www.jasonmaling.com/#

Live art: http://www.triageliveartcollective.com/

Festival of Live art: http://fola.com.au/

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/about/what-is-live-art/

DATABASE NARRATIVES

As you’ll remember from the Rose reading last week, under the influence of the internet “a new type of narrative is emerging – one that’s told through many media at once in a way that’s nonlinear, that’s participatory and often gamelike, and that’s designed above all to be immersive” (2011, p. 3).

As you work towards pitching your own ‘new direction in narrative’, we offer another nonlinear narrative theory, that of the database narrative.

In his discussion of the principle of variability, Lev Manovich suggests a form of nonlinear narrative, which he calls a database narrative. In this model a narrative is fragmented into self-contained records and stored in a database. These self-contained records are called chunks, narremes or modules and could be text passages, individual images, or video clips. In theory, the database contains a collection of items or story fragments that the user can put back together in different orders and combinations to generate a wide variety of narratives.

According to Manovich’s theory, the variability of a database narrative is only possible because of its modularity. In other words, because the narrative modules are not hard-wired together they can be arranged into many different sequences. It is the user, in collaboration with the automated software, who performs this arrangement of narrative modules into a variety of sequences. To describe how the variability of a database narrative works, Manovich offers the following analogy of a film editor who creates a narrative from a database of film footage. Usually the editor is working under the instruction of the film’s director, so both are responsible for the narrative of the film. Manovich writes, “During editing the editor constructs a film narrative out of this database, creating a unique trajectory through the conceptual space of all possible films which could have been constructed” (2001, p. 208). Similarly, the user of a database narrative constructs a sequence from its database of narrative modules. In doing so, the user performs one of the tasks traditionally performed by the storyteller, namely, re-ordering narrative elements into a sequence.

Whilst Manovich calls some films ‘database cinema’  – most notably Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera (1929) –  he defines the database narrative as a purely digital phenomenon. For other theorists, however, database narrative can also be found in literature and cinema (Kinder 2002; Kinder 2003; Bizzocchi 2005). The new media theorist, Marsha Kinder, defines database narrative as “narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories” (2003, p. 6). She sees such narratives “throughout the entire history of cinema, from the early cinema of attractions to the present” (2003, p. 4). Some of the films she terms database narratives are Groundhog Day (1993), Pulp Fiction (1994), Memento (2000), and Run Lola Run (1998). To this list the media theorist Jim Bizzocchi adds Rashomon (1950), Timecode (2000), and the BBC adaptation of The Norman Conquests (1977).

The defining feature of these narratives is that they challenge the traditional mode of chronological ordering. Each of these narratives is ordered, to some extent, by point-of-view, spatial location, reverse chronology, or chronological looping.

For Manovich, the principle of variability is strongly related to the concept of customisation. He writes that the logic of new media corresponds to the logic of post-industrial society where “every citizen can construct her own custom lifestyle and “select” her ideology from a large (but not infinite) number of choices” (2001, p. 60). For instance, Manovich writes that the user of a hypertext can produce her own version of the work “by selecting a particular path through it” (2001, p. 61). For Manovich the variable work is an improvement on the one-size fits all model of traditional media. He writes, “new media technology acts as the most perfect realisation of the utopia of an ideal society composed from unique individuals” (2001, p. 61). The user doesn’t receive a ‘one-size fits all’ narrative. Instead, she is able to construct her own unique narrative and thus, she is re-assured that she, too, is unique.

Can a narrative that has been customised on the fly ever really be a genuine improvement over a narrative that has been skilfully crafted over months or years? Perhaps the real strength of a database narrative is that it allows the user can generate many unique sequences, which combine to form a very different experience of a narrative.

Rhizome narratives

In botany, a rhizome is a root or underground stem that sends out shoots from its nodes. No two rhizomes are ever identical. The philosophers Deleuze and Guattari use the term rhizome to describe a web-like, non-linear, decentralised structure that can be entered or exited at multiple points. A narrative with a rhizome structure may have a defined beginning and ending, as in this diagram, but in its centre each node may be linked to any other node.

Here are some examples of rhizome narratives.

Waterlife	Universe Within	The Whale Hunt
Content: The story of the great lakes in Canada. Text info, voice over, haunting music. Buttons animate. Links to external websites.	Content: stories about individuals living in highrises all over the world	Content: documents an Inupiat whale hunt in Barrow, Alaska.
Interface: Choose one of the 24 topics on the left side of the screen. Clicking one of the tiny images will also take you to one of these 24 topics.	Interface: click on different ‘rooms’ via world map or via face menu. Once in a room, scroll around and click different graphics to view movies.	Interface: interactive timeline, mosaic or pinwheel interface.

The challenge of this structure is to create a narrative interface that allows the user to access the rhizome structure in a systematic manner. As Marie-Laure Ryan, a digital media theorist, explains, an author can reconcile database and narrative by creating “a database design and a linking philosophy sufficiently transparent to enable the readers to aim with precision at the elements of the story that they want to expand” (2006). For Ryan, if the content of a database narrative and its interface are constructed appropriately, “the unpredictable probes and always incomplete exploration of the reader will not prevent the emergence of narrative meaning” (2006, p.149).

In The Whale Hunt users can isolate different thematic or spatial groups of images using the metadata that Harris has assigned to each image. According to Manovich, “Metadata is what allows computers to ‘see’ and retrieve data, move it from place to place, compress it and expand it, connect data with other data, and so on” (2002, p. 1). The user utilises the metadata of the work by clicking on the ‘change constraints’ button and opening the constraints panel (figure 8). This panel allows the user to find particular image groupings within the thousands of images contained in the work. The constraints are organised into four categories: ‘cast’, ‘concept’, ‘context’ and ‘cadence’. Clicking on these constraints will progressively narrow the number of images available on the main screen.

The constraints work by filtering photos according to their metadata. For instance, if the user chooses ‘Joe’ from the ‘Cast’ constraints, only the images with the metadata tag ‘Joe’ will be available on the main screen. If, in addition, the user chooses the concept ‘food’, only the images with the metadata tags ‘Joe’ and ‘food’ will be available. As the user selects each constraint, the photos without that tag disappear from the main screen. The constraints can be progressively chosen until the number of available photos decreases to zero.

YOUR TASKS

Flipped lecture: come to the tutorial with an example of a narrative that ‘challenge the traditional mode of chronological ordering’. If you can show us something on screen, even better!

Pitch preparation: come to the tutorial with a draft of your ‘logline’, or short 1-3 sentence summary of your digital narrative, for me and your peers to workshop with you.

If you haven’t already emailed through your BLOG URL, it’s very important you do so ASAP.

References:

Bizzocchi, J. (2005) “Run, Lola, Run: film as narrative database” (university paper, draft available here).

Kinder, M. (2003) “Designing a Database Cinema,” in J. Shaw & P. Weibels (eds.) Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary After Film (pp. 346-353) Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 348-49.

Manovich, L. (2001) The Language of New Media, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Rose, F. (2011) The Art of Immersion: how the digital generation is remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the way we tell stories, W. W. Norton and Company, New York and London

Ryan, M-L. (2006) Avatars of Story, Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press