(or: Learning What The Bloody Hell Korsakow Can Do)

Scale here is important: with Korsakow, we’re not setting out to create the most ambitious crossover event in the history of cinema; Korsakow is designed to give meaning/importance/significance to the small moments – the small stories, experiences, places – rather than large narratives. It’s for deconstructing the big into smaller fragments, isolating certain themes or ideas or moments, and from there, linking them together into non-linear sequences (ie. Hannah’s cool deconstruction of Sans Soleil – particularly inspiring work).

In the reading for week 6, Anna Weihl talks about Korsakow as a way of creating:

• small stories/worlds
• a networked world
• multilinearity
• uncertainty

Uncertainty here is key. Hannah used the internet as an example of a way to distinguish the non-linearity of a Korsakow project: when you click a link on the internet it can take you to one place; when you click a link on Korsakow, it can take you to many places. There’s a degree of uncertainty as to what comes next and that’s kinda the crux of the software. But, how can we do this in a way that promotes interactivity within the film and produces some kind of emotional connection?

At this point, somewhere between week 6 and 7, we’d refined our original ideas. The idea of creating an ‘aural Kuleshov effect’ – accurate definition notwithstanding – got under our skin and we wondered how we could use music, building off mine and Darcy’s previous project, to stir some kind of emotional effect in the viewer. In that project, we wondered how audio could be used as a prompt for viewers to create their own complementary video; in this project, we decided to invert it. The person receiving the work is now a viewer (though still an active viewer), no longer a consumer/prosumer/other media degree keyword. They don’t have to create something as a part of the work, they are now part of the work.