Week 7: Symposium 0.4

What kind of genre is an interactive documentary? Is it still a documentary, or would you say that it is a new genre because of the hypertextual interface?

• Documentary: A document of physical reality.
• Mediated by author and technology
• Mixing form and content
• Brian – yes, it is still a documentary just in a different form.
• Documentary can be film, radio, artifact, even poetry.
• Genre is also about institutions and industry that produce them – help package, distribute for audience recognition.
• All stories have to make truth claims, but the truth claims in non-fiction have to make truth claims about “the” world not “a” world.
• Is documentary a genre?

If, “Interactive narratives have no singular, definitive beginnings and endings,” then what would be the constraints for an author of interactive media to control the interpretation of a narrative?

• Authorial intent and purpose is re-thought
• What kind of learning experience do I want to provide for my reader in getting them to engage with me and what I’ve authored.
• Plurality
• Less about messages
• Experience of a world the author has imaged and created
• Authors can never control interpretation. Eg: Bible “never have, never will” – Adrian “let go of the arrogance that you can control the reader.”
• We interpret texts not authors
• Objects have personalities that we interpret
• Hypertext = schizophrenic (try to establish causal links, narrative context)
• Author includes certain codes in the text (Stuart hall – encoding and decoding theory)
• But authoring is a gamble (readers might not get references, no guarantees)

How do you actually write a hypertext narrative?

• Different for each project
• Who is the audience?
• What kinds of motivations are involved?
• Includes time, space, characters and events
• Starts form the granular, small bits, then work out connections and intersections