INTERACTIVITY, DATABASE & FUTURE CINEMAS

notes

interactive practice assignment

team-taught class – notes/marks

today

Ghost of a Chance (Allison Ross) / Twine

“cinema 3.0”

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Xiaoli Liu, Disha Vasudeva, Sylvia Wang

Pry (Tender Claws, 2016)

interactive cinema

“a much-hyped hybrid that never did quite make it”

Peter Lunenfeld, “The Myth of Interactive Cinema” (2004)

narrativity

“It is not possible to tell a story by putting the storytelling in the hands of the spectator. And the linearity of a story is going against the nonlinear nature of a game”

Bernard Perron, “From Gamers to Players and Gameplayers: The Case of lnteractiveMovies” (2003)

ludology-narratology argument

The “difficulty integrating the bottom-up input of the player within the top-down structure of a narrative script.”

Mary Laure Ryan, “From Narrative Games to Playable Stories” (2009)

top down / bottom up

(Aylett and Louchart, 2004): “On one hand the author seeks control over the direction of a narrative in order to give it a satisfactory structure. On the other hand a participating user demands the the autonomy to act and react without explicit authorial constraint.”

what is narrative?

Ryan: “[T]he basic condition of narrativity: a sequence of events involving thinking individuals, linked by causal relations, motivated by a conflict, and aiming at its resolution”

playable stories

players actions are subordinated to narrative meaning

gameplay is meant to produce a story

Gone Home (Fulbright, 2013)

Dear Esther (The Chinese Room, 2013)

narrative games

narrative meaning is subordinated to the player's actions

story is meant to enhance gameplay

Grand Theft Auto V (Rockstar, 2013)

Fallout 4 (Bathesda, 2015)

new narratives

distributedcross-sited collaborativetransmedialimmersivelocativealternate realities

Kristin Daley, “Cinema 3.0: The Interactive-Image” (2010)

→ “a new cinema form based on interactivity, play, searching, and nonobvious relationships”

time-image → interactive image

"the spectator is no longer a passive viewer yielding to the ineluctable flow of time, but rather alternates between looking and reading as well as immersive viewing and active controlling”

cinematic structures reflect the culture

Alex Galloway: “[N]ew forms of cinema represent the larger political economy and power structure of the day—ambient, interconnected, intense, informative, serendipitous. This narrative structure best translates the experience of globalization, remix, and interconnection in our digital society.”

culturally situated

cinema 1: movement-image – not discrete units (Bergson); time dictated by action, "sensory-motor schema”

cinema 2: time-image – vs. (Benjamin) “mirror and soothe”;rupture, hesitation, irrational cutting, prolonged duration; pastness of recorded event with fused with presentness of viewing

cinema 3 “train and stimulate the viewer in ways that mimic the logics of the contemporary computer and digital economies”

→ “a new cinema form based on interactivity, play, searching, and nonobvious relationships”

“I would give both audience and technology more agency and assert that the globalized, networked, digitized society demands a new cinema form based on interactivity, play, searching, and nonobvious relationships. Even the logic of the computer, emphasizing the processibility of complex series of possibilities, bifurcations, and combinatorics, articulates narrative forms based on stochastic logic and Markov chains where contingency is a function of game and chaos theory, creating a network of probabilities, and not a determinant cause and effect as in traditional narratives.”

unpack

”passive” / active viewer

“[T]he spectator is no longer a passive viewer yielding to the ineluctable flow of time, but rather alternates between looking and reading as well as immersive viewing and active controlling”

transmedial / participatory

Cinema 3.0 ”participates in a world of cross-media interaction, and this has enabled new forms of narrative requiring, as part of the enjoyment, interaction in the form of user participation and interpretation”

live cinema

embodied, immersive, performative, site-specific, social media engagement

https://www.facebook.com/SecretCinema/videos/secret-cinema-presents-star-wars-the-empire-strikes-back/10153224974006053/

Jenkins positions ”media fans as active participants within the current media revolution, seeing their cultural products as an important aspect of the digital cinema movement.”

fan interactivity

“fan mode of interactive and intertextual engagement with the text has become a more prevalent viewing mode”

interactive (immersive/live) cinema or theme parks

Raphael: “With transmedia storytelling and an overwhelming amount of merchandising around films and cinematic universes, movies are becoming only a part of a bigger story. But then maybe . . . [they] provide a different experience and exist for different reasons than traditional cinema. This made me think of how Martin Scorsese recently compared Marvel Movies to theme parks . . .”

limitations of 3.0 formulation

Skyler: “Despite the interactive-image allowing its ‘viewsers’ to traverse networks which might not have been available to spectators of the movement-image, it nevertheless allows for a mostly safe and comfortable space in which to consume, create, and disperse. ‘Viewsers’ are typically (i.e. in the typical address of contemporary media conglomerates) not asked or forced to reconsider the ways in which they engage with visual media and thus reevaluate entrenched answers to fundamental questions of space, time, and their interconnection.”

ethics of involvement / distortion

Maddie: “When it comes to a common genre of film, historical film, the expansion into the historical realm in interactivity seems a place rife with potential concerns. How does one interact with the past, something that has already been structured and has ended?”

what is gained / lost with interactivity?

Sylvia: ‘[S]hould films be to some extent the artists’ self-expressions? Though still in development, the current existing interactive films are very limited in their narratives and themes. . . . And is it beneficial to a film to have multiple endings?’

Kinoautomat(Radúz Činčera, 1967

database cinema

“a form of cinema less concerned with storytelling and visuality and more interested in cognitive and navigational processes”

Lev Manovich, “Database as a Symbolic Form” (1999)

https://vimeo.com/44602928

database film

Los Angeles: Database as Artistic Form

https://vimeo.com/165919163

database as distributed identity

identity is “stored in external corporate, medical, government and surveillance databases, broadcast to the world via blogs and web cams, invaded by media images.”

Steve Anderson, “Select and Combine” (2004)

Man With a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1928)

Manovich: ‘[I]n one of the key shots we see an editing room with a number of shelves used to keep and organize the shot material. The shelves are marked “machines,” “club,” “the movement of a city,” “physical exercise,” “an illusionist,” and so on. This is the database of the recorded material. The editor, Vertov’s wife, Elizaveta Svilova, is shown working with this database—retrieving some reels, returning used reels, adding new ones.’

Downtown Browns (Tonia Beglari, Emilia Yang, et al. 2017)

http://downtownbrowns.weebly.com/

Possibilia (Daniels, 2016)

https://helloeko.com/v/D3iXb9/

“Bandersnatch” Black Mirror, Season 4, episode 1 (David Slade, 2018)

Pry

Danny Cannizzaro and Samantha Gorman (Tender Claws, 2015)

top 25 Apps of 2015 by Apple

prynovella.com

Six years ago, James returned from the first Gulf War. Explore James’ mind as his vision fails and his past collides with his present. PRY is an app hybrid of cinema, game and novel that reimagines how we might move seamlessly among words and images to explore layers of a character's consciousness. Open or shut James’ eyes, pull apart his memories, or read his thoughts infinitely scrolling in every direction. Through these unique interactions, unravel the past and discover a story shaped by the lies we tell ourselves: lies revealed when you pull apart the narrative and read between the lines.

interface

Tender Claws: "The whole point of the interface is to capture the sense of being overwhelmed. We use this sense of overload and endlessness as a way of mirroring James’ internal state. The text represents an obsessive thought that repeats endlessly. This is one example of how the type of interaction resonates with and, in many ways, is the content of the story."

ARG website

Harlow House, Emily Rauber Rodriguez

http://www.harlowhouse.org/

meta-streaming Twine

Watching You

file:///Users/kikibenzon/Dropbox/CTCS%20505%20interactive%20media/505%20materials/505%20student%20work/Watching%20(you)/Watching%20(you)%20Into%20the%20Netflixverse%20v03.html