ACM Multimedia'96 Hynes Convention Center

November 18 - 22, 1996 Boston, MA, USA

Storytelling after cinema II

Friday, November 22, 9:00 - 10:30 am, Room 306, Panel 7,

Moderator: Annika Blunck

Panelists: Graham Weinbren , Katherine Phelps, Perry Hobermann , KP Ludwig John

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#Annika Blunck

Intervention in Narrative Spaces.

Interactive art arouses hopes, since it creates possibilities to conjure and discover new continents. Interactive art maintains the demand for changes fortified by the conviction to transform the consumer into an activist, into an explorer of digital worlds. Cinema is not bound to its original space anymore. But when interactive stories are told, they do not have a beginning or an end. In each moment the situation can change because each decision causes a change to the entire condition:

Interactive stories are told AND written at the same time. The user discovers the work while he reconstructs it. Certainly a plot develops between the artist, the idiosyncratic work and the viewer. The plot forms itself in those black boxes, in those claustrophobic spaces, that trigger new phobias, in order to not destroy the putative immersion and to maintain the illusion of the endlessness. Seen against this background it is compelling and exciting to ask how the nature of narration has changed by using new media, especially compared to the happening and action art of the sixties. Is it possible for a work laid out on an interactive structure to

tell a story? What demands are made on the narrative and what necessity exists for the contemporary viewer?

CV

Annika Blunck born 1967, studied art history, English and Scandinavian

philology in Kiel, Berlin and London. Project development of international

exhibitions with focus on media art involved in various projects of the ZKM MultiMedia Lab working as a research assistant in the ZKM Institute for Visual Media.

email: blunck@guido.zkm.de

Media: 2 Slide projectors (if possible superimposition projectors), PAL VTR

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#Grahame Weinbren

What is narrative and why do we need it?

These are large questions, that have been addressed time and again in the last few millennia. Like anything of any complexity or abstraction, there will be a phalanx of answers that come together in different ways and that apply to different situations. Of course I won,t attempt to answer these questions. But I will suggest that the kinds of answers that are given to them can be divided into a few categories:

- answers that consider the effect of a work on its audience

- answers that consider the structure of narrative itself

- answers that consider the needs or desires of the makers

When I think about a concept of interactivity in narrative, as a maker I find myself focusing on the third question: what can I do that I couldn,t do before? what kinds of stories can I tell, is it a subset of the non-interactive story, or a superset, or something else altogether?

But when I,m actually involved in the construction of an interactive piece, I sometimes find myself in the territory of the first category, a region where I,m somewhat uncomfortable. This is the place where I need to ask what the reaction of a viewer might be at some point in the story, so that I can implement a way to gauge his or her response for the work to act on it. I would rather consider the shape or architecture of the work, assess to what extent it corresponds to my inner impulses, and hope that once it is made, it will become transformed, separated from the mundanity of my intentions, and say something larger, or at least something else. So why, as a filmmaker, am I interested in making interactive narratives?

CV

Grahame Weinbrens films since 1972 and include over 10 short films and Umbrellas, a feature documentary made with Henry Corra and Albert Maysles. First prize at 1996 Festival of Films on Art, Film Exhibitions and Performances. 1976-86 throughout US and Europe, Lectures, Panels & Presentations since 1982 on Interactivity and Art all over the world including Israel, Finland, Russia, Germany, Holland, Australia, and throughout the USA.

Writings on Interactivity and Art-Making, and on other forms of

cinema, published in English, French and German, and on the World Wide

Web Editor since 1986 of Millennium Film Journal.

Grants include NEA, NYSCA, Mass Council, Art Matters, Jerome

Foundation, Valley Film Works, Art Matters, Checkerboard, NYFA (1989)

Teaching Graduate Computer Art and MFA Photo Departments of School of

Visual Arts.

email: string@interport.net, http://www.sva.edu/MFJ

Media: VHS playback (monitor is preferable to projection) and Mac using

Powerpoint software (projection is preferable to monitor).

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#Katherine Phelps

Story Shapes for Digital Media

My paper discusses the six digital story shapes: what they are, how they assist in managing the storytelling task, and how they influence and facilitate the fuller application of the storytelling elements of plot, character and theme within digital media. In this way I hope to begin the process of enriching the aesthetic tools available for the creation of an entirely digitally based narrative form.

It occured to me that if I could make the basic story structures for digital media visible, then I could more easily keep the structure under control and I would be in a better position to examine how standard storytelling elements can be mapped onto the media. From personal experience I came up with six digital story shapes which formed a model that I then applied to numerous CD-ROMS and hyperfiction sites. I did allow that some CD-ROMs were likely to be a combination of shapes. My investigations seem to indicate that I have a workable model. To further my understanding I set myself the task of writing stories to fit each of these shapes. I also shared this information and my experiences with students in my class, Writing for Multimedia, at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology TAFE. With the structural concerns under control everyone found that they could focus on the subtleties of plotting, character development and theme once again, so that they were creating more than just choose-your-own adventures, but an involving storyscape. I have an example of their efforts.

CV

Katherine Phelps is a PhD candidate at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology where she is studying the principles of narrative forms for application to digital media and thereby provide more opportunities for the enrichment of storytelling within this field. Her BA and MFA are both in creative writing. She is the author of the book Surf's Up: Internet Australian Style which has had three printings in Australia and two in New Zealand in its first year of release. Her short stories and articles have been published in numerous publications including Leonardo's online magazine. She has presented papers at the Asia Pacific World Wide Web Conference, the Sapporo Hyperlab at the University of Hokkaido, the Australian National Book Council and the Melbourne Writers' Festival. Katherine Phelps is part of the Australian Xanadu and Hyper-G research teams and created the first commercial Web and Gopher site in Australia, this site features fictional work. She has previously studied with Hugo and Nebula award winning writer, Joanna Russ, and American National Book Award winner and Pulitzer Prize committee member, Charles Johnson.

email: muse@glasswings.com.au

Media: A computer that can read PC disks, Netscape and computer projection equipment.

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#Perry Hobermann

The Open End of Interaction

On some level, interactivity would seem to conflict with the notion of

storytelling - in an interactive experience, a story isn't being told to

anyone; if there's a story at all, it's being lived by the participants.

Does a story require a teller? And when you're inside a story, is it useful

to call it a story at all? Or is it simply an experience that you might tell a story about afterwards? Perhaps we could talk about "storyliving".

But what would this be?

Maybe there are alternatives to the closed system of branching multiple-choice multimedia. Do designers have to anticipate every possible

event in advance? The techniques of artificial life seem to suggest an

alternative. Here a process is started and allowed to develop according to

evolutionary pressures, without attempting to predict any particular

outcome. This would appear to have potential, but it has so far mainly been

used with a pretense of neo-scientific objectivity to develop simple

organisms. Could it be used to open up a space of higher-level narrative or

interaction?

CV

Perry Hoberman is an installation and performance artist who works with a variety of technologies, ranging from utterly obsolete to seasonably

state-of-the-art. He moved to New York in the late 70s, attended the

Whitney Independent Study Program in 1978, and began exhibiting in the

early 1980s. His installation "Bar Code Hotel" was awarded the top prize at

the 1995 Interactive Media Festival in Los Angeles, and has been shown

widely in Europe. "Faraday's Garden", a viewer-activated appliance

installation, has also been exhibited widely. Other ongoing projects

include a variety of stereo 3D installations and performances, and "The

Empty Orchestra Cafe, a radical Neo-Karaoke Bar. Hoberman currently teaches in the graduate Computer Art Department at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Before that, he was the Art Director at Telepresence Research, a company specializing in virtual reality and telepresence installations for arts and industry. His work is represented by Postmasters Gallery.

hoberman@bway.net

Media: Video, Slides

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#KP Ludwig John

Play instead of Telling Stories

We do not tell stories anymore, we create experience playgrounds.

The decisive aspect of digital media works is the potential of their interactive structure. The CD-ROM as a concept also envisages for the potential of mass distribution, which finally means reception of identical works in very diverse and individual environments. The producer gives up almost all controll about the circumstances of possible reception of his audiovisual interactive work. Still, even in the rather standardized environment of CD-ROM there is a variety of possible interfaces available:

- add communication possibilities between users to your work

- make things playful, rich in variations, inspire imagination

- demand personal engagement of the user:

For instance, the use of voice level (mike) instead of slight handmovement (mouse) as a navigation tool can become quite a physical event.

CV

KP Ludwig John, born1961, studied in Leipzig (GER) and Utrecht (NL) MFA.

Co-founder of the media arts festival MedienbiennaleLeipzig.

93/95 Teacher at the media arts department of the Academy of Graphics and BookArt Leipzig. 1993 artist in residence at the Banff Centre for the Arts, currently living and working in Munich. After doing interactive installation work KP Ludwig John focused for the last three years entirely on artistic interactive multimedia productions for mass distribution.

The CD-ROM "Die Veteranen" received 3 EMMA awards 1995, the Babelfish at Interactiva95 (Potsdam) and the "Recommendatory Price" at ARTEC95 (Nagoya). The CD-ROM "Venetian Deer" - to be published Jan 97 - received already 2 EMMA awards at the Book Fair Frankfurt 96.

email: 100116.617@compuserve.com, http://www.systhema.de/veteranen

Media: Power Mac 7500, System 7.5 QT, projector, speakers, microphone connected to computer, CD-Rom work needs mic as interface, Internet.

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