Bath Spa University College

"Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. " – John Keats, letter to his brothers, December 1817

We are entering an age of narrative chaos, where traditional frameworks are being overthrown by emergent experimental and radical attempts to remaster the art of storytelling inside developing technologies. The maturation of New Media Art into a major innovation in screen narrative form and genres is recorded in myself and Andrea Zapp's new book: New Screen Media: Cinema/Art /Narrative, a collection of essays by leading cultural theorists, critics and artists using new media, which seeks to establish a clear overview of this changing territory. It does this by outlining the challenge interactivity and new media pose to the future of cinematic and broadcast formats of story. It specifically describes emerging narrative types in hypermedia, installation and video art, the Internet, computer games, interactive television and interactive film and relates them to classical film and drama theory.

Traditional narrative has been augmented by the advent of new media, not just through the revolutionary distributive aspects of the technology, but principally through the changed relationship between audience and author. New media forms offer both a convergence of narrative vehicles and a fragmentation of understood forms: the genesis of broadband, virtual and immersive technologies, together with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and autonomous agency in interactive drama, inevitably change current screen broadcast and Hollywood models of cinema. The acceleration of technical development tends to ensure that the evolution of dramatic language can often be overlooked in the pursuit of a 'better' interface. The new narratives sometimes seem to be dependent on the speed of engineering, rather then on a developing conceptualisation of possible genres and their languages.

The discovery of ambiguity in the sub-atomic world was the essential catalyst for the twentieth century’s abandonment of hierarchical Newtonian science; with its omniscient privileging of the observer.¹ Quantum mechanics, revealed through Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, provided definitive proof of the ultimately unknowable and unpredictable nature of the universe-all versions of reality were thereafter tied to the subjectivity of observation. As the ambiguity of fundamental particles raised a conundrum for particle physicists, so for artists, writers, and filmmakers (engaged in the experimental discovery of appropriate form and language for interactive story and drama), the rediscovery of ambiguity in the language and structure of narrative still poses a primary challenge. However. it is now the omniscient privileging of the author, as opposed to audience, which is under contention. In this paper, I hope to demonstrate some of the means by which interactivity and narrative can utilise the interpenetrative power of language to collapse the distance between subject and object, and between interior and exterior spaces.

The frequent assertion that interactive narrative is ‘a contradiction in terms’ centres on the argument that the diegetic space of narrative is compromised or destroyed by interactive engagement with story; as I hope to show, this argument is based on a misunderstanding of narrative mechanisms. The active participation of audience is not new nor is it disruptive of narrative diegesis; it is merely incompatible with certain narrative conventions, which have become unduly emphasised by historical accident.

Writers frequently use complex strategies to manipulate the engagement of audience with content. These strategies often fall outside the normal complexities of the Aristotelian model of drama. Dickens, for example, was an episodic writer by practice and his plots are often thin or incredible to the critical eye. What we value in late Dickens, apart from his characterisation, is the vividness, energy, and ambiguity of his language; and it is through such language that the darker symbolic sub-texts of his narrative-worlds can reach an audience. ² These affinities of language have been remarked in many great writers and form a secondary 'deep structure', which creates the unconscious mood of the work. We can also find equivalents to such literary devices in various cinematic genres such as film noir: where complex plots have very little to do with the powerful unconscious effect of the imagery on audience mood, and may even defy logical analysis. ³ It seems to me that language is the perfect tool for overcoming the discontinuities and schematic thinness brought about by sudden shifts of timescale or viewpoint, typical of interactive narratives. The very flexibility of language allows both for a compression of meaning and a proliferation of association, which can simultaneously lend rich ambiguities of meaning and organic unity to a new media work.

The Multi-lineal possibilities of new media are not in themselves of any advantage in developing narratives. Economy and compression usually are hallmarks of successful artistic work, and cinematic conventions are based on its powers of visual shorthand and suggestion, with the audience filling in the details (witness the montage theories of Eisenstein). Imagine the artistic disaster, if a film like Groundhog Day ( Director:Harold Ramis 1993) were spatially mapped as an interactive story, in such a way that the audience could live through all the repeated days and detail of the hero and his discovery of community. A tale of redemption would become a circle of hell- and the audience would empty the cinema. Multi-linearity then demands two things: compression and precision

Ritual and myth appear to offer a route for "deep" story. Narratives where actor and participant are one and the same, where the proscenium arch is dissolved, where landscape takes on symbolic significance, and where the usual hierarchies of temporal sequence, plot and sub-plot are suspended. In other words, the same model as early Greek theatre, carnival, and religious ritual.

In the Dreamhouse¹³ project, my artist's group, Ship of Fools was seeking to bring such an experience up to date, combining spatial, ritualistic, and dreamlike elements. As in many other ‘games’ the user finds themselves in a house. A walk through the Dream house offered access to a number of rooms or experiences; each designed by an artist, reworking traditional storytelling structures. Various rooms were appropriately matched to the different psyches of those involved in authoring the piece. So the house became an interactive theatre, where different tales are triggered by audience exploration. The bland domestic environment of a real suburban house (in fact a real Barrett’s ‘Show Home’ in a suburban estate at Bradley Stoke, the negative equity capital of the U.K.) ¹⁴ became the main interface.

In my own contribution, Labyrinth ¹⁵ various devices-doors, windows, mirrors and other objects, opened gateways into the mythological world. The themes of intimacy and alienation were explored through such devices as multiple talking heads, each with their particular poetic fragments, or through a hall of sleepers who could be individually awakened. I sought to employ the resonance of poetic verse drama to unpack a number of thematics around fatherhood, overwhelming passion and ‘Real Politik’ suggested by the original Theseus and Daedalus legends. The transition in Greece from the worship of the Goddess to Apollonian religion is explored in the myth, where the Frankenstein-like quest for knowledge has equally dire consequences for the inventor. Daedalus commits murder, loses a son, and creates the monstrous Minotaur through his overweening pride in science. The piece explores these themes through dramatised video and a verse structure, which utilised parallel monologues (or duologues), set in dialectic opposition for each linked pair of protagonists. The verse is constructed so that cross-counterpoints occur with every phrase. The verse reads vertically for the individual speaker and horizontally for each pairing. The freedom to switch video streams at any time allowed the audience to reconstruct meaning somewhere between the two opposing narrations. The development of irony and pathos demanded that no single monologue is privileged. Writing for such an interface involved a new and precise multi-linear approach to scripting:

The main direction of my recent work has been in examining the nature of theatrical and interactive installation spaces where poetry can be re-imagined as a part of a hypertextual universe. In pursuing this direction I was attempting to synthesise aspects of cinema, video art and more primitive and associative spaces, to create a narrative form based in a physical environment, rather than on a virtual one. While in Labyrinth a more directly theatrical route was chosen, the Understanding Echo ²² installation was an attempt to root interactive narrative in a magical space corresponding to part of the audience’s ‘collective unconscious’ where ‘memory, dreams and reflections’ ²³ could rise to the surface. Language once more played a central role, one indexed directly onto a physical space.

In a darkened room hung a number of translucent panels, displaying large digital photographic montages. In the centre space of these images was a shallow circular pool of water. In the silence of the installation the audience could make out the drip of water. Flickering in the pool was the image of a woman’s face, submerged below the surface. From time to time she rose from the depths and talked slowly in short poetic fragments or aphorisms. The audience may not immediately have realised it, but the form of these spoken fragments became ever more personal as they approached the pool. The large changing digital montage projections around the pool also represent combinations of memory. (A similar strategy had been successfully used in earlier interactive works such as Lynn Hershman's Lorna²⁴)

The figure rising from the waters loosely corresponded to the nymph Echo, in myth forced to forever repeat the last lines of her lover Narcissus’s speeches, trapped in a pool for all eternity. The form of the work also alluded to the female spirits that inhabit wells and rivers in various folklores, such as the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian Legend. as well as the drowning Ophelia in Hamlet. The woman reviews her life and the sense of powerlessness her situation has brought. The poetic fragments were intended to resemble a mix of colloquial musings and the timeless incisiveness we associate with poetic aphorism. They ranged from the general to the intimate. The woman is by turns embittered, flirtatious and coquettish, disillusioned and enthusiastic: ignoring the audience one minute; hectoring them the next. Her character moves through a wide emotional range, returning obsessively to her situation and the unhappy love affair, which caused it. The woman inhabits the present, but lives only in the past. Onto the audience she projects her loves and fears. We are immersed in her longings and become her blank screen: the spatialised narrative and the poetic monologues were fused together in the environment of the piece.

Once an audience enter the installation room, they have become part of the diegetic space of the narrative and are continually addressed directly or obliquely by the character of Echo. The precise sequencing or order of the fragments is irrelevant. There is no linear temporal curve involved. The more a visitor interacts, the more intimate the knowledge they gain of Echo's character. Thus the narrative is embedded in every experienced fragment. The difference between conventional literary narrative and this interactive form could be compared to the difference between a conventional photograph and a hologram. Whilst in a photographic fragment we see a part of a single perspective view, in a hologram each fragment of the photographic plate carries the total waveform of light generated by the original object. This holistic potential is what attracts me both to poetry and to interactive work. The immanent form is not only manifest in each part of the work, each fragment attains further resonance, meaning and ‘negative capability’ from the collection of other fragments and that meaning is subtly altered with each viewing.

Naoko Tosa and Ryhohei Nakatsu ³⁰ at ATR research Labs in Tokyo have created Play Cinema, where controllable avatars act under the audience’s direction, creating new scenes from Romeo and Juliet (in Hades), as the characters journey through the underworld. The dialogue and plot are unconvincing and by no means free-form. But at least here gesture-recognition and speech-synthesis, as well as facial and emotional-state recognition software, have been fused to create a variety of responses and variations on the basic plot. The neural net software is about as adept as a human observer at detecting emotional nuance in audience response. In an earlier experiment Muse, a software agent talked poetry to which the audience responded in preset phrases or in their own words. The animated "Muse" responded in turn with emotional expressions controlled through a neural network, that also recognised emotional nuances in the audience’s own phrases. Most of words in Muse were previously developed by programmers, as were many of the dialogues in Romeo and Juliet (in Hades). There is obviously a long way to go before machines can properly attempt the precise art of poetry, and it is a moot point whether machine consciousness will ever have any affinities with human consciousness, let alone poetic sensibility!

The responsive nature of such systems opens up a potential new craft for the writer, where the encoding of mood, emotion and their syntax takes precedence over plot and and traditional forms of narrative technique. In the experience of any serious work of art, the audience must invariably map narrative onto a whole range of cultural and historical references and resonances (a process conflated by Barthes as the ‘Death of the author’). This process seems to be independent of whichever medium is involved. Interactivity by itself may never introduce closer engagement than that achieved by traditional art forms, even when autonomous agents in immersive environments conduct the narrative. Words alone are clearly not enough, but if used intelligently within such models they can, as I hope I have demonstrated, move us nearer to the serious works of art new media has the potential to deliver.

Footnotes

1 I am referring to Heisenberg’s theory of Quantum Mechanics, outlined in the Uncertainty Principle Paper 1927:

"I believe that the existence of the classical "path" can be pregnantly formulated as follows: The "path" comes into existence only when we observe it."

2 Witness Alan Shelston, University of Manchester writing on the late novel "Our Mutual Friend":

<http://www.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/~matsuoka/CD-Shelston.html>

3 For example The Big Sleep is notorious for its illogical and convoluted plot:

Hagopian, Kevin Jack, "The Big Sleep" (10 Shades of Noir) Images, issue 2.

<http://www.imagesjournal.com/issue02/infocus/bigsleep.htm>

4 Ship of Fools group, Dreamhouse, CD-ROM, Research project on interactive narrative and new media at the Faculty of Art, Media and Design, University of the West of England , Bristol 1994-6

5 Barratt is a major UK home builder and has built housing estates up and down the U.K. As a consequence of the housing boom in Britain in the late 1980s and the subsequent slump, housing prices fell sharply in the early 1990s, leaving many home owners with mortgages far in excess of the value of their properties. Bradley Stoke in the South West of England experienced the worst negative equity problems in the U.K to the point where the town was nicknamed ‘Sadly Broke’.

6 Labyrinth, CD-ROM and Installation, shown at ISEA 97 in Chicago and exhibited at F-Stop, Bath 1998 and Cheltenham Festival of Literature 2000, <www.sof.org.uk>

7 Rieser, Martin, Understanding Echo, Interactive environment, commissioned by DA2 and SW Arts for the Cheltenham Festival of Literature 2000

<www.sof.org.uk>

8 Jung, Carl "Memories, Dreams and Reflections", Fontana, London, 1963

9 Lynn Hershman's Lorna, interactive video disc artwork 1979, allows viewers to experience, and participate in, the life choices and outcomes of an agoraphobic woman. Lorna's neuroses are caused -and exacerbated - by the invasion of her "home space" by electronic media. The Lorna persona is performed/experienced through her distorted possessions -a mirror, tv, wallet, watch and telephone -and viewers can access different disc channels by clicking on a hypertexted image of one or more of these, each of which confronts the viewer with a different series of "hot" social and personal issues. Each issue (abortion and the threat of nuclear war are two examples) accessed by the viewer, contributes to Lorna's agoraphobia, demonstrating how fearfulness seeps into many women's lives through mechanical media, leading them to reject the outside world. (See also Dinkla,S. Pioniere Interaktiver Kunst von 1970 bis heute, Edition ZKM, Ostfildern 1997, pp.170-195. )

10 Neesham, Claire ‘It was the Best of Times... ‘New Scientist’ Vol. 162 No. 2181, Reed Publishing, April 1999, see also Creativity and Cognition. Conference Proceedings. University of Nottingham, 1999