History as mosaic

On occasion, cinema has exploited the overlap of character and camera point of view to construct narratives where the events are refracted through the perspectives of different protagonists. Kurosawa's Rashamon (1950) is perhaps the best known example, where the recollections of events by different characters challenge the plausibility of earlier versions of the same events. Bernardo Bertolucci's first film La Commare Secca (The Grim Reaper, 1962) famously begins with a shot of a leaf drifting down from a bridge to alight on a dead body; the film subsequently retraces the course of events leading to this outcome. The different characters we meet during the police investigations into the crime offer versions of events which differ materially. Gradually we realize that not all can be telling the truth.

Conversations begins from a similar premise, which heightens our sensitivity to the constructed nature of the past, but with the difference that the order of the user's encounter is not decided in advance. The need for each viewer of Kurosawa's and Bertolucci's films to evaluate the events portrayed and interpret the veracity of different accounts is here matched by the demand that each user negotiate the scene of the crime and the sequence in which the various stories stemming from it are told. If it has become more common to understand History as a function of point of view, the technological embodiment of this sensibility in a database narrative such as Conversations should be read less as the proposal that a single event can be witnessed from many different sides, but rather as alerting us to a more radical diffraction of the event. It suggests that the apparent unity of history is only ever imposed retrospectively, a fictive act legislated by power. It remains a prismatic representation where the lines not only fail to unify but insist upon their distinctive and decisive trajectories. Perspectives split like the crossfire of parallax bullet lines. The corollary of such an understanding is that presenting history as a set of elements open to re-interpretation is a political undertaking in the broadest sense.

Database

Crime scenarios seem peculiarly suited to database narratives.

The detective story was itself a distinctive invention of 19th century urban culture. Influential figures such as Poe's Auguste Dupin and Conan-Doyle's Sherlock Holmes exemplify the mobilization of reason with the aim of deciphering the secret life of the city. Recourse to 'scientific' logic to map the new forms of urban space and identity reveals the extent to which the older urban milieu of the quartier was becoming a nostalgic point of reference. In the place of the fixity of class-based 'character', abstract systems were needed to comprehend the more fluid exigencies of urban life. As Joan Copjec points out: "The origins of detective fiction coincide [...] with what Ian Hacking has termed 'the avalanche of [printed] numbers'. Unlike the priest, or classical ideas of determinism, the scientific detective deals less in truth than probability. Modern complexities lend themselves less to absolute certainty than to the relative certainty of the balance of probabilities."

In the 21st century cities are becoming hybrid compositions of architectural and media space. If detective fiction first offered a means of making sense of the social anonymity and abstract relations of the modern city, database narrative offers the detective scenario in a reflexive mode and corresponds to the hybrid forms of the material and the immaterial in contemporary culture. Conversations enables one to stand back from the conventions of the crime scene and pull them apart, to evaluate them even while enjoying the narrative pulsion of the quest for truth - a quest which is endlessly deferred, and endlessly repeated.

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