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T_Visionarium
(page 2 of 6) |
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Dennis
Del Favero, Neil Brown, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel
2003 - 2006
Interactive Immersive Environment
Description
T_Visionarium is an interactive narrative project investigating
the exploration of a database of video streams that are recombined
through the interaction of viewers, an interaction which allows new
emergent narratives to be generated.
Background
The interactive architecture of digital technology provides a fresh
opportunity for reformulating the role of narrative within cinema.
Current experimentation in interactive narrative is handicapped by
under theorization of the role of time and critical attribution in
virtual environments. We know, for instance, that digital architecture
is multi-modal. We also know that multi-modal artifacts are shaped
by software rather than semiotic codes. Software compresses information
into virtually realisable and interpretatively thick units of meaning.
Notwithstanding the use of digital animation in conventionally scripted
cinema, which laboriously render graphic images from scratch, such
as Shrek, or even in post-production enhancements such as Waking Life,
the multi-modal information delivered to producers of digital cinema
is already condensed into cultural tokens of text, sound and image
at the point of contact. For this reason the metaphors of production
in digital cinema borrow from images of montage, layering and re-assignment
rather than from fabrication. The manipulation of culturally prefabricated
information in digital media rehearses the long-standing artistic
tradition of transcription. In this tradition the artist is presented
with a body of informational resources or cultural goods which they
reassemble in the process of creation. Thus the roles of the artist
and viewer in a transcriptive model of cinematic production are editorially
intertwined.
The project presents an experimental framework which maps the transcription
of televisual information as a form of recombinatory search. The re-enactment
of televisual information has the potential for allowing a multiplicity
of significant differentiations or fissions to occur within the original
data. The great mass of televisual information is already received
indirectly and sorted by the viewer in episodic memory. Television
is encountered through techniques such as - channel hopping, muting,
and multi-screens, through multiple association in different contexts,
or fragmented through time-delay and by report. Thus even though television
broadcasts may begin as purposeful artifacts, their meaning for the
viewer is not exhausted by critical recovery of their producer’s original
intentions. Rather, their meaning is revitalized into temporal, directional,
and irreversible narrations, transcribing the functions such information
is felt to cause and can be shown to perform. Transcriptive narrative
dramatizes the world instead of freezing it into schematic representations.
It transforms the cinema into a kind of Platonic cave wall onto which
viewers project, then respond to, the episodic shadows of their journey
through cultural information. It is only insofar as digital technology
makes multi-modal transportation of data within virtual time a practicality
that the aesthetic potential of interactive narrative can be put to
the test.
The project's objectives are:
* to explain transcriptive narrative as the viewer generated manipulation
of duration and movement in the reflexive reassignment of eventfulness
to multi-modal cinematic information;
* to test the function of transcriptive narrative within two demonstrator
virtual environments - entitled T_Visionarium I and T_Visionarium
II - through the experimental application of recombinatory algorithms
in the digitized search of televisual information. The experimental
design brings together three existing interactive models that, in
concert, enable the eruption of data into multi-temporal narrative
forms;
* to evaluate the aesthetic significance of interactive narrative
as a product of cultural transcription in digital cinema.
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