gcraighobbs /210 /Proposal

Final Proposal Document

Last updated 12.10.07

Narrative Synthesis: The Generative Process of Narrative Articulation explores the space/time continuum of digital video through content-typing schema, software design, and generative processes toward the creation of live performance tools and narrative methodologies for generative video installations using database-driven content.

Project Synopsis

"Montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots" wherein "each sequential element is perceived not next to the other, but on top of the other" Montage is "the nerve of cinema," and that "to determine the nature of montage is to solve the specific problem of cinema."

• Sergei Eisenstein

"Vertov is able to achieve something that new media designers and artists still have to learn — how to merge database and narrative into a new form.”

• Lev Manovich in The Language of New Media

Technological advancements in the realm of personal computers and telecommunications networks have altered the process of human communication, perception, and cognition. The myriad options for amassing, organizing, and communicating sense-data are vast, and the cognitive consequences enormous. Control, manipulation, and resistance increase at correlative rates.

In the realm of entertainment - cinema, television, video games (gamespace) – the acceleration of narrative experience results in increased narrative intensity, experiences which are fragmented, intensified, suspended, diffused, engaged and/ or disengaged at will, and often at the push of a button.

It is within this context that I wish to explore narrative synthesis as both ontological inquiry and technical challenge. The goal is to develop a database driven narrative content-typing schema and associated software applications using object oriented programming environments including Processing and MAX/MSP. I seek to develop narrative methodologies for digital content in both live performance and installation contexts for scene and event driven narratives influenced by architectural space, viewer presence/ input, and the passage of time.

The narrative space I seek to explore is one rooted in transformational events. Events seemingly simple in origination, yet irrevocable in their temporal outcome. One’s decision to answer a cell phone call, one’s decision to drive a car, one’s decision to have sex. These transformational events operate as synaptic triggers to activate situations, reactions, and stories. They are decisions made on the verge of infinite potentiality.

Narrative synthesis opens up the possibility for the exploration of narrative as conveyed through mise-en-scène, milieu, ambience, time, and space, as much as traditional plot and compositional structure.

Series #1 Sub_Ob - Subjectivity vs. Objectivity

What is it?

In in simplest form, Sub_Ob is a two-room video installation highly tuned to user presence and absence. By design, the installation requires two viewers, in two separate rooms, to complete the affective circuit. The installation functions as a type of system, an ontological diptych addressing the co-dependent themes of subjectivity and objectivity.

One room, Subjectivity, is the modulator of the second room, Objectivity. Subjectivity is a space consisting of top-down projected scrolling sentences of text. What I will call text objects. As the viewer navigates the room, their presence activates the quantity, rate, and narrative intensity of these text objects. The objects scroll across the room in a path whose location is determined by viewer presence. Viewer proximity is recorded during a “search for meaning” in the morphology of the projected text. The text can never project on to the viewer. That is, the viewer functions as a literal modulator of the projected objects which warp around the viewer, but will not touch them.

In room two - Objectivity - narrative sequences appear in the form of front-projected live action video. The sequence and its dynamic are authored by viewer presence in room one - Subjectivity. The author, as modulator of meaning in one room, renders a sequence of content and intensity in another room. The viewer in Objectivity is essentially a passive recipient of meaning authored by the viewer in Subjectivity.

Narrative synthesis sets up a situational matrix. Narrative intention is designed into the system - a logical narrative structure is built into the content database - but how this database will be modulated is determined by the viewer(s) in response to the system.