New Media Authoring

*Frame and excess : the claims of Non linearity/ Interactivity/ Multiple media.
*Indices of excess -- the off-frame.

 

Interactivity - The range (scale):

There are two extremes and a range of options between them, for understanding interactive authoring:

1. Creating an environment, zone, space, game.
E
xample: the interface of a building is basically interactive - you move in it or around it. Activity is an integral part of contemplating it. The point of view is mobile, not stable, and is not singular even if it is directed by a corridor, a door. It's always partial and dynamic. The movement in it -- the way the space is executed in the act of viewing -- is open and unsystematic.

2. Creating a directed path of observation implicit in the space or work. The story is unfolded by the viewer, but the author remains always in control:certain doors open always after other doors; stairs lead in one direction only (subway).The reading is directed. To a large extent the activity of the user resembles exploration only in the limited sense that was used by Cocteau in one of the scenes in his trilogy, where he depicted the act of creation as an erasure of a black board which thereby uncovers a hidden image of a flower. The user's exploration is a creative act of rewriting a story already told by the author. The navigation, as open as it seems, occurs in a single and prescribed route; it is a statement the user realizes rather than expresses. [Vs. Creating a black board and giving the user a chalk and eraser].

Defining yourself as an author within this range or scale -- choosing between creating open ground for the user's activity (game playing) vs. prescribing a more or less linear unfolding of the work -- and accordingly defining the identity of your user, is a primary step in the creation of interactive work.

 

Authorship

I would like to narrow the discussion of the applications and manifestations of interactive communications to their use as a tool for personal expression.

My focus in the following text is on what specifies this media as such a tool, in answer to the need for self expression (vs. for the purpose of empowering of minorities, for providing accessibility to information etc.)

One of the main challenges to any act of authorship is rendering that which evades anchorage. I.e. stabilization by means of a structure, a composition, a frame, a plot etc. That is, representing that which is excessive to representation, as such.

 

Categories of Excess

I am deliberately simplifying the term of excess in these first distinctions. Throughout the course we will be looking at various texts and samples that would complicate and expand the meaning of what I am beginning to outline here.

By the term "Excess" - what is excessive to representation - I refer in this present discussion to three main categories (not inclusive; overlapping) of material which evade the speaker / author's control:

1. What escapes my point of view or my range of vision (I can only occupy a single angle): what might therefore provides the content for somebody else's view. The angle which completes my own and which contains "the back of my head". My blind spot. What by definition I cannot see. My face.

Example: Bruce Nauman's corridor.

2. That which is not replicated by repetition or translation: that which remains different within a pair of synonyms; between a poem in Hebrew and its translation to English, a tune on a guitar and the same tune played on an ud; a representation of an event in video and in audio.

3. That which escapes signification. Those elements of the story not justified by the plot (The fate of a character; The features unmentioned in the appearance of a person). What is perhaps implied but not talked about. Gaps. Frames -- and off frames -- can emerge (be formed) by the very fact of transgressing them (focusing a lens).

Example 1: The city detail (name) in Calvino's first story in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler:

The narrator, finding himself stranded in an unknown train station, comments: "Where would I go out to? The city outside there has no name yet, we don't know if it will remain outside the novel or whether the whole story will be contained within its inky blackness. " (p.14)

Thus he drifts to a higher narrative level that contains him -- a gesture typical to the entire book -- and outlines, hence creates, the gap or omission he refers to ("inky blackness") . Not only is he pointing at a gap otherwise unnoticed; he is actually forming it by delineating it.

Example 2: Max Newhouse' sound island in Times Square. Newhouse is not merely delineating a zone within a continuum (as does Christo) but is also forming it (a circle in a square) by that very same gesture.

 

Features of the New Media

Of the features of the new media I will also, to satisfy my need for clear form, distinguish three:

1. Interactivity.
The form itself becomes a gesture, on the part of the author, which surpasses what is normally a movement in one direction -- from the author to the audience/reader/spectator. An Interactive piece is, rather, created as an act which compresses dialogue within a single move: the response is an element of the message transmitted. Not only the space for the spectator is outlined, the very options of spectatorship are determined by the author in advance, are an element of the author's statement. There are varying degrees to the amount of control over spectatorship, in accordance with the scale I mentioned earlier.

2. Multimedia.
An Interrelation (a second sense of interaction) between the various media or forms of expression . The underlying ideal of this form of interaction is to come close to a complete and continuous depiction of a topic or idea, where nothing, that is, escapes signification (a noise free representation); where each medium supplements the information provided by the other with its own specific tools and forms (temporality; image; sound, 3D space, written text). What is specific to the new medium, that is, is its non specificity, its pluralism, its ability to encompass all the other means of expression, and to make the interaction between them its own form of expression.

3. Non Linearity.
Last is the non linear representation of time, which here again, as a tool for expression, serves to overcome the constraints of a structure determined by a systematic and unified process; to encompass a multitude of paths of development or action. Not only the format is hence specifically non specific but also the narrative: allowing as it does possible multiple paths to coexist.

To sum, the common denominator of all three features mentioned is a deliberate plurality --of voices, media and stories -- through which the author attempts to speak.

 

Features vs. Control of excess

To return to the beginning, underlying the three dominant features of the new media is an attempt to create an illusion of encompassing the whole through the plural form; an illusion of maximum control:

In Interactivity: an attempt at actualizing the voices of both author and reader by compressing dialogue into a single gesture.
In Multimedia: an effort to convey the complete picture by resorting to every possible tool: what is visual is rendered through graphics or photography; what is verbal through writing or audio, what is moving through video etc.
In
Non linearity: optimally, allowing the reader to take every possible narrative route.

How then do we indicate with this new tool, what escapes signification, what remains excessive to it?

Each of the means of obtaining control over/ representing a vaster (plural) range of material, in fact betrays in a more extreme way the impossibility of so doing; In Beckett's words, it fails better in doing so:

1. The author of an Interactive piece sets as a goal to create an environment for contesting points of view which ultimately - ideally -will undermine her/his stance and control over the dialogue, will create the unpredictable (1st form of excess).

2. The replication of a subject through the different media conjoined in its multimedia representation, and the juxtaposition (synching) of these various forms, betray what is incompatible (not in synch) between the many accounts of the single topic (2nd form of excess).

3. By simultaneously rendering contesting options of development in a nonlinear narrative, one is forced - in the act of reading - to constantly confront that which is arbitrary in the author/reader's choice, that which it lacks, is left outside the frame. The primary experience in reading a non linear text is that of missed opportunities; missed information. Gaps. Cuts. Fragmentation (3rd form of excess).

What I have tried to show here is that two opposing pulls take place simultaneously in the media we are about to explore. The meeting point of people (dialogue and interaction)/ material (multimedia)/ narrative options (non linearity), along with their incompatibility and disjunction - are both integral to the identity of this medium, perhaps more explicitly than in other fields: the control over information, and the loss of it.

Which, to return to the beginning, within the medium itself, outline the two ends of the scale I outlined initially.

The course is structured around these three categories - non linearity; interactivity and multimedia.
We will explore the implicit structures and concepts that these features bread, such as repetition, excess, gaps, multiplicity.

***

 

course plan
next