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version
TAKE
A CHANCE ON ME
An
essay on the mediation of the contemporary condition
”…time
stands still in a raging speed, like an north american soap; rich in
superficial drama, poor on development and coherence. Therefore the
most fundamental project for the 21:st centrury would be: Demand control
over time! Demand the right to be inaccessible, to slow time, to peaceful
studies without the noise from the transmitters of trash in informationsociety,
demand time to understand how we got here and how we can reclaim control
over our own time.” (1)
We live our
present lifes in a crossfire of media, of stories and messages. Immersed
in digital moviechannels, programmed with prepacked human interest and
testimonials.
We constantly decode messages, every second awake in mediasociety consists
of a chase to comprehend. We live in a multimedial game dramatization,
staged on web-site after web-site. We are forced to make choices, navigate
according to your wishes, be constantly aware of our needs and act as
a skilled hyper-text strategist.
This increasing
and exploding amount of content and saleable interactivity can if continued,
lead to a collapse of meaning; a state of overwhelming frustration, where
the art of listening to another human being is exchanged with another
quest set up by gamecreators – our urge to constantly seek new opportunities,
new frontiers.
Contemplate
for a while on the antropologist Hylland Eriksens opening line in the
quote: ”…time stands still in a raging speed like an north
american soap; rich in superficial drama, poor on development and coherence.”
In his essay he deliberately throws incendiary torches, his viewpoints
are delivered in a polemic rage. But he shares the manifest moral with
a growing number of critics of media trivialities. How can we handle this
condition ? How can we create unique experiences in this massive explosion
of expressions ?
The
sublime
One possible road to investigate would be to recover the intensity of
experience. The quality Jean-Francois Lyotard termed the sublime, the
ability of art to guide us to an experience of the now – ”It
happens” – reclaiming the moment of experience as alive with
meaning. The term ”It happens” constitute for Lyotard a reverence
for the experience we feel before we put words to what we feel.
One method to reclaim the experience in an age where narrative models
are emptied and banal, would be to accept the collapse of meaning. To
create an univere of content – text, images, thoughts, scenes –
and let the machine take over. Let a randomizer generate paths for the
narrative to take, leave the choice of which content to link to and what
experiences to relive.
To bring meaning to such a model, we must agree on a fundamental thesis
– all human communication is an experience. The process at work
in art is that of an constant exchance between individuals. Or as put
by the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer :
”The
work of art has it´s true being in the fact that it becomes an
experience that changes the person who experiences it. The ”subject”
of the experience of the art, that which remains and endures, is not
the subjectivity of the person who experiences it but the work itself.
... All presentation is potentially a representation for someone. That
this possibility is intended is the characteristic feature of art as
play. ” (2)
This awareness
of the process in art that it reaches its full meaning first in the eye
of the beholder is a definition on one of the fundamentals in human nature
– our capability to communicate.
We are actors in an ongoing process, active in a game of meaning and expression.
Not, as so often in the traditional narrative structure, at the recieving
end of a pre-packaged dramatization with a fixed morale and ending. To
use an element of chance as a strategy to vitalize narration would be
one method to eliminate the passive reciever.
In
contrast to one-dimensional narrativity
The digital technology creates a kind of counterimages to the superficial
and one-dimensional content in mainstream media. It opens the field of
narratives for real interactivity, opens up possibilities to play with
time and discard the straitjacket of the linear experience in traditional
storytelling. F. Scott Fitzgerald became aware of this artistic restraint
when he came to Hollywood and formulated his analysis of storytelling
art in moviemaking: ”It's an amazing art form. A series of scenes
put in a particular order designed to leave the viewer with no choice
but to feel one particular way.”
Today with
the impact of the digital world, moviemakers in Hollywood can create alternative
story structures, beyond this straitjacket Fitzgerald identified. One
such play with reality, time and identity is to be found in The Matrix
(Warchowski Brothers 1999) where the story develops on severel parallel
timelevels, and on top of that, in simulated realities. All levels influence
each other and depend on information from the other to tell the story.
Among artists, the possibilities created by the digital tools, have opened
up a whole artistic field, labelled new media. The genre´s aesthetic
expressions expands constantly, at an creative interplay with software
creators. In common though, the new media art has the computer. In Denmark
the new media art scene early establised a forum for showing and discussing
digital art, the netgallery artnode.dk. Artcritic Mette Sandbye commented
the project Looped on this web-site, taking a special interest on the
evolving art of digital storytelling:
”…the
computer user is co-creator of the work. The work takes the form of
a process; a place where something happens. Made possible with distinctive
combination of every imaginable form of audio and visual, moving or
still material. And the unstable condition of hypermedia, where every
line is connected or can be dissolved in digital, replaceable units.”
(3)
The co-creation,
the possibility to actively participate as a beholder, can be seen as
a distinctive form of artistic communication made possible by the digital
techonology. It creates an open field between artist and audience, a transgressive
field that can accomodate ”...the importance of defining play
as a process that takes place in `between´”.”(4)
to quote Hans-Henrik Gadamer who claims that this ”field”
as fundamental for the interplay of art and communication.
The
interactive field
In the digital domain, research in the potentials of this open field delivers
new results at an almost overwhelming rate. Every medialab with a digital
programme investigates the possibilities of the interaction, the role
of the interactor. The renewal of the narrative grammar and language comes
from knowledge created in experiments with interaction. The digital innovations
breads more voices, more potential stories that involve more people in
communicative processes.
This multiplicity
differs from the variety in the entertainment industry. It is based on
an openess where the romantic image of the Artist as exclusive creator
of meaning has been exchanged with an image of the Individual as co-creator.
The artist / writer today create works with a multidimensional quality,
made possible by digital technology.
The screenwriter and director no longer has en exclusive right to o n
e interpretation of their work. A transparence has been created by digital
media where the interplay - the game – have an important place.
At the same time, this deconstruction of the early secrets and models
of drama in the setup of the interactive gameplay, can make us so active
as co-creators of the stories that we lose out on the capability of emotional
surprise and immersion in the drama. Our focus are shifted from content
to process, from following a narrative stream to stearing a personal path
over troubled waters.
"In
electronic narrative the procedural author is like a choreographer who
supplies the rhytms, the context, and the set of steps that will be
performed. The interactor, whether as navigator, protagonist, explorer,
or builder, makes use of this repertoire of possible steps and rhytms
to improvise a particular dance among the many, many possible dances
the author has enbled." Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet H. Murray
(5)
Again, making
the element of chance attractive in the setup of a digital narration,
can be a method to transform the focus on catharsis that is so dominant
in traditional storytelling into another narrative form; catharsis being
the point where meaning and coherence traditionally is created for the
audience. Interactivity and non-linear storytelling opens up for this
intensity of experience that Lyotard named ”the sublime”.
This experience is created before language, before explanation, before
structure. Here we can trace the roots of attraction inherent in the elements
of chance. Chance is freed from ”planned” meaning and goal.
Chance can re-create the moments of ”it happens” as defined
by Lyotard in our contemporary stories.
In the digital
landscape chance can be the tool that again opens our eyes for stories
and their possibilities to carry thoughts, emotions and experience. Since
chance per defininition cannot be programmed with an intention or purpose,
it can bring life to the play. It can open up communication and the quality
Gadamer sees as immanent in the human exchange of experiences - ”All
presentation is potentially a representation for someone. That this possibility
is intended is the characteristic feature of art as play. ”
(6)
© THORE
SONESON / 2001-01-12
(1) Hylland
Eriksen, Thomas ”Ögonblickets tyranni gör oss historielösa”
article in daily paper, Sydsvenska Dagbladet 1999 12 27 ( my own translation
to english )
(2) Gadamer, Hans-Georg chapter ”Play as the Clue to Ontological
Explanation” Wahrheit und Methode p102-103, (1960)
(3) Sandbye, Mette Looped from cataloque to exhibition ”100 teckningar”
(artnode.dk Köpenhamn 1999)
(4) se footnote 2
(5) 4. s.153, chapter "The Aesthetics of the Medium", in
"Hamlet on the Holodeck", Janet H. Murray (1997), senior research
scientist at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
(6) se footnote 2
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