Future narratives
Publicado en Literatura y crítica. com. José Ángel García Landa
A question sent today to the Narrative-L:
Dear members of the Narrative List:
No real reason for this question, except for intellectual
curiosity and a wish to get the list going after the summer. I find that
the threads here are often welcome by people who bring to them, and
perhaps extract from them, issues related to their own concerns; so
getting associations of ideas going is a good thing for many of us...
Take it as an excuse, then. My question is:
Can you
think of any instances of people (writers, etc.) who have imagined, and
perhaps thus helped to bring into existence, new narrative forms, genres
or media? E.g. did anyone imagine film before film? (This brings to
mind Aldous Huxley's virtual reality films in Brave New World, and Matrix-like transmissions of virtual reality programmes are imagined by Olaf Stapledon in Star Maker).
I've just begun William Gibson's Spook Country
and he invents there (I expect they're invented, one never knows) a
subculture of artists who recreate famous celebrity events in California
(or elsewhere) with virtual reality technology, on the very spot where
they took place. That's just an example.
Did anyone imagine the upsurge of fan fiction on the web before it happened?
Has anyone invented a narrative form based on, say, the tracks
left by our searches using Google? Or is anyone doing complex multimedia
narratives on the Web, combining text, images, video, sound... or is
that just a plain old blog?
Or better, none of the
above—anything I am unable to even think just now, because it is a kind
of narrative that doesn't exist yet, and perhaps never will, but which
has been imagined in a suggestive way by some recent science-fiction
writer or filmmaker?
Jose Angel García Landa
http://www.garcialanda.net
I
find that the issue of "the imagination of future narrative" or "future
communication" if you want is well worth pursuing, as it promises to
hold complex unfoldings and interesting interactions.
By way of interaction between list and blog, I paste here my queries
(sometimes some of the most intriguing answers) so as to provide a date
or anchoring point, I classify a bibliographical record of the entry,
and keep the whole thread in my mail folder for imaginary future use.
(Today's example of retrofuturistic technology: The Opening Books project).
FROM THE ANSWERS:
Christy Dena on Sept. 24:
Great questions Jose!
I'll tackle some. Apologies in advance for the references to my own
sites and research -- I'm adding them here in case someone finds them
helpful or interesting.
One question was whether narratives
have been based on/created (?) by Google searches etc? Just about every
single technology on the web and beyond has been employed for
storytelling (but more for artworks) now. There is blogfiction,
botfiction, SMS fiction, MMS fiction, mobile stories, online comics,
search fictions, email fictions and so on. I have a listing of some
links on my del.icio.us site (which needs updating):
http://del.icio.us/new_media_arts
There are some search fictions listed here:
http://del.icio.us/New_Media_Arts/Creative_searchfiction
There are also programs being created specifically for online
experimentation (non-artificial intelligence) with storytelling. Some
programs are covered here in my post at WRT:
http://writerresponsetheory.org/wordpress/2007/04/28/ficlets-literary-lego/
I have another question to add to your one about narratives imagined
but not materialized yet. I'd like to know if anyone has any ideas
whether the following type of emerging narrative has been prefigured:
I'm researching what I've been calling 'polymorphic narratives' --
which are narratives that are spread across media platforms. A story,
for instance, begins in print form and continues on the web. This is a
subset of my larger research which is into what media theorist Henry
Jenkins has called 'transmedia storytelling'. Judging by the
descriptions Jenkins gives, he is actually referring to a transmedia
series. A polymorphic narrative is not a series (it is not episodic):
they are the equivalent of paragraphs distributed across media
platforms. I'd love to hear if anyone has some ideas on this form being
imagined.
Emma Kafalenos on Sept. 24
Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray?
Cortazar in his story translated as "Blow-Up"? (But not Antonioni's film of the same title.)
Artworks
in one medium that embed artworks conceived as in another medium
(whether represented in the other medium or in the medium of the
containing artwork--e.g., through ekphrasis) seem to have the power to
represent art forms not yet in existence. That is not to say that the
writer or artist necessarily foresaw the later development.
My
essay "The Power of Double Coding to Represent New Forms of
Representation: The Truman Show, Dorian Gray, "Blow-Up," and Whistler's
Caprice in Purple and Gold" (Poetics Today 24, 1 [Spring 2003]: 1-33)
might be of interest.
Peggy Phelan on Sept. 25:
Thanks Emma for recalling the point about new genres and media within
Jose's question. "Machinima" (sometimes spelled machinema) is perhaps
one of the most interesting new genres to have emerged from the
underbelly of video gaming. Basically, this genre makes use of code from
games that has multiple functions but cannot be accessed through the
game itself. This 'superfluous' code is then re-programmed into new
narratives and new web-based films and visual art. Interestingly, some
of the re-coding can be done in live performances, and this in turn
creates a new kind of performance art - -so far, all collaborative and
interactive. Audiences scream out directions to programmers who are
"improving" new code from the stream of code that is being recycled and
refashioned from the gaming code. As someone primarily interested in
live art and not code, I find the performances sort of transfixing
because they are sort of mesmerizingly awkward, 'naive,' and even 'dumb'
in terms of narrative complexity or dramatic arc. And yet there is no
doubt that they are completely absorbing performances --combining
elements of sampling from hip-hop, old school improv techniques, and new
media savvy in re: to gaming and coding. And the frenzy with which the
directions are thrown out from the audience is something to behold. The
best re-programmers are those who can quickly meld one direction into
another, and this requires, among other things, adroit fingers, typing,
and so on. There are now 'teams' and 'stars' as in sports events.
Here is a wiki link for those who would like a more detailed (and
probably more accurate) description of the recycled code etc:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machinima
My answer to the list, Sept. 25:
Thank you all for so many interesting answers!
Concerning
Christy's question about "polymorphic" narratives—i.e. "spread across
multiple media platforms", I suppose one obvious source would be the
very existence of narratives (e.g. classical myths) which give rise to
multimedia representations, say, pictures of Odysseus or narratives
about Odysseus. It is a short (and long) step from that to the use of
different media platforms to articulate a single work of art by one
artist. Long, because although other connective strategies may be easily
devised (and perhaps have been used? any suggestions here?) one seems
to need a form unified in a digital sequence with multimedia capacity
before this kind of work becomes manageable or mainstream. Although
perhaps part of what is suggested in the word "spread out" used by
Christy refers to a much more disjointed or "distributed" narrative—the
kind of thing Jill Walker has been writing on? One thinks of William
Gibson's cult videos in Pattern Recognition being disseminated
across different websites... but then that was only video (which can be
multimedia in itself, to be sure). Or an Amélie-like strategy for urban
narrative made of clues taking you from one piece of the artwork to the
next? Anyway, one major issue, apart from the nature of the pieces
spread across multiple media platforms, would seem to be the thread that
links them together, or the frame which holds them together: either a
unified, marketable object in digital form, or an experiential sequence
to be tracked out in different places and disconnected media. Or things
in between. But I must look closer into Christy's del.icio.us collection
before indulging any further in random musings and speculations.
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