Performing Fictions: Depiction and Interaction

2003

ABSTRACT This paper presents a method for analysing an aspect of interaction that can help us understand how users can feel that they are part of a work. I argue that interaction can be a form of depiction, causing the user to imagine both her perceptual actions and her manipulation of the work as being fictional as well as actual. This produces an ontological fusion between the actual and the fictional.

Technoetic arts, 2011

Understanding the interactive art experience requires investigation of relations among multiple (v)users-participants who are both viewers and users in interaction with the artwork and among themselves. The author proposes five elements in interactive art: Presence, including components of proximity, boundaries, common ground and scale Mapping, comprising both space and time, and whatever interface organizes the two; this may result in a dynamic map-one that changes in response to (v)user interactions Action, designating both the analogue and digital behaviours that (v)users engage in, as well as the various gestures that become meaningful Learning, involving a learning curve, scripting by the artist, improvisation by the viewer in figuring out the system, and repetition to confirm patterns, resulting in a rhythm or flow 1. (v)user is a term introduced by the author in early 1998 to discuss participants who are both viewers and users in the interaction with the artwork and between themselves. Bill Seaman uses a similar term, (v)user, also coined in early 1998.

ABSTRACT Understanding the interactive art experience requires investigation of relations among multiple (v)users – participants who are both viewers and users in interaction with the artwork and among themselves. The author proposes ve elements in interactive art: Presence, including components of proximity, boundaries, common ground, and scale. Mapping, comprising both space and time, and whatever interface organizes the two; this may result in a dynamic map – one that changes in response to (v)user interactions. Action, designating both the analog and digital behaviours that (v)users engage in, as well as the various gestures that become meaningful. Learning, involving a learning curve, scripting by the artist, improvisation by the viewer in guring out the system, and repetition to conrm patterns, resulting in a rhythm or ow. Vividness, whereby the experience becomes memorable from elements of either familiarity or surprise.

The ability of computers to produce ‘presence’ – the visceral feeling of actually ‘being there’ – is typically associated with the presentation of intensive graphical effects. But studies on presence indicate that what players are able to ‘do’ in fact contributes more to their sense of presence than graphical realism. Keeping this in mind, I explore possibilities for 'performing’ presence in digital narratives, particularly through the non-graphical digital medium of interactive fiction. I draw from critical theorists (Barthes, Iser and especially Gumbrecht) as well as theorists of new media (Aarseth, Ryan, Montfort) to frame an investigation into two major aspects of presence production in interactive fiction, namely: 1) how interactive fiction generates presence through the exclusive use of verbal signifiers rather than graphical images, and 2) how it allows users to generate presence themselves through their own actions. I conclude by examining three works of interactive fiction: Adventure, All Roads and Luminous Horizon (Crowther and Woods 1975–6; Ingold 2006; O’Brian 2004).

In this contribution, I identify rhetorical figures that are specific to interactive writing : figures of manipulation (meaning gestual manipulation). It’s a category on its own, along with figures of diction, construction, meaning and thought. In many computer art works, the artists use the figures of manipulation to introduce a loss of grasp. What is emphasized in such figures is the coupling action/behavior, which could be considered as a basic unit in interactive writing. This coupling can be conceived independently from the medias it relies on. Thus, an a-media approach seems relevant when attempting to define an art of rhetoric in interactive writing.

Critical Inquiry, 2005

Let me begin with a puzzle: why are readers with a promiscuous appetite for contemporary fiction-colleagues, students, friends, myself-by and large not drawn to the "interactive" fictional texts one finds on the web and in other electronic form? Shrewd critics have, after all, demonstrated that electronic fiction (also called hyperfiction) offers some of what is most adventurous, playful, and innovative in contemporary writing, indeed, that the very structure of the form encodes many of the features that recent theoreticians of literature have most prized. I would like to be convinced by their arguments, yet in gamely clicking my way through screens I have rarely felt the singular delight that keeps returning many of us to literature, indeed, to art in general-the sense that someone is playing with our minds and our senses in a way that, for reasons not wholly apparent, we enjoy or admire. Why? Are my age, education, or obsolete reading habits to be blamed? Surely they do not help, but that cannot be the whole story; hardly any of my students, all of whom have grown up with the internet, seek out these texts either. It is tempting to shrug off the whole form as what the New York Times has termed www.claptrap.com, but with that gesture one would also have dismissed the opportunity to reflect on a set of immensely rich issues with important consequences for our understanding of all literature. The question of why potential readers of hyperfiction decline to become actual ones touches on matters far beyond the scope of electronic textuality, for to learn why hyperfiction maintains only a loose hold on our attention is

In his 2008 TV special The System, illusionist Derren Brown performs a trick in which he flips a coin and achieves ten consecutive heads. This astonishing feat conjures various possibilities in the mind of the viewer. Is he palming the coin somehow, changing unwanted tails to heads with sleight of hand? Does he switch out the coin as soon as the trick has begun, substituting it for a double-headed fake? Is he using camera trickery, making multiple attempts look like a single, unedited shot? The multiplicity of possible solutions, and the consideration of said possible solutions, contributes to the viewer’s enjoyment. Like Reader Response theorist Norman Holland, I take the view that “literature is an experience and, further, an experience not discontinuous with other experiences”. (qtd. in Iser 39) Texts in general, and interactive fictions in particular have various parallels with this coin-tossing trick, in that the multitude of virtual outcomes they suggest are actually illusory (cf. Newman NP; Ensslin 81), while the reality is magical in its simplicity.

Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies, 1997

2011

Whi le the enhancement of participatory technologies over the last decade has converted viewers of information into producers of a digital world, less attention has been given to the role played by narrative in structuring our interactions with the digital. As digital technologies intersect with our movements, decisions and responses with increasing ubiquity, the meanings of these transactions coalesce as eventful and episodic transactions that structure our communicative experience in the form of interactive narratives. Based on previous Australian Research Council funded research undertaken at the iCinema Research Centre at The University of New South Wales, this paper sets out a framework for theorizing the emergence of interactive narratives in our encounters with the digital, particularly in immersive and cinematic art installations.

2005