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Database | Narrative | Archive

Seven interactive essays on digital nonlinear storytelling
edited by Matt Soar & Monika Gagnon

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Database|Narrative|Archive: An Anthology



[Note to Contributors and editors: Please keep in mind that the project is completely proprietary until further notice. To allow for the blind peer review of the anthology, you will all be locked out of the system from Friday July 13th at midnight EST, until further notice. Please do not share any of the links, logins, or content with anyone outside the project.
 Our shared production notes can be found here.]



Table of Contents

Conceptualizing Transmedia Scholarship
Suzanne Scott (Occidental College) & Chris Hanson (Syracuse University)
Editor: Chris Hanson (Syracuse University)

Critical Reflection on Dayton Express: Bosnian Railroads and the Paradox of Integration
Amir Husak (New School)
Editor: Adrian Miles (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)

Jennifer Proctor (University of Michigan-Dearborn) & Brigid Maher (American University)
Editor: Kim Sawchuk (Concordia University)

Case-Study: Public Secrets and Blood Sugar
Sharon Daniel (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Editor: Sheila Schroeder (University of Denver)

Adrian Miles (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology)
Editor: Will Luers (Washington State University)

Monika Kin Gagnon (Concordia University)
Editor: Matt Soar (Concordia University)

Will Luers (Washington State University)
Editor: David Clark (Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University)


Editorial Statement

Database|Narrative|Archive is a collection of seven essays by both thinkers and makers in the emergent medium of nonlinear digital storytelling. All of the essays have been conceived and written for Scalar, an interactive, multimedia, scholarly publishing platform under development at the University of Southern California. All of the contributors have been concerned with investigating and addressing critical, conceptual, and creative questions at the heart of contemporary nonlinear storytelling in this formative era of the Web.

A profusion of recent scholarly writing and cultural commentary addresses the sprawling, emergent realm of interactive narrative, which is itself part of a profound historical development that has been referred to as “the computerization of culture” (Manovich 2001). Categories such as “electronic literature” (Hayles 2006), “interactive database narrative” (Kinder 2002), and ‘transmedia’ scholarship are amongst the many neologisms claiming to describe some of the emergent characteristics of interactive narrative. Given an ever-expanding array of digital production platforms that have broadened opportunities for the delivery of research-based media productions - DVDs, archives, kiosks, installations, data visualizations, mobile devices and social networking software - recent innovations in research and practice in new media and communication studies now focus on the combination of database functionality and digital delivery, producing multimodal forms of scholarship. As Anne Friedberg describes it, “the digital page yields a new axis of depth—a page that layers to other pages, can be seen next to other pages, and can include moving images, still images, sounds.” (Friedberg 2009)

The nine authors of the seven essays in this collection engage with the multimodality offered by Scalar with creative, critical and historical approaches that explore these new axes of depth and layering. As Suzanne Scott and Chris Hanson’s essay demonstrates with copious keywords, principles and examples, the potential for scholarship is much more than simply using images, video and sound, and the hyperlinks and connectivity of websites, as mere supplements. Indeed, all the works presented in D|N|A both interrogate and perform the potentialities of multimodal representation. As Tara McPherson has described of the multimodal scholar, these nine artist-authors ask, “How do you ‘experience’ or ‘feel’ an argument in a more immersive and sensory-rich space?” (McPherson 2009).

Sharon Daniel and Amir Husak engage with particular communities and histories. What Daniel has recently said regarding her own new media projects (some of which are in Scalar), can be applied to both authors: “What connects all my recent projects is a desire to effect social change” (Daniel 2009). In working with two of her recent socially engaged projects, Public Secrets and Blood Sugar, Daniel explores how “interface is a form of argument,” reinscribing the age-old debate about the relation between aesthetics and politics in a post-Web 2.0 environment. In a similar manner, Husak discusses his documentary engagement with an identity group and community history frequently excluded from the public sphere, ie nationalism and identity in Bosnia.

Jen Proctor, Brigit Maher and Monika Gagnon introduce various case studies; in the former, to present typologies of crowdsourced interactive cinema practices, and, in the latter, to compare the traditional and digital archive. Proctor and Maher distinguish conventional narrative film viewing and interactive reader/viewer/user experiences online, drawing on examples from crowdsourced projects such as The Johnny Cash Project and 18 Days in Egypt, as well as the database film software, Korsakow. They reflect on the changing nature of narrative and what they conclude may be a tendency toward more “emotionally engaged interactivity” that is longer in duration and deeper in substance. Inversely, in examining the online archive of late intermedia artist Theresa Cha at the Berkeley Art Museum, Gagnon explores the changing material characteristics of the archive as a repository of original artifacts and its digital facsimiles, and explores how interrelationships between art and media objects, so crucial to conceptual art, might be more effectively maintained through experimental modes of creative archiving.

Engaging with questions of form, specifically narrative and plot structure in the non-linear database narrative, Adrian Miles explores the importance of affect with specific reference to Korsakow (a piece of software being co-developed by Soar and used extensively by Miles, both professionally and in the classroom). Invoking Deleuze, Miles argues that “cinematographic database narratives” are to be understood as ‘assemblages’ of narrative fragments. Will Luers also uses affect as an entry point in discussing the fate of ‘traditional’ plot devices in an era of digital, nonlinear storytelling. Drawing on a wide range of examples, from graphic novels, interface design and the work of Peter Greenaway, to video loops, Luers proposes the term ‘vernacular database narrativity’ to account for the the transformation of ‘plot’.

Throughout this anthology, analyses and hyperlinks to dozens of mediaworks make this Scalar-produced multimedia collection unique, aggregating some of the most recent crowdsourced and interactive mediaworks that are here made available to readers to explore, such as Katerina Cizek’s Highrise (2011), David Dufresne’s Prison Valley (2011), Jigar Mehta’s 18 Days in Egypt (2012), with references to older experimental films such as Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Perry Bard’s participatory remake, Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake, as well as references to the work of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage, and Michael Figgis’s Timecode (2000).

To complement and perhaps complicate the seven contributions, collection editors Soar and Gagnon have created an editorial meta-commentary that, through the use of alternate paths, further enjoins the seven works in dialogue in creative, theoretical, and conceptual alignments. If the contributors’ respective paths through their own content can be understood as the warp of D|N|A, then the additional paths conceived by Soar and Gagnon can be thought of as the weft: semi-autonomous but conceptually integrated meta-paths, each tasked with making thematic and topical connections across and between the seven essays. Examples of weft paths we’re actively developing are: affect, neologisms, mediaworks, topologies/taxonomies, Korsakow.

Appendix

The Editors

The co-editors, Dr. Matt Soar and Dr. Monika Kin Gagnon, have a critical and applied interest in nonlinear storytelling. They both trained in Communication Studies after careers in media production; co-directed the Concordia Interactive Narrative Experimentation & Research Group (CINER-G, 2007-2011); and, currently codirect Adventures in Research Creation (ARC, 2011-2014). CINER-G was funded by the Quebec government; a key outcome was the redevelopment and subsequent relaunch of the Korsakow System, a user-friendly software application for creating browser-based database documentaries. Korsakow was invented in 2000 by Berlin-based artist and documentarian Florian Thalhofer, and has been used by both Soar and Gagnon (and numerous artists and educators worldwide) to make successful nonlinear narratives. Korsakow is also central to ARC, which received major funding from the federal government of Canada, and, aside from Gagnon, Soar and Thalhofer, includes two eminent Canadian artists as collaborators: Midi Onodera and Phil Hoffman.

The Contributors

Sharon Daniel is Professor of Film and Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research involves collaborations with local and on-line communities, which exploit information and communications technologies as new sites for "public art." Daniel’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums, festivals including the Corcoran Biennial, the University of Paris, the Dutch Electronic Arts Festival, Ars Electronica and the Lincoln Center Festival as well as on the Internet.

Monika Kin Gagnon is Professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University. Gagnon produced the DVD/film project, Charles Gagnon: 4 Films, in collaboration with her late artist father, which explores cultural memory, unfinished films and archives in what she has termed “posthumous cinema.” Her Korsakow film Archiving R69 chronicles working with the unfinished film and associated archives of Charles Gagnon's R69, using still images, archival documents, and short interviews during the making of the DVD with editors, filmmakers and artists.

Chris Hanson is Assistant Professor of English at Syracuse U. He has worked in video game and software development, and assisted with the planning and production of an educational series and content for PBS. Hanson has been a HASTAC Scholar (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) and his work has appeared in Film Quarterly, Spectator, and Discourse.

Amir Husak is a filmmaker and multimedia artist based in Brooklyn, NY and is a part-time faculty member in the Media Studies & Film department at The New School in New York. Husak has worked across a variety of time-based and interactive media, producing interactive works that combine documentary, essay and experimental techniques and is particularly interested in digital media representations of history and their impact on identity politics. His works have been presented at South by Southwest (US), Stadtmuseum Graz (Austria), Sundance Film Festival (US), Sarajevo Film Festival (Bosnia & Herzegovina), P.O.V./PBS (US), Big Sky Documentary Film Festival (US), TV Cultura (Brazil), and Full Frame Film Festival (US).

Will Luers is Visiting Professor in the Creative Media & Digital Culture program, Washington State U. His current research and artistic interests are in database narratives, remix video and the multimedia book. In 2010, he was awarded the The Vectors-NEH Summer Fellowship to work on his database documentary, The Father Divine Project. In 2005, he won Nantucket Film Festival and Tony Cox Award for Best Screenplay.

Brigid Maher is Associate Professor of Film and Media Arts, School of Communication, American University. She is a filmmaker and writer and her scholarly writing focuses on the interplay between traditional film and new media theories. Her award-winning narrative and documentary films have shown in festivals in the U.S. and abroad and her latest documentary, Veiled Voices, focuses on the phenomenon of Muslim women religious leaders in Islam. Veiled Voices has screened on over 150 public television stations and three national networks and has screened in numerous international festivals in the United States and abroad.

Adrian Miles is Senior Lecturer in New Media and currently the Program Director of the labsome Honours research studio at RMIT, in Melbourne, Australia. Miles’ research interests include hypertext and hypermedia, appropriate pedagogies for new media education, digital poetics, and the use of Deleuze’s cinema philosophy in the context of digital poetics and online interactive video. He is very interested in the relation between hypertext and networked interactive video.

Jennifer Proctor is Assistant Professor in Journalism and Screen Studies at U. Michigan- Dearborn. Proctor is a filmmaker and media artist and is the former Managing Director of the Cinematexas Short Film Festival and Austin Cinemaker Co-op. Her work has shown at Aurora Picture Show, Portland Documentary & Experimental Film Fest, MadCat Film Festival, NextFrame, Basement Films, Mini-Cine, Splice This!, FLEXFest, SF Cinematheque, Cinematexas, Ms. Films, Dallas Video Fest, Iowa City Documentary Film Festival, and others.

Suzanne Scott is Mellon Digital Scholarship Fellow at Occidental College. Scott recently completed her Ph.D. at the University of Southern California, and has served for the past two years as a lecturer in the Film + Digital Media Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research builds on intersections in fan studies, cultural studies, and theories of new media. Scott has served as an editor of the open-access, peer-reviewed online journal Transformative Works and Cultures, has been honored as a HASTAC Scholar.

Associate Editors

The collection was further strengthened by the creative and intellectual contributions of individual editors who worked uniquely with one contributor.

Sheila Schroeder is Associate Professor in the Department of Media, Film & Journalism Studies, University of Denver, and is an award-winning video producer/director/editor and educator. Her current film project, Woodstock West: Build Not Burn tells the story of a 1970 University of Denver protest and explores the impact this “fight the power” moment had on the young people who tried to change the world.

Adrian Miles (RMIT). See above.

David Clark is Associate Professor in Intermedia at Nova Scotia College of Art & Design University. He is known for his net.art project, A is for Apple, which has played at Sundance, SIGGRAPH, FCMM, Transmediale in Berlin, and the Museum of Moving Images in New York. It won the top prize at the 2003 SXSW in Austin, Texas and the FILE2002 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Recent projects include the net.art piece, 88 Constellations for Wittgenstein; the non-linear film Meanwhile; and the feature film Maxwell’s Demon.

Will Luers. See above. 

Chris Hanson. See above.

Kim Sawchuk is Professor of Communication Studies, Concordia University. She is co-director of the Mobile Media Lab (Montreal/Toronto), co-editor of wi: journal of mobile media (www.wi-not.ca) and former editor of the editor of the Canadian Journal of Communication (www.cjconline). She has extensively published on feminist theories of the body and technology.
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