Temporal plotting is more than just a logic of continuance; it also provides affective meanings through relational structures. Boredom, calm, suspense, relief, anxiety, fear can be designed into a narration's rhythm and pacing so that the viewer/reader/listener can both know and feel–identify with– what characters are experiencing. How can such affective-expressive uses of causality and linear sequencing work in a graphic interface? Because database narratives are often made of smaller narrative units that are organized for nonlinear access, chronology must be communicated through graphical devices such as a timelines and timestamps.  Such methods of navigating time are common in spatial and database narratives and are effective at imparting temporal information, but they do not work well for narrative engagement. An interface is perhaps more engaging when displaying subjective time through spatial relationships. For example, a small frame embedded within a larger frame can spatially denote a "flashback." Grids, timelines and nested narratives (mise en abyme) act both as framing device–for how to read one narrative in light of others– but also as a way to graphically model the nonlinearity and recursion in thought and experience.

Early in Shaun Tan’s graphic novel, “The Arrival”, there is a double-page spread showing a grid of clouds. In the context of the story, the grid makes visible on macro and micro levels, the passage of time, the loneliness of travel, the longing for home, boredom, the small changes that each day brings. The point of view of the protagonist is implied, not articulated. There is no image of the man looking up at the sky. The reader, turning the page to the clouds, is momentarily without narrative bearing as the clouds invoke a subject-less reverie of "passing days." Compared with a more mimetic approach–a single image of the protagonist sitting alone in thought–the grid is relational on many levels: as a simultaneous view of distinct days in the story world, and as a confluence between the narration, the reader and the object of attention; an affective-expressive identification that is not attached to a single point of view.

Like Tan's grid of clouds, multiple loops embedded within a interface can display not a representation of a thinker, but a field of thought that emerges and is produced in the encounter with a user. A spatial montage of loops requires a different kind of narrative attention; an attention that is more focused on relations between events and subjects than on continuity. Manovich writes about how the loop, driven by an algorithm, is emblematic of database logic. But loops are computational effects that have not yet been fully codified into digital narrative. A loop is useful for making cinematic motion a subtle distraction on a static page with text, as can be seen in embedded online advertisements; and there are loop-like behaviors in the world that offer mimetic possibilities–the lapping of waves, the swaying of branches and copulation, to name a few.  If we think of the interface as primarily a semiotic space that includes multiple representational elements, such as photographs and videos, what is the expressive role of loops? Is there semantic meaning and, more importantly, relational meaning that can be exploited in the loop?

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