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Database | Narrative | Archive

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

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Plotting the Database Fiction

The cultural explosion of “database logic,”continues to challenge notions of narrative as a primarily sequential and mimetic art. The line Manovich draws,”database and narrative are natural enemies,” is not about the incompatibility of two tendencies, but about how a communicative act falls on a spectrum: between the modularity of the database and the linearity of narrative. Narrative forms have always slid along these and many other spectrums. The word “database,” refering to the unique nonlinear capabilities of a computer,  connotes a vast repository of stuff and “narrative” an ordered selection. According to Manovich’s distinction, a narrative hides its set of source material (paradigm) and makes visible the selection (syntagm). Alternately, a database foregrounds the paradigmatic set and hides the syntagmatic or narrative ordering.  But, linear narratives can be endlessly inclusive and digressive and a database can be a limited set.  A computer database is fully capable of delivering linear plots. Plotted narratives can have database-like depths of allusion, segmentation and intertexuality.  But typically, the usefulness and pleasures of plot, as a unifying device, is significantly weakened in a computer’s networked and modular environment. Search, fast retrieval, temporal ordering--the qualities that make databases unique--leave plot effects, such as foreshadowing and suspense, ineffective.  

Without plot, what holds a database fiction together as a conceptual and experiential whole?  What models in contemporary and past narrative forms can help us re-imagine an affective-expressive narrativity that is less reliant on plot devices, cause and effect chains and central conflicts?  Narrative forms--non-Western, non-mimetic and antimimetic-- that ignore, dismantle, or diminish the structural role of plot, also engage the attentive mind as single entities (stories).  Cohesiveness comes through the discursive style; the patterns, gaps, rhythms and repetitions in the material surface of the work. In other words, the interface.



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