continues to challenge our understanding of narrative as a primarily sequential and mimetic art. The distinction Manovich makes,”database and narrative are natural enemies”, is not about the incompatibility of the two tendencies, but about how a communicative act falls on a spectrum: between the modularity of the database and the linearity of narrative. In any discussion about the compatibility of these two tendencies, definitions and categories become slippery because narrative forms slide along these and many other spectrums.  “Database” refers to the unique nonlinear capabilities of a computer: complex networks, hyperlinking of data, instant retrieval, random access, etc. And yet, a computer database is fully capable of delivering linear plot as discrete narrative units. A TV series on a website or DVD is a kind of database narrative. Narratives in traditional media (novels, theater, film) can have database-like depths of allusion and intertexuality.  But typically, the usefulness and pleasures of plot as a unifying device is significantly weakened in a computer’s networked and nonlinear environment. In the navigation of a database, temporal ordering is handed over to the user, rendering familiar techniques of engagement, such as foreshadowing and suspense, ineffective.  

Without plot, what holds a database fiction together as a conceptual whole?  Narratives that dismantle, displace or otherwise diminish the structural role of plot —as in many non-Western and non-mimetic narrative traditions—also engage the attentive mind as single entities (narratives).  It is usually through the patterns, gaps, rhythms and repetitions in the material surface of the work. The discursive style, narrative voice and spatial design. In other words, the interface.