MTD1Notes WEEK 8

Announcement:

Ann Arbor Film Festival screening

Date: 6pm, Wed, Oct 27th Festival director Donald Harrison will introduce Program One of last year's 48th annual festival showcasing many short film award-winners and audience favorites. The AAFF Touring Package includes animation, experimental films, and docs that explore boundaries, challenge audiences, experiment with style and technique.

Screening is free and sponsored by the Departments of Film & Video, Television, and Interactive Arts & Media.

review of mid term

Image analysis: compare Gap ad with Horst P. Horst's "Mainbocher Corset" [1]

Main directions (horiz, vert)

Magnetism of the frame (pull of edges of frame)

Asymmetry of frame (diagonals; screen left, right)

Figure/ground

Closure

Patterns (proximity, similarity, continuity)

Vectors (graphic, index, motion)

Balance (stabile, neutral, labile)

Golden mean

Depth (size, overlap, texture crowding, focus, etc.)

Color

Height in plane

Ch. 7 Berger, Radway, reading the romance

Happy Endings: Margaret Atwood [2]

Resisting/reinterpreting the text: There are ways of subverting the texts we read, of resisting the hidden imperatives and masked ideologies in such texts.

Texts are formulaic, romance novels have a pattern

Elements are interchangeable (sound familiar? Propp?)

How people use the media – stressing not the media object but the media user (viewer, listener, reader, etc.)

modular fiction

Ch. 8, Hamlet on the Holodeck, Janet Murray

New technology transforms universal stories such that they remain relevant in a new era.

Stories have developed from linear and episodic in nature (Don Quixote) to multiform stories (existing in multiple versions) (Rashomon)

Games – stories with embedded puzzle elements

Pleasure in games (interactive narrative/experiences):

• Immersion – create belief in another world
• Agency – deciding and acting; “seeking”
• Transformation – into character in the game/story

“The emotional impact of enactment within an immersive environment is so strong that virtual reality installations have been found to be effective for psychotherapy”

fear of flying – VR simulation

20 master plots

Alternative narratives:

• RISD.tv [3]
• The Whale Hunt [4]
• Lascaux [5]
• Josephine Anstey Trial Trail[6]
• Façade[7][8][9]
• Chris Crawford [10]
• Patrick Lichty interactive text [11]
• Mark Amerika’s Grammatron [12]

immersion: the CAVE [13]

agency: Anstey/Pape virtual drama[14] [15]

McCloud 3

Preoccupation with the reality (or un-) of our surroundings

The Matrix: the construct [16] The Truman Show [17]

Our partial perception of things requires CLOSURE on our part

Thus we can connect things that are disparate in time and space (ellipsis)

Western art and literature are goal oriented, they don’t wander much (and don’t allow us to do so)

• East – cyclical and labyrinthine; more concerned with being there
• West – straightforward, more concerned with getting there

East emphasizes negative space [18][19][20] [21]

Interactive Narrative

• RISD.tv[22]
• The Whale Hunt [23]
• Lascaux [24]
• Josephine Anstey Trial Trail[25]
• Facade[26][27][28]
• Chris Crawford [29]

Writing a research paper

helpful site[30]

Columbia’s library page on research papers [31]

Columbia's Writing Center [32]

• Written in the third person; involves original thought based on examination of sources of information (other than Wikipedia)
• Persuasive, or exploration of a topic
• This is not a blog. Use complete sentences, do not advance personal opinions unless based on demonstrable fact.
• Audience: other college students (adults), who are not in your field of study.

Use the topic specified in the assignment, or create one of your own. Here are some seeds that may serve to spur thought:

These 5 master plots (enumerate) are the most commonly shared among games, films, and television programs in the post 9/11 decade in the US. The prevalence of these plots have led thinkers in sociology, psychology and cultural criticism to posit X,Y,and Z about the cultural climate in the US at present.

How has the definition of “narrative” changed with the availability of interactive media including games? Discuss this phenomenon in light of McLuhan’s Laws of Media.

Compare interactive narrative and video games, taking into account the work of new media theorists Lev Manovich and Marcia Kinder as well as that of game makers/thinkers Chris Crawford and Steve Swink.

Discuss the effect of literature such as Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” on the development of virtual worlds and video games.

Plagiarism: copying exactly or paraphrasing someone else’s work and presenting it as your own. [33] From the syllabus: “Academic Honesty and Conduct: Academic honesty is expected of all students. Any inappropriate use of materials or plagiarism will not be tolerated. (See Academic Integrity Policies on pg. 18 of the Columbia Catalog.)”

questions

McCloud 3:

• With such a difference between Eastern and Western storytelling in terms sequence types, how does humanity have a chance of what McCloud calls “universal communication”? Would the attempts of creating a fluid, universal iconography be futile because of these cultural differences[34][35] [36]
• 7 Radway:

Radway believes that consumers of media have the power to resist the influences of the (very few) people who control media. With the incresed consolidation of media ownership, even since Radway’s book was first published (1984), do consumers of media still have enough power to resist these influences? I really don’t think everyone still has the power to do so, if only because their resources and experience aren’t sufficient for such action. What are some egs. Of reading the media against the grain, for your own benefit [37] [38]

• 8 Murray:

Murray, like many others suggests that we are only capable of telling so many stories, and that we are basically stuck telling the same ones over and over. If this is entirely true, then why, as students in this arts and media college, do we even bother?