Larry Friedlander presented some his work on the development of theatrical spaces that use technology to structure visitors' participation and engagement with an exhibit. Borrowing from architecture, theater, and interactive computing, Larry uses embedded technology to create transformational spaces that respond to visitors' interaction with them. For example, in a proposed model for a museum at the Globe theater, visitors act out a scene from one of Shakespeare's plays with the film actor of their choice. Using blue screen technology, visitors can take home a copy of themselves acting along side, say, Sir Laurence Olivier (or even Larry Friedlander! how about Mel Gibson??).
Larry also presented work from an installation developed at MIT based on elements of the mandala and from an exhibit designed by Tinsley Galyean at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry in which an individual enters into a virtual space in part controlled by fellow museum participants. In the former each installation space is controlled by a behind-the-scenes director who tries to structure participants attention and experience so that they engage with the language of the installation environment. Participants progress through the installation only when they have changed the environment in some way. In the Exploratorium exhibit, narrative direction is given over to museum visitors who watch as someone dons a vr headset and enters into an animated graphical world. As in the MIT installation, the museum visitors can exert control over the way the virtual world interacts with the person experiencing it.
The seminar discussion addressed how notions of narrative and point- of-view can be applied to these kinds of interactive spaces. Larry made the analogy to a Greek chorus that exists somewhere on the boundary between participation and witnessing. He's trying to use technology to blur the distinction between actors and audience, narrative and life experience.
How do we tweak our definitions of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd person participation for this kind of narrative experience?
The group considered the frequency, range, and significance of the interactions in Larry's examples, as well as others brought up in conversation. Clearly there is a tension between the amount of narrative structure provided by an exhibition designer and how much the space allows for free flowing, purposeful actions. Everyone agreed that any kind of branching structure determining a range of possible narrative paths and outcomes would "feel" forced and would not provide for a satisfactory narrative experience. Nevertheless, it was agreed that there needs to be some kind of aesthetic criteria to embed the interactive space with meaning and latent narrative possibilities. In short, gratuitous action is as much a turn off as clunky narrative structure.
Brenda Laurel confronts this problem by distinguishing between "narrative" and "enactment"--arguing that the latter is more suitable for our subject at hand. In her words:
Enactment, meaning to act out rather than to read. Enacted representations involve direct sensing as well as cognition. To state it more simply, the stuff of narrative is description, while the stuff of drama is action. (Computers As Theater, 94-95)She goes on to say that the episodic structure of narrative is all about the extensification of time and experience, while enactment is about intensification and condensing time. She then goes on to adapt Aristotle's four causes as a way to provide meaning for the actions and representations of immersive interactive environments (causa materialis, causa formalis, causa efficiens, causa finalis. . .ironically, Heidegger argued that these causes were insufficient explanations for technology that is also a "revealing").
I'd propose turning to the expressive forms of poetry as a means of complementing Laurel's dramatic model. Poetry as meaning system, or information system. Can poetry's intensification of image, sound, rhythm provide a model for the design of interactive spaces? Is there a similar "enactment" of meaning (or "derangement of the senses"!) in the language of poetry as in what Larry called the "nonordinary" language of his MIT installation?
We also considered whether the very notion of Virtual Reality is encumbered by a kind of mimetic fallacy--what Xin Wei called "ocular centrism" (after Martin Jay?). Xin Wei wanted to consider haptic and audial interfaces, while acknowledging that the same critique can be made about them as well. Returning, I think, to our narrative/dramatic model, it was proposed that "selectivity" should guide interactive design, that projective completion of sensory realism is an important part of the narrative enactment. In other words, there must be space for the participants to imaginatively extend (and be surprised by) the environment. Larry encouraged us to think of the interactive experience as one of metaphor building: where participants find correspondences for the significance of their interactions with the environment (again, I think this implies a poetics of technology).
This lead to a discussion of the "embodiment of meaning" in interactive spaces which diverged into debate about whether or not we are transcending or atrophying our bodily selves in VR. I don't have much to say here except that it seems to be more a complaint about clunky datagloves and headsets than anything else? I mean nobody complains that book technology leaves our body-as-meat slumped over the text while our imagination parties down in a text-based virtual world. . . . We skirted around the mind-body problem, Cartesian epochˇs, and all that good stuff--hey, it was dinner time.
p.s. speaking of a poetics of technology, i came across a most peculiar technology white paper on the web today. The paper was on Macromedia's ShockWave extension to the Director authoring system and Lingo scripting language. Each section of the paper was preceded by a quote from T. S. Eliot--either from Prufrock or 4 Quartets. The paper exhibits no sense of irony about this juxtaposition. I can think of no better way to describe the "technology area formally known as VR" than as existing somewhere between the mysticism of the Quartets and the alienation/absurdity embodied in Prufrock!
in the room the programmers come and go
talking of Macromedia's Lingo
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