hat Is Literature Survey?

Literature survey is the documentation of a comprehensive review of the published and unpublished work from secondary sources data in the areas of specific interest to the researcher. The library is a rich storage base for secondary data and researchers used to spend several weeks and sometimes months going through books, journals, newspapers, magazines, conference proceedings, doctoral dissertations, master's theses, government publications and financial reports
to find information on their research topic. With computerized databases now readily available and accessible the literature search is much speedier and easier and can be done without entering the portals of a library building.

The researcher could start the literature survey even as the information from the unstructured and structured interviews is being gathered. Reviewing the literature on the topic area at this time helps the researcher to focus further interviews more meaningfully on certain aspects found to be important is the published studies even if these had not surfaced during the earlier questioning. So the literature survey is important for gathering the secondary data for the research which might be proved very helpful in the research. The literature survey can be conducted for several reasons. The literature review can be in any area of the business.

The Immersive Media Lab

The Immersive Media Lab

The objective of this lab is to carry out research in the area of immersive media, a new and emerging field of studies that considers the profound effects of the expansion and intensification of media formats and presentation. By increasing the scale, resolution and dimensionality of image and sound, a threshold can be reached that radically changes our relationship to media, which is then no longer a separate object to be experienced from a distance; rather it becomes an experiential environment that surrounds and engulfs us. Immersive media can facilitate new kinds of cinema, in which narrative can be experienced from the inside; new forms of games, in which interaction is through direct manipulation of media objects (rather than through keyboard and mouse); and new forms of experience, where our perceptual apparatus can be directly engaged and challenged. In all cases, immersive media holds the promise of creating large-scale social experiences that are ideal for multiple users, facilitating direct communication and dialogue. While the techniques for conceptual immersion are in many cases well understood (although by no means exhausted), the technologies of physical immersion are still being developed, and the techniques to exploit them are relatively new or nascent.

The Immersive Media Lab is a testbed in which to conduct research into new forms of media. By exploring, extending, combining and experimenting with various immersive and interactive technologies, we hope to gain insight into where these technologies might be headed. While there has been research into certain aspects of immersive technologies—most prominently in the field of virtual reality—we focus our efforts on three specific areas:

* Immersive cinema (narrative)
* Immersive games (interactivity)
* Immersive environments (experience and perception)

Each of these areas is critical in the development of new forms of media; together they hold the potential to develop media that extend cinema and television in ways we can only imagine at present. A key component of the Immersive Media Lab will be to make advanced and experimental media technologies available to CNTV faculty and students so that they can try out these new forms. This would augment our research by providing valuable insights into what new kinds of stories and narratives these media could accommodate.

It's Just Like Art

It's Just Like Art
Richard Wright
Printed in MFJ No. 28 (Spring 1995) Interactivities
Introduction

. . . the definition of art, and through it the art of living, is an object of struggle among the classes.
Pierre Bourdieu, "The Aristocracy of Culture." Media, Culture and Society, no. 2, 1980.

. . . the practical guidelines that we will all develop in [electronic media] are unlikely to be much use if they are based exclusively in either the norms of the popular arts or the norms of the canon alone: only some as yet undreamt-of mixture of the two is likely to do the job.
Jeffrey Palmer, "'Popular' Culture and 'High' Culture : The Question of Value." Inaugural lecture, London Guildhall University, 1994

A theory of hierarchical culture, ranging from "low" art and popular culture to the "high" art of avant-garde galleries, museums, and theaters has been proposed by different writers with various mechanisms to explain its operation and purpose. Probably the most rigorously materialistic of these theories is that of the French cultural sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. For Bourdieu, cultural hierarchies are defined by and help maintain social hierarchies expressed through class divisions and rivalries correlating economic capital with cultural capital but without reducing one to the other. Each social class is characterized by a set of cultural "competencies," a set of intellectual skills and sensibilities acquired through social background and educational environment and expressed through "taste." These competencies distinguish the dominant classes through exercise of their superior "taste" and pursuit of specialized "high art" cultural interests.

Social divisions are theorized as supporting and being legitimated by cultural practices hierarchically organized into those more "serious" and "elevated" and those more "vulgar" and "mindless." The dominant classes maintain their position of superiority by their economic ability to invest time and money in the education and participation required to further refine their cultural pursuits and ensure that they are always sufficiently different to distinguish them from those of the "lower" classes. For Bourdieu, the particular cultural values a class espouses are completely arbitrary and indefensible (apart from the task of maintaining the cultural hierarchy). Thus far then, we are left with a situation in which different social groups are aligned with their different cultural interests, none of which has any intrinsic value over any other. Although this means that the cultural values of the dominant class are purely "ideological" and have no real superiority to those of popular culture, this position also means that we are left with no basis on which to propose an alternative culture or set of aesthetic values. The classic problems of this radical relativism leave us mute when trying either to explain the development of a particular art form, or how for instance, a new art practice such as that of electronic media could evolve under such conditions. But Bourdieu's materialistic reasoning actually takes us one bizarre step further in describing this organization of cultural power.

The only creative movement of the cultural intellectuals of Bourdieu's dominant class is in internal rivalries generated by promoting the interests of each others' cultural fields, and in further distancing and elevating the taste of their own class above that of lower classes. The chief way of ensuring their exclusivity is simply to increase the difficulty of acquiring the cultural competencies necessary for the exercise of taste, to increase the investment needed in education, experience and social background. Any cultural competencies which require no particular effort to gain, are in a sense easy or "natural" and are therefore not valued and considered to be "barbarous" taste. Dominant cultural values which are comparatively educated, sophisticated and rational are placed in direct contrast to popular culture which are easy, immediate and sensual. So from our starting point based on empirical sociological data we have arrived at a dialectic which implicitly divides cultural competencies between a "natural" state of sensation and simple pleasures and a highly contrived aesthetic of critical intellectual contemplation. Although for Bourdieu these particular sets of values are still meaningless in themselves, this opposition is necessary in his theory of symbolic power to explain the mechanism behind how aesthetic codes are constructed. It would not now be difficult to find examples of artworks that seemed to have properties of both "high" and "low" culture so defined (though the theory is used to explain various conflicts and preferences), but there are areas in the development of electronic media forms where such a contrast of values seems to relate to problems in the cultural positioning of these new practices.

[MFJ ordering] [MFJ Special Ordering]
"Pure" Form and "Barbarous" Taste

Formal experiment which, in literature or the theater, leads to obscurity is . . . one sign of what is sometimes felt to be a desire to keep the uninitiated at arms length . . .
Pierre Bourdieu, op. cit.

A high degree of formal experimentation was encouraged by the nature of music videos: they had to catch hold of the viewer's attention . . . Naturally, the traditional filmic devices of mainstream and avant-garde cinema were available to promo directors, . . . but they lacked novelty value. New forms of image technology were to supply the answer.
John A Walker, Cross-Overs (London: Methuen and Co., 1987)

In his descriptions of the "popular aesthetic," Bourdieu identifies in it a refusal of all formal and experimental aesthetic devices and a desire to anchor any artifact such as an image to a specific "content" or use value. Taking a photograph of a wounded man, for example, the working class respondents to his surveys are concerned with the properties and traits of the particular man depicted and the likelihood of his situation . Middle class aesthetes on the other hand are attracted to stylistic properties of the picture itself. Responses from working class participants tend to refer to the possible function of the picture, to an "appreciation of informative, tangible or moral interest." These observations are extended to explain the popularity of narrative forms in which the working class can enter into a participatory enjoyment in a social world that they recognize. Thus far we have had constructed a popular aesthetic that appears to be a kind of utilitarian attitude to culture combined with a demand for a participatory social realism. Despite the problems in defining what is meant by a particular "realist" narrative form and how it operates, Bourdieu does not at first have any trouble in ignoring a consideration of the ideological function of representation and in reconciling his claim that a popular culture must be immediately accessible to be able to provide the base line from which a high culture can separate itself. Bourdieu maintains that the working class dislikes any formal experimentation in cultural forms, whether it is in television variety shows or the stylistic devices developed in high art circles. But at other points he refers to the base line popular aesthetic as being one of "pure and simple animality, to palpable pleasure and sensual desire." Bourdieu's desire seems to be to identify this immediate emotional and sensual response to texts with that of emphatic narrative identification, but we could also easily argue that such a "primitive" response was equally appropriate to "pure forms" and patterns, such as those of the wallpaper, carpets and textiles that adorn working class homes everywhere. The only time that Bourdieu credits a quality of the image in itself is when he notices that sometimes working class people cite color as able to render an otherwise "pointless" image attractive. This apparent contradiction is partly explained by Bourdieu himself when in one passage he states that "The department store is, in a sense, the poor man's gallery . . . because, there, people do not feel themselves measured against transcendent norms, i.e., the principles of the life-style of a supposedly higher class, but feel free to judge freely, in the name of the legitimate arbitrariness of tastes and colors."

It is not, then, the pictorial delights of images that the general public refuses, but the artistic context in which they are sometimes obliged to pay homage to them. This would explain the acceptance of vivid stylistic experiments in TV programming, music videos, advertisinf and youth culture. As long as they are not aligned with the cultural interests of high art, such graphic devices can be enjoyed for their sheer visual energy. It would also address the popularity of the novel experiments in digital imagery, startling in their visual stridency but estranged from traditional practices and often criticized by cultural commentators both for their lack of artistry and their lack of "content."

Animation has often been considered as special by film theorists for its distance from any necessary link with social narrative caused by the absence of live action recording and freedom of formal invention. Unlike conventional cinema which seeks to efface the means by which it appears "realistic" its stage setting, editing, cinematography, etc. animation actively draws attention to its technical means and molds it into a stylistic device. Endlessly formally inventive, animation remains one of the most popular filmic arts, albeit normally relegated to children's cartoons. In the earlier days of cinema and particularly when the Disney studios were just maturing their later style, animations were universally popular to the extent that they were also routinely enjoyed in cinemas by aesthetes from the highest levels of the art world. As described by theorists such as Michael O'Pray, some filmmakers of the time such as Sergei Eisenstein tried to explain this seemingly irresistible appeal by referring to Disney's consummate ability to make all the cartoon characters movements "lifelike" purely through a fluidity of motion, a perfected series of seamless transformations. He referred to this quality as the "protoplasmic," because it seemed to appeal to a psychological recognition of the creation and dissipation of organic forms and energies, the "omnipotence of plasma which contains in 'liquid' form all possibilities of future species and forms." Although this sounds very metaphysical, O'Pray explains the same effect using Freud's concept of the omnipotence of thought our desire for an all-powerfulness expressed through a supreme control and virtuosity of forms, as seen in the best Disney animation of the time. When observing the popularity of recent special effects films like Terminator 2 or even the otherwise mediocre Lawnmower Man, it is not difficult to see that their computer animated sequences have managed to combine all the qualities of "protoplasmic" imagery the "full-frame" metamorphoses and strident kaleidoscopic graphics that are all the more extreme for their claims to portray events "realistically." Special effects computer animation seems to have become the pinnacle of pure formal experimentation, "images beyond imagination," expressed as pure visual technology captivating and ephemeral.

Electronic media has rendered formal innovation in art trivial by reducing it to a matter of selecting from a series of command options. Bourdieu argues that this is all that the basis of taste is, a set of fundamentally arbitrary decisions about surface effect drawn from a plurality of possibilities. The computer makes this selection explicit, accessible and levelled out into a problem of pure information processing, a displacement of the ideology of representation onto another level entirely. It is as though the drive towards aesthetic creativity has gone out of control, going beyond a poetic purpose and expressing nothing but pure technical agency. It is difficult under these circumstances for art commentators to accept these developments, as popular culture becomes the center of the most unrestrained manipulations of the image surface in an appreciation of the protoplasmic quality of organic libidinal energy. The engine of change is no longer fashion, but is a structural property of media itself. The omnipotence of thought reflected through the omnipotence of technology as pure sensation.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to position new media practices within the cultural spaces of galleries, publications, conferences, or popular entertainments, with so many different interests at work. Electronic media are too new to have a readily defined place in the cultural hierarchy and typically show the traces of many genres in their production, partaking of aspects of both high art and popular culture. As new producers emerge, their greatest challenge is the formation of new audiences, spaces, and support structures. How the forces of cultural hegemony react to these new players will be crucial in defining what is possible and where, far more than their technical facilitation. The need to develop new forms of expression should lead to pressure to combine various traits of both high and low and to overcome their distinctions. But as aesthetic standards are disrupted there are many instances in which new forms of legitimation are emerging, leading to the prospect of certain technologies and practices being declared "artistic" at the expense of others. I will now briefly examine two examples showing how some of these issues are being worked out today.

Only the Innocent Understand Technology
As well as an endless array of new graphic devices, electronic media has extended the range of cultural sites at which its manifestations can be experienced. For Bourdieu the ideal place to reinforce the aesthetic distinction of high art is in the museum where the most ordinary object is elevated to the level of refined contemplation. Electronic media on the other hand has produced a range of eclectic sites in which hybrid combinations of academic research, commercial products, and artistic experiments come together and are questioned from a variety of different perspectives.

In the summer of 1993 two large art shows based on digital and interactive media opened in the United States, similar in content and intentions, but moving in very different directions with regards to the future of how to locate electronic media work. The first year of the MONTAGE '93 show attempted to eclipse all other media festivals in one go by offering such a huge program of exhibitions, film and video shows, seminars, lectures and expositions. One of the largest exhibits was Iterations: The New Image, a show of electronic and interactive installations along with some digital photography, curated by Tim Druckrey and Charles Stainback from the International Center of Photography in New York City. At the very same time on the other side of the continent, SIGGRAPH '93, the world's largest computer graphics conference, saw the opening of Machine Culture, its first curated art show dedicated to interactive media art. Although SIGGRAPH has featured a juried art show since 1981, its relationship to the many other events, such as presentations of the latest scientific research, courses, trade shows and technology exhibits has resulted in its remaining low on the list of priorities. This year the art show chair Simon Penny, an electronic sculptor, with his assistant Harry Fozzard, took on the task of fashioning a coherent and artistically credible exhibition that could withstand the concentrated onslaught of over 35,000 conference attendees over five days an audience ranging from scientists to sales reps to art critics.

Both shows attempted something new in their different ways. Both wanted to try to advance the reputation of art produced using electronic means and to bring it into the mainstream Avant Garde. In this respect, the Iterations show was best placed to promote this kind of work to the art world. The Memorial Art Gallery gave all the pieces plenty of space to perform, and its serene calm provided the kind of respectful atmosphere required. But a big factor in SIGGRAPH's favor is its unique position in being able to resource such a massive undertaking as Machine Culture, with its incredible total of thirty computer based installations. As Simon Penny states in the show's catalogue, "SIGGRAPH is perhaps the only place that such an event could occur, as it gathers both the technology and the goodwill of the makers of these technologies." Certainly, this is a constant problem for gallery based exhibitions such as Iterations that require fast graphics workstations for artists' use. All in all, a staggering two million dollars in loaned hardware was negotiated for the use of the Machine Culture show.

[MFJ ordering] [MFJ Special Ordering] But the most important difference was how the two shows negotiated their very dissimilar audiences and situation, especially Machine Culture. Many artists and critics already come to SIGGRAPH just to keep up with the latest technological developments, renew contacts or even look for jobs. With the lack of a regular media arts festival in the US this yearly event has been the nearest equivalent on home soil. But this audience forms only a minority among the thousands of computer graphics production companies, vendors, research scientists, engineers and consultants. It was to these people, very unlike the usual arts-going public, that Machine Culture would also have to prove itself. For this reason, the work in the show had to be able to engage its audience at an immediate level before anything else, to be able to present a clear opening to its audience on how it is to be approached. The result gave an indication of the possibility of a how a different kind of art event could be made to work.

To answer the problem of how to find an audience for electronic art we have to recognize the fact that such media derives its "mode of address" from many elements of popular media and entertainments rather than those defined within the usual art formats. For non-art audiences that are familiar with technological media through their regular pastimes, its status as art is not problematized in the sense of opposing it to commercial artifacts they are all part of the same media landscape. This can provide them with a route into "serious" or otherwise provocative pieces, whose qualities are often obscured for a traditional art audience repelled by their technological implementation associated with "non-serious" popular media. But if both art and media are using the same means and are appealing to similar audiences, then how do they now differentiate themselves?

Apart from the academic events and the trade show, there were two other exhibitions at SIGGRAPH apart from Machine Culture--Designing Technology and Tomorrow's Realities, of which the latter was an exhibition of new interactive media technologies. The theme of Machine Culture was interactive media as well, in particular the exploration of innovations in interactivity as artistic projects presumably in such a way as to overcome the content/technology dichotomy. Tomorrow's Realities had in its stated remit to address "social, economic, cultural and political implications" (although how it intended to accomplish this gargantuan task was not clear), and Machine Culture's main aim was to explore the "nature of interaction and the interactive interface." There was a sliding scale between the corporate research groups of Tomorrow's Realities with their networked flight simulators and the lone artists with their idiosyncratic installations, and this was reflected by the lack of demarcation between exhibition spaces. Both Tomorrow's Realities and Machine Culture exhibited single independent producers with conceptually multi-layered pieces, but Machine Culture just had more of them. Many of Tomorrow's Realities exhibitors regretted not being accepted for Machine Culture, the implication being that they desired the certain status that they perceived the art show could bestow upon them. But due to the interchangeability of some of the works, the most significant difference between the two shows was the change of context in which the Machine Culture works were to be encountered. It is true that some artists were primarily presenting systems that were designed for future commercial markets. Sometimes this is just because the custom built systems they need are not already available domestically. But for those whose work is ultimately transferable to a standard commercial platform these are irresistible temptations that fuel their future ambitions. In this way some artist's work assumes the role of "blue-sky" research just waiting for the right sponsor to reach its full fruition.

In Machine Culture then, the artist appears resolutely as the "maverick" researcher that artist Jim Pomeroy once asserted, a bit like a contemporary figure to replace the lone scientist struggling to perfect his invention that was such an important part of prewar science fiction. But is this artist a true gunfighter living on both sides of the law or merely a forced outsider just waiting for the day when his or her work will be noticed, and rewarded with a corporate research consultancy? Some are eager to be recuperated into the commercial mainstream, flattered by the acceptance of their ideas by the industrial and scientific establishment. Others stay with the traditional avant-garde role of the artist as an oblique commentator through the technology they employ, accepting their function to produce work for the discursive spaces allotted to them by the art-world. And for others still, their efforts will find a place operating in the new cultural spaces opened up by their choice of media, from the rock concert scale performances of Survival Research Labs to an audience composed of uncountable nodes in a network designed to distribute multi-layered documents growing in virtual spaces. But for most it will probably be a little of all of these as their lives become a process of continual negotiation for opportunities and identities.

After visiting the stalls of the industry floor to examine newly released products, after listening to presentations of the latest research directions and viewing numerous commercial showreels, attendees would trace their way through Tomorrow's Realities and Designing Technology to Machine Culture,where they would recognize much of the same devices and techniques they had just been evaluating but now used for very different purposes. The effect was to change the perspective of both industry and arts attendees, to see a media arts practice as situated between the realms of commerce, science, and popular culture. Visitors would queue up to "have a go on" the exhibits, their approach derived from a background of gaming pursuits rather than the art museum. Nonetheless, the difference between exploring the cultural implications and aesthetics of interactive techniques themselves, and the value of making a coherent narrative or personal statement was still clear when compared with the intentions of the Tomorrow's Realities exhibits. With the help of just a few meters of heavy black drapes, partitions were created in which electronic sculptures like the swaying tubes of Louis-Philippe Demers and Bill Vorn's Espace Vectoriel could sing and flay about to the fascination of audiences. At the other end of the room was a restaging of Agnes Hegedus's Handsight, a quieter piece about the eye's penetration into symbolic spaces which survived and indeed thrived in the manic activity on the SIGGRAPH floor, almost by its very contrast. Even very whimsical pieces like the Australian Ian Haig's Hack installation (an attempt to "hack" together elements drawn from popular games, comic books and video art) made it apparent how far both computer conferences and art exhibitions fall short in reminding us of the stimulus that electronic media receives from popular cultural forms.

Can "serious" issues still be addressed in this kind of environment? If by "serious" we mean the pursuit of certain specialized aesthetics, then the answer is probably "no." A demanding long term reading of a work like Grahame Weinbren's interactive cinema installations would not be possible in a space like this, especially in the open plan unpartitioned areas of the show. Works that came from a more video arts background like Victoria Vesna's Another Day in Paradise suffered from the continual interruptions and swarms of people. But if by "serious" we mean capable of prompting just some kind of critical reflection, then it would seem that the answer is a conditional "yes." Certainly even just the juxtaposition of works by artists with works for industrial applications in other parts of the conference proved able to provide an enlightening context for their themes. By comparing the approaches taken by these independents when building their own media, one is more able to decipher the concerns and implications behind the development of more commercial products, and where their intentions might converge as they have done in the past. Otherwise this show was evidence that an unusually wide range of art works can prosper when they are released from the captive safety of the gallery into a traditionally hostile environment.

[MFJ ordering] [MFJ Special Ordering] As well as its vulgar derivations from commercial mass media, a constant impediment to a regular art world's appreciation of electronic art is the level of technological literacy associated with it. Although it is naively assumed that the "content" of a work can be apprehended independently of its embodiment, the mysterious functioning of digital processes cannot be prevented from growing into a barrier of bewilderment and alienation for the uninitiated. It was no doubt this that accounted for some of the reluctance of the invited critics and curators to engage with the work in a receptive frame of mind. As if to caricature this condition, one of the most popular exhibits at MONTAGE 93, was Persistence of Vision by Gregory Barsamian, which returned the visitor to a fun fair side-show encounter with new media. In a disarmingly low-tech set up, Barsamian used a sequence of plaster models of objects in different stages of metamorphosis, slowly rotating and illuminated by strobe lights in order to produce a Zoetrope illusion of movement. The squirming lizards perpetually breaking out of eggs, hands scooping sand out of books and angels turning into helicopters and back again provoked a reaction of innocent awe in its spectators. This awe was all the more potent for the fact that the technical devices that produced it were so obvious and unsophisticated, thereby side-stepping the feeling of enforced ignorance experienced by some when confronted with the latest abilities of computer media.

In Persistence of Vision, prior knowledge of the medium does not de-simulate the event and the piece retains its magic. In similar works like the computer phrenakistiscopes of Toshio Iwai the technology is less accessible, but this is compensated for by their immediate toy-like appeal. This example gives us an idea of what the experience of computer media should be like in a world of comparable computer literacy to make the technology transparent, or if not then at least the humility needed to negate the feeling of technological incomprehension. For some cultural thinkers, the willingness to adopt Eisenstein's "childlike primitiveness" and acceptance of things at face value means an infantilization rather than an ability to give ones self up to the play, exploration and openness that the high art museums always claimed a brutish public dieting on mass media would never have the sensitivity to develop. For others, the humility to accept what they do not understand means an abandonment of critical faculties. But no one person can "master" the technology now employed to create so many diverse systems and devices (this would be a hopelessly totalitarian task). Instead, for many critics and curators, the reluctance to enter a partial dialogue which they cannot dominate becomes an excuse not to enter the dialogue at all.

DOOM but Not Gloom
In Woody Allen's Manhattan Murder Mystery there is a scene where he and his wife Diane Keaton are leaving the Lincoln opera house before the end of the performance. Woody explains "I don't like to listen to too much Wagner I keep getting the urge to invade Poland." This kind of logic has much in common with frequent reactions to the effects of excessive violence in movies, TV, comics, and now computer games. The software house producing the most extreme examples of the genre of bloodthirsty shoot-em-ups is id Software, and their latest release Doom is quite exceptional in the lengths it goes to in order to put you into the most visceral situations. Id's first game in this series was Escape from Wolfenstein, released last year, which centered on an escaped POW running around a Nazi castle and shooting everything that moved. The most striking thing about it was the level of sophistication of the graphics very interactive, a strong 3D illusion, lots of graphic details and completely over-the-top violence (Nintendo made id tone down the version that it produced for their games consoles). But Doom actually goes an order of magnitude higher than this in reaching new degrees of realism and interactive simulation. The aim of the game is apparently straightforward, simply a question of shooting your way through each level while being chased by an assortment of half human soldiers, demons, and monsters "You're toast if you get too close to these monstrosities." The excuse for a story is that you are a "tough marine" of the future, sent to Phobos to rescue the moon base from something nasty that has been transported during their experiments in inter-dimensional space travel. "Just a few days ago you were probably swapping war stories with one of these guys. Now its time to swap some lead upside their heads." This scenario is represented graphically using highly sophisticated texture mapping techniques to produce a range of lighting effects, radioactive pools, mountainscapes and interiors from stone dungeons to hi-tech computer display panels. These allow the player to appear to move around both inside and outside the buildings, run up and down staircases, take lifts and jump off walls. The adversaries that you face are also partially intelligent, enabling them to join forces as they pursue you, try to cut you off and ambush you from secret trap doors while the lights are switched off. In some instances they will get caught in their own crossfire, resulting in them taking time off to attack each other.

Doom uses a first person viewpoint, the view on the screen is what the protagonist would see and it changes to mimic walking, turning or running a "virtual reality" interface without the goggles. Sticking out of the front of the screen is one of a number of weapons that the player can acquire, and the action of firing is portrayed in remarkable detail with blasts, impact explosions and smoke. The result of actually hitting one of your enemies is even more dramatic, involving bodies flying, blood splattering and screaming noises, in some cases bodies completely exploding into charred husks. "Chainguns direct heavy firepower into your opponent, making him do the chaingun cha-cha." The violence is hyped up relentlessly, the player is exhorted at every turn to get stuck in and start blasting away, and it is highly addictive. In an interview in a recent issue of Edge (the coffee-table computer games magazine), id software's technical director John Carmack describes Doom as a graphics system looking for a game."We designed the user interaction and display technology to be as cool as possible, then worked a game around it . . . Doom is just a killer environment with no pretensions of having a real story." Although described as an "action oriented slugathon," this does not give a clear idea of the attraction of playing the game. The driving motivation for the player is not a simple blood lust, nor even a primitive expression of law-of-the-jungle self-preservation. Because Doom is not really a battle simulation, but a cinema simulation, specifically a simulation of body-count cyberpunk movies like Robocop, Total Recall and Aliens. The real thrill of playing Doom is roaming around the bizarre scenery of the futuristic moon base, noting the changes in mood as you travel from a flickering computer control room down corridors to a mouldy dungeon surrounded by shimmering pools of radioactive waste. To pass through some doorways you need to find color coded keys. At other times badly needed ammunition lies hidden behind secret doors. The mechanics of locating a secret door do not really require a surfeit of brains, however, just a matter of approaching every wall and pressing the "open" button until one responds. The real point is the tension of searching and exploring the architecture, the same tension one would experience watching a film while waiting for the climax. The greatest satisfaction is in locating a doorway that leads out through a tunnel into an open courtyard, rewarding you with a vista of fractal mountains and an opportunity to view the building from a new vantage point. The feeling when edging around corners or stumbling upon a room full of demons is one of surprise and the excitement of disorientation rather than the exercise of a trigger-happy "killer instinct."

All id's games come with a full music soundtrack as well as the sound effect punctuation. This enormously heightens the effect of being actually inside a movie, and enables it to become totally absorbing. Various filmic references are scattered around the game, such as the opportunity to pick up a chainsaw as part of your weapons arsenal, appropriate enough for a games company that is based in Texas. But the strongest experience in playing Doom is the exhilaration of exploring an alien environment which leaves you continuing to run around the corridors long after all the enemies have been disposed of. The violence is so parodied and self-conscious in this Schwarzenegger-simulator that it is not difficult to negate it altogether and to experience the game on other levels.

At the current time, Britain is suffering one of its periodic "moral panics" spearheaded by conservatives who believe that the best way to preserve the nation's moral fibre is to eradicate all references to the contrary. Along with Bulletin Board Services said to "spread child pornography" (always a favorite call to arms), video games have come under attack for their portrayal of horror. The recent controversy over Sega's Night Trap console game has also been joined by many intellectuals and cultural critics in journals and newspapers of the libertarian left who now feel that sex and violence in video games represent a menace to the appreciation of serious culture. Although Night Trap is portrayed as a stalk-and-slash scenario in which young girls in nighties are molested by alien monsters, the main contention is that the game pioneered the use of live video clips for graphic realism. This development implied for many left critics a more serious influence on young minds, especially its perceived victimization of hapless women and fascistic blood lust. In fact, if many of the critics had actually seen the game they would have discovered that the female characters were far from helpless and that the level of exploitation was no greater than an episode of Lost in Space. But of course, many cultural critics do not like games, preferring to side with reactionary parties who relegate them to the status of the junk culture that serves to make their own cultural interests appear that much more edifying. Computer games do not attract the support of those who so vehemently oppose the introduction of more draconian film censorship for example, for, as everyone knows, film has the status of Art. Apart from an astonishingly naive understanding of how electronic texts function, it seems that the main contribution of intellectuals to the development of this sphere of video culture will be to discourage the interest of people looking for a new medium in which to develop challenging new ideas so that in the future they can complain about any lack of serious intent even more. But fortunately the influence of such concerned individuals is in conflict, especially as an involvement with some form of electronic media is becoming the only way that the arts establishment can maintain its currency in a society where visual literacy and cultural skills will, in the future, be developed primarily in a haze of phosphor radiation.

In the Ocean of Streams of Story

In the Ocean of Streams of Story
Grahame Weinbren
Printed in MFJ No. 28 (Spring 1995): Interactivities
It is easy to read the nostalgic tone of Rushdie's 1990 "children's story" as the wish for a return to innocence, to a state of story-telling purity beyond the reaches of politics and intrigue. Rushdie is, of course, too sophisticated--and too embittered by the outrageous circumstances of his life--to profess such an outlook, and Haroun and the Sea of Stories abounds with metaphors of cruel suppression and mindless censorship. The nostalgia in the image of the Sea of Stories is better seen as a reminder of the creative process a writer craves in his or her darkest pessimism: an ocean of stories, wide and deep, effortlessly tapped. The power of the image is in its erasure of the line between writer and reader--Haroun's father, as a professional storyteller, need only drink from his personal faucet plumbed to the Ocean and report to his audience: this alone constitutes writing.

Can the image be turned around? Can we imagine the Ocean as a source primarily for readers rather than writers? Could there be a "story space" (to use Michael Joyce's resonant expression) like the Ocean, in which a reader might take a dip, encountering stories and story-segments as he or she flipped and dived? In these waters, turbulences created by the swimmer's own motion might cause an intermingling of the Streams of Story; the Ocean is a dynamic narrative region, a Heraclitean river into which one could never step twice, a lake of Heisenbergian uncertainty where the very attempt to examine a particular story-stream transforms it. What a goal to create such an Ocean! And how suitable an ideal for an interactive fiction!

Fiction, Cinema and Cybernetics
The idea of interactive fiction is not new. A fictional structure on which the reader, viewer, or user can impact has attracted writers since the 19th century, but such authors as Bram Stoker and Laurence Sterne had to use literary devices to give the illusion of a textual variability. Interactivity describes a relationship between viewer and work: interactive works do not require a particular presentation medium or technological base. In attempting to develop an interactive narrative cinema, I realized early that it will not have the shape of narrative as we have understood it--the very idea of user impact opens to question the concepts of end and beginning, of crisis and conflict, of development itself. The traditional (Aristotelian) notion of narrative must be rethought.

My own work is in the pull of a pair of forces that have defined the late twentieth century--the Cinema and Cybernetics, the Projector and the Computer. I have made two installations that incorporate computers and moving images that I call works of interactive cinema. In both Sonata and The Erl King the participant's (inter-)actions affect the temporal conglomerate of images and sounds. The computer itself is not a medium or a tool, but a device which can be used to control existent media, so the questions that arise are about how cinema changes when its apparatus is linked to a computer--just as one can investigate changes in the structure of cinematic communication when sound was invented.

The first two questions to arise for me in thinking about an interactive cinema can be posed in quite traditional terms: what kind of story will fit the medium, and what will be the grammar of its telling? Early on I realized that one would have to find a subject for which the sequence of events was not of central importance, since if the viewer is to wander around and through the narrative, the order in which the depicted events are accessed would have to be open to variation. And this requirement led me directly to Freud's techniques of dream interpretation.

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A Branching Structure
Freud transcribed and published the case history of the Wolf Man in 1914-15, soon after the end of the patient's analysis. It is the apex of Freud's early period, where the central concepts of condensation, displacement, wish fulfillment, the primal scene, etc., reach their full fruition, never to be repeated in quite the same way.

The analysis revolves around the dream image of the staring wolves, introduced early on by the patient. Freud describes the process of gradually uncovering the components of the dream, linking each element with an event, a character, or an emotion remembered but perhaps suppressed. The dream's significance for the dreamer, manifested in the overwhelming emotional effect it had on him and the fact that it remained in his memory for decades, led Freud to seek further explanation. He finally accounts for this power in his proposal that the dream encapsulates the dreamer's greatest fears and desires, as transformed memories of the events that first produced them. For my purposes the details (and--it goes without saying--the `truth') of the dream-analysis are not important. I wish only to appropriate certain aspects of Freud's methodology in my own search for a paradigmatic story structure suitable for an interactive cinema.

Condensation is the key concept. The dream is formed by compressing and combining a set of mental entities. The dream can function in the dreamer's mental framework as the distillation of a set of emotional charges. The dream's powerful affect comes from the fact that, in an important sense, it embodies a set of memories and the specific emotions linked with them. Repeatedly Freud stresses that there is no universal symbol translation table--every element of the dream image, and every property of every element, is understood by the dreamer in his own individual way. Each element substantiates a combination of particular fears, hopes, desires or beliefs, transformed, by the laws of the unconscious, into a component of the dream image. Seeing the images through the dreamer's eyes--identifying the underlying atomic parts and understanding how they are altered by the dreamer's mental process into the dream image--is understanding the dream. In this understanding is written a page or several chapters of the biography of the dreamer.

Freud's notion of a dream is a conception of a narrative-type based on a hermeneutic method. Unraveling a dream reveals the narrative of the dreamer's interlocking emotional states. But it is not a narrative that unfolds in time--all the elements are simultaneously present. Freud goes to great trouble to convey this atemporality, but even for him it is a notion that eludes expression, since, after all, his own mode of communication--writing--is, of necessity, linear, one word following another, forming paragraphs that follow one another, etc., while his conception of the dreamwork is, by its very nature, non-linear, unsuited to the writing forms of the early 20th century.

Considered as a narrative structure, the underlying elements of the dream can be revealed in any order whatsoever, and the same story will emerge. Thus, it is truly a narrative without specificity of sequence.

The Interpretation of Dreams
A film might try to approximate the structure of Freudian dream analysis in a story structure that step by step unraveled the components of an evocative image. However, the linearity of cinema sequence tends to freeze material into narrative hierarchies, one element gaining in significance while another loses, depending on each one's context and their overall order. How better to reproduce the minimal significance of sequence, the irrelevance of order, than through interactivity? For only in an interactive work can the sequence of events be determined by the viewer. And when the viewer becomes aware that sequence is determined by his, by her responses alone, sequence may already have stopped being a criterion of narrative significance. In normal cinematic circumstances, the weight of an event is given largely by its context: now, with sequence under the control of the viewer, this weight can lighten or even dissolve. And in these circumstances the viewer's understanding of the events of the narrative can undergo a radical transformation, based entirely on the knowledge that things could have been different. Later in this paper I shall make an attempt at describing the "subjunctive" state of mind evoked by the interactive cinema.

The elements associated with a particular dream-image are not by themselves sufficient to define the biographical narrative underlying the dream. This would be a gross oversimplification. Of course it is also essential to incorporate how the elements are transformed and combined into the dream. Often this syntax and its application can be expressed only verbally. It is difficult, for example, to imagine an effective visual expression of the transformation of something into its opposite (from "staring" to "being stared at," or from the ornate motions of sexual intercourse to the stillness of the white wolves), or the transfer of a particular quality from one object to another (as the color white is lifted from sheep and flour and attributed to the wolves). Freud's interpretation of the dream is far more than a simple compacting of memory-images into one conglomerate: the grammar of the image-elements' metamorphoses and rearrangements is as significant as the elements themselves.

I am not suggesting that the principles of condensation and displacement could not form a foundation of a visual narrative, but only that some depiction of the types of transformation will have to be incorporated alongside the results of the transformations. The point, to reiterate, is to develop a type of narrative that can retain its identity and make sense independent of the sequence of events. Thus, in Sonata, I found that I needed to make the formative elements of the dream into components of the dream-narrative--without them it became merely a collection of scenes connected only by association.

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Desire
Cinema, of course, cannot be internally affected by its viewers. Turning one's head, far from affecting the visual experience, removes one from its world and into the mundane space of the screening room. The chess pieces and french fries on screen will only yield to forces that are profilmic, within the diegesis, or (commonly) both.

Furthermore, the impossibility of impacting on the cinematic is one of the sources of our pleasure in it. "Don't go up(/down) the stairs!" we inwardly cry out while watching Hitchcock's Psycho, first to the private detective Arbogast, and later to the heroine Lila Crane, all the time knowing that however deeply felt, our distress will not influence their behavior. The experience of suspense would be fatally distorted by the elimination of inevitability in the characters' actions. If Lila could turn back because of our pleas, the entire effect of the horror film would dissolve. Much of cinema's power over us is our lack of power over it, and, in this sense, suspense is a paradigm of cinematic response. It could be argued that the introduction of viewer impact on the representation is a destructive step for the cinema. The removal of the possibility of suspense is the removal of desire from the cinematic, and, ultimately, the removal of the very fascination of the medium.

To find interactive forms in which desire can be sustained will require the construction of a new cinematic grammar. And, to be successful, this search, this construction-process, must foreground that aspect of cinematic communication that is fundamentally a grammar of temporality.

Time. Time. Time.
Time always moves relentlessly, tautologically, forward, as long as one is alive. "Real," clock-measurable time can always be distinguished from time subjectively felt. The real time of cinema is rigidly defined by the apparatus, fully predetermined by the physical substrate of images projected serially at a regular pace set by an electric motor. A film begins and ends necessarily and predictably. Relative to the beginning, the end is dependent on, and only on, the length of the filmstrip. Whatever its images, however they are organized, a film has a physical beginning, middle, and end. Whether and how this linear temporality structures the image-material in a particular film is a major issue (perhaps the major issue) for a filmmaker. It could even be argued that the stance taken by a filmmaker towards temporal structure, how time is articulated in a particular film, is an index of where in the spectrum of cinematic practice (from Hollywood to Avant Garde) a given work falls.

This gives us the first sense of cinematic time--it can be called Screen Time: the clock-time required for the filmstrip to run through the projection apparatus.

The second sense of time is that of the world depicted in the film--and here the limits are more or less the cinema of story-telling, and its Diegetic Time. A cinema narrative may jump forward, eliminating decades (or centuries) in a single cut; or slide back, using perhaps one of the various narrative strategies that fall under the category of flashback; or remain in the present, so that a given passage of film denotes a continuous passage of time. This latter case (the most frequently used) still allows for a broad range of variation: one continuous two minute portion of a story can occupy five minutes of screen time, while the next portion compresses seven years into as many seconds.

Meanwhile...

Experienced Time. Detective Arbogast's walk up the stairs seems painfully extended, so that his stabbing at the first landing is a dreadful shock; this prepares us for Lila's later descent into the basement, which stretches time even further as each step seems to last a full minute, for we now (rightly) expect the worst to be waiting for her. On another end of the scale, a contemporary action film can make us feel as if no time passes during its 100 minutes, while in another discourse entirely, a film like Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1968) insists on equating real and depicted time, a position transformed into an ideology in the 1970s by such filmmakers as Peter Gidal. The relationship of film grammar, plot, and the experience of time is a fertile area of study, especially since the compression of time is undoubtedly one of the major determinants of cinema's phenomenal success.

The question is: what happens to cinematic time when viewer input becomes a component of the screen amalgam? To what extent does the incorporation of viewer impact keep time real, canceling out the magnetism of cinema itself--when does it cease to be cinema and become "multimedia" in its drab information-delivery costume, the slick transmission of data in fields of "hot spots," "buttons," and point-and-click menus?

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The Kuleshov Effect
The temporal grammar of classical film continuity can be summed up in a single example, which, like much mythology of cinema, is described more often than seen. The "Kuleshov Effect" scenario consists of a close- up of a Russian actor, intercut with several emotion-laden images (a dead woman in a coffin, a child playing, a bowl of soup). This supposedly produces in the audience a sense of the actor's face as saturated with appropriate emotion. But more interesting than this (presumably a commentary on the actor's ambiguous, doleful expression) is the idea, taken as "obvious and certain" by Pudovkin, that the character is seen to be "looking at the soup"--the man and the soup are linked, across the cut, into a single continuous space. Of course it cannot be as simple as this, as the sense of continuous space requires the support of a number of factors such as eye-line, lighting, shadow direction, etc.--but the point is clear. I'll suggest a recasting of this fable later in this paper. Here I introduce it only to restate the familiar homily that in cinema spatial unification is easily maintained through temporal disruptions, given a particular sequence. Sequence determines space. And sequence logically requires time.

The Liberation of the Filmstrip
A standard linear unit of cinema has an A-B-A structure: e.g., the Kuleshov point-of-view cutaway, the shot-reverse-shot of a dialogue scene, or the performer-audience-performer of the Musical. This atomic structure defines continuity of time and space in the cinema.

The equivalent in my interactive cinema is formed by a sequence in which the middle term is produced by an action of the viewer. If the viewer does not act, the first shot continues. But on action by the spectator the B-shot appears, then, after an appropriate period, the A-shot reappears, perhaps transformed by the interspersed shot, perhaps unchanged. In Sonata this structure is used as a bridge to an alternative point of view (for example of another fictional character, or of the author); as a jump to an earlier (or later) time in the story; as a glance at a different depiction of the narrative situation (e.g., a classical painting of the Judith and Holofernes theme rather than its continuing narration by a story-teller); or the momentary introduction of a parallel narrative line. Does the sequence still denote a continuity of space and/or time? The interpretive mode the viewer takes toward the new material is associative. Because the new image or scene was produced, i.e., brought on screen, by the viewer, he is forced into connecting to the image it replaces--an act of association, rather than spatio-temporal suturing. In Sonata this act is reinforced by two strategies:

1. the automatic return to the previous image, so that it seems that the image produced by the viewer interaction is a temporary interruption of a continuing logic;

2. audio continuity: the sound from the first image continues through the interruption, which reinforces the impression that the viewer's actions are disturbing the natural flow, thus demanding that a sense be made of the new complex.

In the environment created by this structure, Screen Time becomes variable, not fixed. Though the plot of the unfolding narrative is not affected by the viewer's interactions, the screen can now contain multiple diegetic times simultaneously, and the viewer quickly becomes accustomed to navigating between them.

Experienced Time, on the other hand, becomes open and indeterminate. At one extreme the viewer can find himself in the extended time-instant of the computer hacker or videogame player compulsively acting on the screen image. It is this semi-hypnotic state that allows the computer programmer to spend twenty-four hours at a stretch in front of a CRT, "jacked in" as the novelist William Gibson puts it. In his fiction Gibson often compares the state to that produced by imagined mind-altering drugs of the future. In this mental condition, the user's impact on the screen output is paramount, while awareness of content and interpretive distance are subordinated to action. Videogames and virtual reality environments are often designed to stimulate this condition--the content is minimal and ancillary to the actions of the user, which are immediate and powerful, either floridly destructive requiring hand-eye coordination, or effortlessly navigational: and most often a combination of the two. Unlike a virtual reality environment or videogame, however, changes in interactive cinema are driven by content, and consequently compulsiveness will not be the overriding ingredient of the mental state of the viewer. Here the need for evaluation, interpretation and understanding are in the foreground, though the obsessive need to fully explore the narrative space can serve well as an incentive and accompaniment.

Freed from the predicament where the apparatus alone dictates the temporal experience, time can now expand or contract based on the extent of the viewer's involvement or attention, no longer only because of the hills, gullies, and plateaus, the changes in elevation of the plot. One can imagine the user of an interactive cinema surfing between compulsive input, loss of self in the flow of the narrative, and a sense of distance and control of his own experience of time, as the tides of the story ebb and flow based on his own actions on and in it.

The notion of suspense, for example, can be retained but transformed. If the viewer identifies with a character, seeing him as transfixed with horror at one moment, overcome with relief at the next, there may be some hesitation about accessing the cause of his distress. Now a new emotional affect, begins to emerge. "Don't look behind the door!" we inwardly cry--but now whether the character opens the cellar door is determined by us, and the vacillation, the hesitation, related to a particular experience of suspense, will put the viewer, unexpectedly, in a different grip of the screen. The new pull is a hook of agency--whether we have to face the horror that we fear and are fascinated by is now our decision, and in an effective work we will be equally compelled in both directions.

Then What Can the Interactive Cinema Depict?
Our worlds are disorderly and disorganized, unrestricted and loose. Strands of perception and inner experience are interwoven with actions that impact on our immediate environment, causing change in our perceptions and generating new experiences. Time advances relentlessly while our consciousness staggers in and out of it--memories of the past intermingling with hopes for the future as we react to events of the present. Lived experience does not parcel itself into linear, closed structures, though we sometimes represent things in that way in order to tell stories about ourselves. But autobiographies, like all narratives based on fact, are always at most distortions and at least abbreviations, omitting many events while inflating others. A complete recounting of the most minor experience (including the mental activity that accompanied it) would last much longer than the experience itself. We compress, excerpt, exclude, and reorganize when we tell stories about ourselves; we must dramatize and deform the facts to fit them into a plotted "story-line" with an ending that provides satisfactory closure. If the interactive cinema is a more faithful rendering of reality, it is precisely because it can bypass some of these criteria of narrative structure. Intermixing and interweaving multiple narrative streams, it can create a metanarrative sum that is greater than its component parts, if the subject- matter is a match for the potential of the medium. What would be an appropriate model for the subject-matter? The ideal is the human mind in operation.

We are multi-tasking units. We can whistle and daydream while working, fantasize while having sex, speak the English translation while listening to the German, and so on. And we can switch from one mental activity--one state, one condition--to another, instantly and without effort. It is easy and natural for most people to keep many thoughts and perceptions simultaneously active in their minds, transferring from one to the next at will, so that their current inner experience is a conglomeration of perceptions of the present, memories of the past, hopes for and guesses about the future, along with beliefs and fears independent of time markers, dreams, imaginings, pains, etc. Each mental element forms an undercurrent in what is happily called the "stream of consciousness," and navigating these waters is part of what it is to be human. Rushdie's Ocean can be heard in these shells.

How do we move from one mental entity to the next? One thing is certain: it is nothing like making a selection from a list. The "menu" model incorporated in contemporary computer software is aptly named--using it is like negotiating a path through a meal at a fast food restaurant. Switching between streams of mental activity involves responding to hardly perceptible internal and external cues, much as one rides a bicycle around obstacles, keeping balance by slight shifts in position, changing direction by combining such shifts with handlebar adjustments and greater weight adjustments. Except in the least significant cases, we affect things in our lives not by making choices, but by actively responding to situations--with speech acts or in behavior, and equally by silence or inaction. Only in restaurants or department stores are we faced with a closed list of alternatives. The interface of an interactive cinema cannot restrict itself to a model of choice, though this does not mean that choice is entirely banned. Response is the operative concept.

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Open Issues: What Isn't the Interactive Cinema?
To summarize the story so far: the interactive narrative will be in the form of a story space (again the terminology of Michael Joyce and Jay Bolter) laid out for exploration. This story space may consist of a number of related narratives that the viewer forges or discovers links between, or of a single narrative seen from various viewpoints (e.g., of different characters). It may be the breakdown of a particular situation or image or scene into its (non-hierarchical) historical or constitutive elements.

But it will not be a linear story where viewer input determines what-happens-next. Such a structure does not contribute to the notion of interactive form since everything that appears will remain within the limitations of the linear--the fact that he has selected which line the story takes is irrelevant. This particular structure becomes interesting only when the viewer is exposed to different hypothetical situations, so that she can see what would happen if the characters took this turn, that path. Only in this case might the overall experience of the piece retain the quality of a story space of multiple narratives simultaneously present for exploration.

To put this point more generally, registering response alone will not satisfy the requirement that the interactive cinema incorporate the interest or desire of the spectator.

The basis of the interactive cinema is that the viewer has some control over what is on-screen. He or She knows that what is there will change if she or he acts, that it would have been different if he or she had acted differently earlier. Thus, the viewer is aware of a fundamental indeterminacy. I have called this epistemological state a subjunctive relationship to the screen--the viewer is constantly aware that things could have been otherwise. This state is grounded in the viewer's continual knowledge that what is on screen is a result of her interactions--inaction, naturally, counting as decisively as action.

The subjunctive mental state is in direct opposition to the epistemology I identified as essential to the linear cinema, a conception of the screen complex as unalterable, the events in the diegesis as inevitable. In an advanced interactive cinema, everything will be in flux, open to the possibility of change--like conversation or competitive sports--and the more sophisticated the system, the more fluid and wide-ranging the possibilities. Awareness of this liquidity has radical consequences for a viewer's relationship to the cinematic material. In terms of the Lyrical, the exploration of a single image-moment and its underlying expression-set, the success of a work of interactive cinema depends on its viewer's recognition that behind each element of the screen- complex there is a potential set of cinematic data that supports it, accounts for it, enriches it, or explains it.

There is another factor too: the viewer must be kept always aware that it is his, her action on a particular image that has produced these new sounds or pictures, and techniques to foster this awareness must be developed. In my judgment, the most immediately available techniques can be found in the language of montage. A deliberate use of film editing strategies can keep reconvincing the viewer of the non-arbitrariness of connection between old and new elements, between the elements already there and those produced by viewer action. Once the interactive work has brought the viewer to the idea that his actions on the screen complex always contribute to the continuing significance of the work, then the associations can roam more freely than in the city zoo of conventional narrative film. Now the fact that the viewer feels that he produces the new elements predisposes him towards finding links, associations, connections that may not have operated in his response to a conventional cinematic work.

Back to the Ocean
So now we have two models of potential structure for an interactive cinema: one drawn from a classical text by the father of psychoanalysis, the other from an introspective view of the mind at work. There are many literary precedents for both models. Furthermore, a number of current works of fiction have forms that eminently suit the notion of an interactive cinema, either in that they involve the unpacking of a given image or scene into its underlying components-- Graham Swift's Waterland provides several excellent instances--or that their narrative consists of the meeting point of a number of interrelated themes-- John Barth's Tidewater Tales and his masterful The Story of Somebody the Sailor are two outstanding examples.

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Tying Up & Getting Out
There are still, there will always be, loose ends. Given that narrative is imposition of order on chaos, intrusion of form on the formless, and that the order, the form, the logic narrative imposes is of time and sequence, sequence in time, we must now ask again whether we can retain narrative when we abandon endings, when we are entangled in an endless middle. A catchphrase often used by theorists to describe narrative is "the illusion of sequence," but in Freud's conception of dream interpretation we can see how strict sequence can be abandoned without losing the narrative thread. Freud's understanding of dream-structure is an alternative to the Aristotelian model, not only because the components can appear in any order, but also because the story is never over, the analysis is always incomplete, there are always more biographical details to uncover. In an Interactive Cinema, where the desire for closure can also be more or less overcome, the viewer continues to explore the narrative space until he considers it exhausted. There is no totality, there is only withdrawal.

And yet. And yet.

However.

Butbutbut.

Real Timecannot be trashed with the need for closure like potato peel or an old jalopy. There is, there always will be, a Beginning, an End to a viewer's exposure to an Interactive Cinema work, and a Time Between. She walks up to the device, she interacts with it, she walks away. He walks up, sits down, stays a while, gets up. Do we place a viewer with an interactive work until it starts to repeat on him like rote learning or yesterday's overspiced entree? The Interactive Cinema will succeed only if, in retrospect, the experience seems substantial.

All and any loose narrative ends will never be knotted; this is one of the features (i.e., not bugs) of interactive cinema. If a viewer navigates through a mass of material, some of it will be seen and some won't, and surely some of what isn't seen earlier will raise issues that remain unresolved in what is seen later. But a system can be sensitized to repetition, either so as to avoid it, or so that as soon as repetition starts the viewer is offered the opportunity to enter a structurally different region, a territory of culmination or summary. In general terms, a map of territory covered can be kept by the system, and once a certain area has been explored, closure possibilities can be introduced.

In The Erl King, after certain segments have been repeated, a box with the work "END?" appears on the screen. If this box is touched, it produces a mildly interactive segment that starts with images of a few key production crew members touching the inside of the video screen from within the monitor, followed by a rapid series of production stills. A viewer can switch on or off two cardinal theoretical texts overlays--texts by Wittgenstein and Baudrillard that describe something of the theoretical underpinnings of the work--by touching different areas of the screen.

Sonata reserves two narrative segments that are acknowledged and indicated throughout the piece. If the viewer perseveres, following a story through to one of its climactic moments, the reward will be one of the two culminating murder scenes, one decorated with the blooming image of a blood-fountain, the other with the voluptuous sounds of a blade severing flesh and splintering bone. The possibility of viewing these scenes emerges when the viewer has covered a certain amount of the narrative ground of the piece. And after the murder the work ends or, more precisely, returns to the beginning.

All this is to say that despite its need for an opened narrative, closure cannot be banished from the Interactive Cinema. Remove the imminence of closure and we begin to drain cinema of desire. Closure must be recast in a more radical light.

The most fruitful possibility for me at this point, based on my interest in multiplying and intermingling narratives, is that several story lines continue until one, some, or all of them end. Here the idea is that numerous Diegetic Times are constantly flowing forward, many narratives operating in time simultaneously whether or not the viewer encounters any particular one. Narrative Time in this model always moves inflexibly on. This provides another picture of a form for the Interactive Fiction Cinema, a picture of multiple narrative streams not interconnected by a central image, theme or scene. The viewer navigates from one current to an adjacent one in a constantly flowing river, crossing between streams of story at moments of similarity or juncture. Or, to descend one level more, they might rather be thought of as potential narrative streams, elements themselves unformed or chaotic, but taking form as they intersect, gaining meaning in relation to one another.

In Sonata I attempt this by juxtaposing the stories of Podsnyeshev (the anti-hero wife-killer in Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata) and Judith (the Apocryphal heroine who decapitated the enemy general Holofernes). Both narratives progress, but it is at their connections, where the viewer can cross from one to the other, that they come into focus and take on meaning. A viewer will access an episode of one or the other narrative but not both, and their forms are similar enough that their plot movement can be seen as concurrent. Each of the two killers--Podsnyeshev and Judith--is reflected in the light of the other, since each emerges out of the story context of the other. And thus an act of interpretation is forced on the viewer: the morality of each character comes into question when they are placed together, especially because the former is presented as Evil and the latter as Good.

Without the act of interpretation, the stories are raw and problematic, but when clashed together at the points of interaction, a judge's role is forced on the viewer. As Eisenstein recognized explicitly, Griffith at least implicitly, and Kuleshov claimed as his own, meaning in cinema is determined by context--in the multiple narrative interactive cinema, context is in constant flux, the elements appearing always different as their surroundings shift.

As the viewer is drawn in by the act of interpretation, now the magnetic attraction of the Interactive Cinema can be felt, and the question of Experienced Time finally answered; for it is here that the Hacker mindset takes over--as we jack into Gibson's Cyberspace. Umberto Eco describes the state somewhat more suggestively than Gibson, though Eco is talking about the travels of a steel ball around an electric pinball surface, not a sprite in a graphic representation of a data environment. Parallel to Eco's pinball machine is a game like Tetris, in which the player arranges falling shapes into an unbroken plane, a theatre of geometry and spatial anticipation one often sees played on long airplane flights--as the time sense is held in abeyance, the magnified time of the cramped Atlantic crossing is compressed into a single moment of hypnotic focus. Tetris's hook of involvement is the desire for closure, for the completion of the pattern, an end that is always attainable but just out of reach, like Eco's "brink of orgasm." It is in this space that the machine absorbs time, providing in its place the never-quite-fulfilled promise of consummation.

Ending, Open Ending
Where have we come to? How to provide closure to this document? Must I close it, or can I emphasize its openness, the ends I am leaving loose, the ties unbound?

There is the very central question of what function is left to Narrative in our Cybernetically Determined, Information Laden Era, as we travel along the Information Superhighways without stirring from our desks. Do we still need narrative to provide lessons in living and dying, do these lessons come to us through other channels ... or don't we need such lessons any longer? Then there is the very important and subtle idea, expressed by philosophers in the wake of Heidegger such as Paul Ricoeur, that the conceptual relationship of narrative and time is reversed: that we impose a (false) linearity on time because our stories about ourselves and others, our formation myths of what it is to be human, take shape as linear narratives, and upsetting this notion will change our understanding of temporality and hence our understanding of the world and ourselves.

But I must stop. It is late, my eyes hurt from looking too long at the CRT, and I'm afraid I'm getting the flu.

KISMET, PROTAGONY, AND THE ZAP SPLAT SYNDROME

KISMET, PROTAGONY, AND THE ZAP SPLAT SYNDROME

Malcolm Le Grice

Malcolm leGrice outlines some theoretical concepts for an interactive avant garde cinema
Printed in MFJ No. 28 (Spring 1995) Interactivities
Interactivity in the plastic arts is not new, since the mid-sixties at least, artists have produced electronically and digitally controlled feed-back projects where the actions of the spectators have altered the work in some form or other. It is, however, only recently that there has been a realistic convergence between recorded cinematic sequence, aspects of virtual reality synthesis and sophisticated interactive possibilities. There is a developing practice in this field some of which is aimed at education and training, but also some which is quite clearly artistic in purpose. It is the aim of this paper to take up some of the theoretical issues which must ariseif we are to bring cinema and interactivity together in the context of the creative arts and in the search for artistic forms appropriate to the new opportunities.

Cinema and television art has been overwhelmingly dominated by the form of linear narrative. The presentational structure of cinematic media (film and video tape) has intrinsic characteristics which reinforce this linearity and reinforce the concept of a consequent and singular resolution. One major aspect of presentational linearity is the reel of film or tape itself with the images held in a locked sequence to be seen from beginning to end. The extent to which this linearity of presentation can be broken or interrupted by the viewer is an economic issue which concerns both a financial and a psychological investment. The economics of making and presenting a film establish a major difference between the active production of the work and its passive viewing in cinema or during TV transmission. Home video taping is already a form of interactivity which puts greater opportunity for selection in the hands of the domestic viewer. Though in this example, the choices may seem trivial, the opportunity for the viewer to fast forward sections of little interest, repeat sections of particular interest and, in a more sophisticated sense, study the cinematic construction in detail, puts the viewer in a significantly different psychological position with regard to the work.

Kismet

The predominance of the narrative form in our culture makes it difficult to establish any critical distance allowing narrative to be seen as one particular form of representation rather than a natural and inevitable system. As renaissance perspective is a mode of spatial representation amongst other modes (maps, diagrams, isometric projections or cubist space), so linear narrative is one method by which events in time and their causal relationships may be represented. In this sense narrative form is a representational model; it is a tool by which human-beings grasp and structure their understanding of the world. Whilst being appropriate in certain circumstances it also has shortcomings; it is well suited to representing certain forms of temporal linkage but incapable of modelling others. Its form imposes a philosophical bias (an ideology) on its subject and because of its predominance we are blind to the limits of its truth and level of generality as a representational system.

A fundamental characteristic of the narrative form in cinema is the inevitability of its fictional resolution. The out-come of the plot is pre- determined and the plot carries its primary significance in the relationship of action to the ultimate resolution. The form of a narrative text itself, in the pre-determination of its resolution, is intrinsically fatalistic. The end (as represented in the text) is already determined. Viewers know it is determined when they start watching the film and the events of the film only have their rationale in their contribution to the ultimate consequence. So even in films where the intended representation is of a non-fatalistic world, the representation is in conflict with the intrinsic form of linear narrative and its experience by the viewer. Attempts have been made within classical cinema to break both the linearity and tyranny of the singular consequentiality of narrative form. There are examples of attempts at ambiguity in resolution, alternated resolutions, parallel action, branching detours in the plot or multiple viewpoint in the representation of the fiction but none of these substantially question the structure of linear causal representation.

Protagony

As well as looking at the structure of linear narrative, it is crucial to analyse the characteristic form by which the viewer is involved in traditional cinematic experience. The viewer watches, as if through a window, an action between a group of protagonists. Normally, one or two of these protagonists are central and become the focus of a psychological identification by the viewer. The viewer becomes engaged in the action of the narrative by an imaginary leap into the position of one or other of these depicted characters. The viewer experiences the desires, frustrations, pleasures and satisfaction of these characters in the unfolding of a plot by living through the representation as if they were in the place of the character. However much the viewers may become psychologically engaged they can never truly be protagonists and any experience they may have of being a protagonist through identification is illusory. To be a protagonist there must be a perceivable relationship between action and effect. In other words, an action on the part of the viewer must be able to change the course of events which follow from that action.

The characters within a narrative are represented as taking part in the complex relationship between action and consequence. However, in the conventions of cinema this representation of protagonism is already itself a fiction. The characters - moving photographs of actors - are not creating the consequences they seem to be. They are playing those actions to a set of consequences pre-determined within the script. They are enacting their protagonism. For the viewer then, this added to the identification with the actor, becomes a double illusion of protagonism. Protaganism is twice removed in the determination of the plot - the only protagonism in this sense is in the authorship of the text.

[MFJ ordering] [MFJ Special Ordering] Thus, in the context of digital technologies and the opportunities for artistic approaches to interactivity, I have identified two major issues implicit in the dominant culture of narrative cinema, the linear consequential structure and the condition of the viewer in relation to the work. In the search for alternative approaches which match artistic structure with new technological possibilities, I offer two potentially fruitful sources: the cinematic grammar developed by the experimental cinema (the avant- garde), which has resisted, transformed or created alternatives to linear narrative; and perhaps more surprisingly, the computer game.

The first of these offers an approach to different models of connectivity, temporal structuring and concepts of the relationship between cinematic sequences (as data) and their combination (as programme). The second offers a model in which the viewer becomes a protagonist in a psychologically motivated field. Only the radically experimental cinema has seriously questioned the inexorable linearity of narrative, seeking instead to model a multi-dimensional connectivity within the form of cinema - what Maya Deren described as the vertical rather than horizontal exploration in cinema. Fundamental to this enterprise has been a recognition of the inadequacy of narrative form to represent a philosophical and ideological structure seen by experimental filmmakers to be appropriate to their perceptual experience. This perception has involved many forms of both abstract and representational linkage not susceptible to the structures of linear causality.

Capricorn the ram

In computer technology, the separation of data from its programmed combination or interaction is fundamental. The relationship and connections between instances of data is not fixed. The instances of date retain potential; they may be combined and recombined according to a variety of principles and permutations. In the cinematic context what might be considered an instance of data remains problematic - it is not determinate, it depends on the level at which the analysis (or classified digitization takes place). It can range from the individual pixel of the image, a fragment of digital sound, a single picture, a shot sequence or, most radically, an analytical set of principles on which three dimensional motion audio-graphics might be synthesized. Additionally, it is a matter of creative ingenuity to define the programme structure by which these levels or instances of data may be combined. In the artistic context, whatever principle of the programme or sequence of connectivity between the data is created, it carries with it the implication of signification and a relationship (as model) between the artistic construct and the world on which it reflects (or into which it is placed as an intervention). Its structures have and promote philosophical and ideological positions, they become part of the vocabulary or grammar by which we grasp and understand the world.The flexibility of the relations between data in programmable sequence offered by computers is a consequence of technology offering random access memory to whatever is defined as data. At its most radical, random access memory is wholly non-linear - the structure of access is not governed by the priority established in initial storage but is only subject to a hierarchy of combination determined by the user. At this level, the concept of random access memory, when applied to the audio/visual arena has the potential to radically undermine the linearity of narrative sequence. In practice, in the developing technology of high information storage, where the data is defined as cinematic sequences (shots), aspects of the access remain partially linear (through the rotation of storage discs). At a technical level there is a range of storage media from linear tape (or film) to rapid cross access discs to fully solid state memory. At the level of theory random access memory places instances of data into a structure which may be considered as a matrix (three- or multi-dimensional grid) no longer confining presentational sequence nor connective principle to the conventions of narrative causality. Narrative structure becomes a sub-set of temporal structuring. Experimental cinema as far back as Dziga Vertov's 'Man With The Movie Camera' (1928), and more recently, the work of Kurt Kren, Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage and many others may be read as aspiring to a form of temporal connectivity better represented as a matrix than a line. This experimental approach in cinema, through specific exploration of devices like repetition, partial repetition, permutation and system, pre- figures many of the structural principles inherent in the technology of random access memory. What is more important in the artistic context is that they represent the development of philosophical constructs which constitute more appropriate models for contemporary experience than do those offered by the singular and fatalistic structure of classical narrative.

Zap Splat

It would be difficult to interpret the development of the computer game as led by artistic or philosophical principles. It has been a spontaneous popular development which has sprung directly from the potentialities of the computer. Nonetheless, in certain aspects of the search for forms of audio-visual (cinematic) art, it has initiated - unconsciously - fundamental differences and opportunities. Though interactivity has had some serious applications in the development of educational and simulative training systems, like rock music, the computer game has captured a major popular field of psychological investment and desire. The major characteristics on which this seems to rest are; the exercise of interactivity in a field of high motivation, the establishment of the user as an engaged protagonist, an adequate degree of representational simulation into-which the user may project and the possibility of failing to reach a satisfactory resolution. Let us compare the condition of the user of the computer game with the viewer of a conventional narrative. The factor of interactivity demands a change of vocabulary.

The viewer is now a player. The interactive relationship offers a level and range of control in a data field of sufficient variety to veer their experience very strongly towards that of being an active participant and away from that of passive viewer. Though some games like Street Fighter have the user controlling the actions of a visually represented character (a figure visible within the game), in many instances, like the classic Space Invaders or more sophisticated simulations like Grand Prix or Gunship (a helicopter war simulation), the protagonist is significantly not represented in the visual field. Thus, one aspect of the identification process fundamental to classical narrative cinema is not at work. (Though this is often different in experimental cinema where in many instances there is no visually represented protagonist. In these cases, the film traces the film maker as 'protagonist' and the viewer's identification is with the film maker). In the computer game, the interaction experienced by the user/player is one of direct intervention in the scene. The un-represented player is traced (traces him or herself) through the effects brought about within the game.Clearly the motivation of the player can only be maintained if there isa sufficiently desirable goal to be sought or the results of the interiminteraction are sufficiently satisfying. Or, perhaps more crucially, if theinteraction is sufficiently frustrating, promising later satisfactionthrough the development of greater skill or inteligence. The creator of a game must have a grasp of the motivational objectives of the potential player/user, but must also devise sufficient complexity in the programme to offer a range of both interim and ultimate out-comes.

This requires programming a high degree of intended redundancy (or superfluity) - a range of options either failures, successes or different routes - which may or may not be used during the interaction. This principle of redundancy must also be a major factor in the development of satisfactory artistic uses of such systems. The economical creation of this redundancy would seem to rest heavily on the complexity of the initial analysis of data (and algorithms) for synthesis in the interaction. For example: in a pilot or driving game, if based on a large number of single pictorial screens and picture units (sprites), the various combinations of elements would soon be exhausted. On the other hand, the same game structure based on a three-dimensional mapping of the space and objects, though initially more difficult to achieve retains a much greater potential for variety in the interaction. In these cases, the user can genuinely explore options which may not have been expected or intended by the programmer (like driving the racing car against the traffic, going the wrong way round the track). In developing artistic applications this principle of redundancy is equally crucial as well as an understanding of how its economy depends on the quality and depth of the structural analysis at the basis of the program. In seeking appropriate structures for the application of interactivity to cinema, the structural principles underlying a satisfactory program will need to take on issues of psychological linkage between sequences and a complex understanding of dramatic and abstract relationships beyond the range of linear narrative.It may be argued that the examples which can be drawn upon from popular computer games all involve relatively trivial forms ofpsychological objectives or dramatic structure. However,it would be unwise to underestimate the enormous lure which is represented by the desire to master the skills needed to resolve a game, the intrigue represented by the unknown yet to be discovered and the enormous gain for the user in being implicated in the plot. Clearly computer games such as 'Dungeon' have imported much of the fundamental range of dramaturgy from narrative, cinema and theatre incorporating danger, threat and suspense, though many games also draw heavily on competitive sports with its own psychological forms and symbolism. In most computer games,the visual simulation does not come close to the level of photographic representation of cinema but the enhanced dramatic experience which is available to the user/player as a result of the interactive element and their implication in the way in which the game develops is evidently a more than adequate compensation for the lack of depth in the visual illusion.

Interactivity replaces the concept of the passive viewer by the active participant. The experience of being a protagonist, whilst still operating in a symbolic field, is more direct in interactive systems than in the traditional forms of identification which operate in cinema. An interactive cinema needs to offer a fundamental range of choices to the user in interacting with the work. This cannot be confined to a few alternative linear routes, endings or character view-points in an otherwise linear narrative structure. The experimental cinema offers some models for a greater complexity of sequence linkage based on the concept of a cinematic data matrix. With the opportunity of computer programs determining structure, this matrix can be subject to genuinely multi-dimensional conjunction in response to interaction. The computer game represents a significant field of interactive practice with many lessons for the development of an interactive cinema. Parallels should be sought between the kind of structural analysis which produces economic redundancy in three-dimensionalsimulations (for example) and psychological or dramatic structures as the basis of synthesis from fundamental (artistic) principles.

D I S S I M U L A T I O N S

D I S S I M U L A T I O N S

illusions of interactivity

Andy Cameron takes a peek at the end of the story
Printed in MFJ No. 28 (Spring 1995) Interactivities

Narrative is present in myth, legend,
fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy,
drama, comedy, mime, painting, stained glass
windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation.

Roland Barthes, 'The Structural Analysis of Narrative' (Image, Music, Text)

The form of the story permeates every aspect of our cultural life. History, politics, memories, even subjectivity, our sense of identity, all are representations in narrative form, signifiers chained together in temporal, spatial, and causal sequence. Narrative is a component of those deep structures with which we construct ourselves and our universe; true stories through which, in the manner of certain Aboriginal legends, the world is dreamed into existence. Narrative enjoys with language the status of a defining characteristic of humanity and its culture - a people without stories seems as absurd an idea as a people without language, (a people with language but no stories even stranger, for what is language for if not to tell stories?)

Over the past few years there has been a tremendous financial and emotional investment in the idea of digital media, the use of computers as the site of culture rather than just tools for business or science. This is partly due to the drive on the part of manufacturers to create new markets for their hardware after the business and science markets have become saturated. It also reflects the apparently inexorable progress of price/performance ratios in digital technology - only recently have cheap computers been capable of simulating analogue sound, images or moving pictures with sufficient verisimilitude. At the same time, there is a desire at work here, a fantasy which exceeds its technical and economic conditions. Implicit in the notion of digital media is the belief (read desire) that digital computers and digital communications will provide a unified site for 1st world culture in the near future and that this new medium will offer distinct advances over existing media, above all by offering its audience interactivity.

Interactivity refers to the possibility of an audience actively participating in the control of an artwork or representation. Until now, what we call culture doesn't allow for much interaction from the audience. The audience is given a space for interpretation and a space for reaction, but not of interaction. There are undoubtedly those who would argue that interpretation is interaction, and so, of course, it is, but not in the sense intended here. For the purposes of this discussion, interactivity means the ability to intervene in a meaningful way within the representation itself, not to read it differently. Thus interactivity in music would mean the ability to change the sound, interactivity in painting to change colours, or make marks, interactivity in film the immersion of the spectator in the scene and the ability to change the way the movie comes out. This is both more than interpretation, and less. This discussion is an attempt to speculate on the collision between a dominant cultural form - narrative, and the technology of interactivity. There is a contradiction at the heart of the idea of the interactive narrative - that narrative form appears fundamentally non-interactive. The interactive story implies a form which is not that of narrative, within which the position, and authority of the narrator is dispersed among the readers, and in which the idea of cinema, or of literature, merges with that of the game, or of sport. The consequences may be far-reaching and profound. Can a simulator, or an interactive construct, usefully adopt a narrative form? Will there be a general transformation from a culture of stories to a culture which expresses its truths through an immersive, interactive medium, - the shared experience of the simulator?

Forking Paths and Synthetic Spaces

In the short story Garden of Forking Paths2 Borges imagines a novel in which the path of the story splits, where all things are conceivable, and all things take place. The author of this story within a story is judged insane and commits suicide, and Borges' narrator is arrested and condemned to death - thus the fate of the narrator and of the author in the interactive era is prefigured. It is not hard to see how the task of writing interactively might drive an author to insanity and suicide. To write not simply an account of what happened but a whole series of ''what-ifs' increases both the volume and complexity of an author's task exponentially. And if the reader chooses his or her own pathway through the story then the narrator can be dispensed with - in effect the function and authority of the author is usurped by the reader.

Interactivity implies forking paths and each pathway must be written and fitted together. The greater the number of pathways, the greater the sense of textual play for the reader, and the greater the amount of work for the writer. The volume of story web increases exponentially with additional points of interaction. An author is faced with an inevitable and depressing tradeoff - sacrificing time spent on the texture of the narrative, its literary or cinematic qualities, for an enhanced interactive complexity. The result can be interactive but schematic, resembling the outline of a story rather than the story itself.

How much interactivity does it take to make an interactive story? We don't know because we don't know what an interactive story is like, nor what it is for (more on this in a moment). It is true that the number and complexity of forking paths could be increased until the reader experiences a large degree of freedom and control within the text. The limits of this freedom are achieved within a model that dispenses with the network of lines altogether, replacing it with a fictional space within which the reader can turn left or right, look up or look down, open a door, enter a room, at any time they choose - synthetic or virtual reality. In the VR model, although the reader/spectator enjoys seamless temporal and spatial freedom, the tradeoff between interactivity and richness of content holds true. VR to date has barely been able to dress the set, let alone cry 'action', or murmur 'once upon a time'.

If the sheer complexity of building an interactive narrative is problematic at the conceptual and technical level, there is another simpler and deeper problem. This is the question of what kind of representation an interactive representation is, if you like, the question of ontology. The change from a linear model to a multi-linear or spatio-temporal model is more than just the change from a simple line to a more complex diagram or space, it involves moving from one kind of representation to another.

A Lonely Impulse of Delight

As he settled into the snug cockpit he tried
not to think about the obvious thing.
Ahead of him, through the windscreen, he
could see a long low hill. It was further
away than it appeared to be, and much bigger.
Yellow through the blue haze, the hill
squatted on the plain, low and indolent and
massive. He wanted to be over that hill
and look beyond.

Before him stretched the grey runway, on
the left a yellow haystack, on the right a
white airfield building. All around him was
the blue airplane. He opened the throttle
and the plane began to inch forwards. The
nose veered to the right, towards the white
building, and he rapidly adjusted the plane
to the left.By now the ground was rushing
past and the tail starting to lift. The nose
came down and he could see the ground
immediately in front for the first time,
a streaming grey blur, and the end of the
runway rushing up to meet him. At the last
possible moment he pulled the stick back
into his stomach and the plane lurched into
the air.
Vertigo.

[MFJ ordering] [MFJ Special Ordering] Afficionados of the Hellcats flight simulator will recognize the landscape - an American airstrip on one of the Solomon Islands in the Pacific Ocean. The time is WW2. This is the beginning of an account of an experience of my own, flying a Hellcat on a mission against the Japanese Navy.

Hellcats is effectively a screen and mouse based virtual reality system - 2nd person VR - offering non-linear adventure stories. The reader - or should it be participant, or player - is free to move in any direction, at all times, as long as he or she never gets out of the plane. This cuts down the scope of the story significantly - it's like Top Gun with everything but the flight scenes cut out. Hellcats is a simulator which models a space and a set of rules - the aerodynamics of a propeller plane - for moving through that space. It provides a simple narrative framework within which to act - the struggle against the enemy - and it provides characters to interact with, what appear to be independent narrative agents with their own characteristics and motivation - Japanese airplanes, gunners and ships.

As a representation of the experience of Americans during WW2 in the Pacific, Hellcats can be compared to South Pacific or From Here to Eternity. Yet despite the similarities of place and time, Hellcats is a very different kind of representation. Hellcats represents one specific aspect of the experience of the war in the Pacific, but it is the experience of the machine, to misquote Stephen Heath, rather than the experience of the pilot. More precisely, it is the experience of the pilot insofar as he or she is an extension of the machine, that part which keeps the plane in the air and flies this way or that way, presses the trigger and drops bombs, but never that part with a history, a family, skin colour, memories, desire, plans for this evening...

Certain key attributes of narrative form are missing.3 Narrative closure has to be fought for - if you crash your plane while taking off the 'story' is short, insignificant and unsatisfying. It is up to the spectator to ensure that the action comes to a satisfying and meaningful end - closure is not part of the structure of the representation but is contigent on the moment of 'reading'. Temporal and spatial coherence are more or less complete, but strictly limited to the skies above the Solomon Islands. There is no specific enigma to be resolved but a different kind of teleological imperative, that of a participant in a violent struggle. If we consider what Barthes has called the symbolic code, that code which accounts for the formal relationships created between terms within a text - the patterning of the text, antithesis, graduation, repetition etc, we find it absent in Hellcats. The simulator does not signify in this way. Neither do we find much in the way of a referential or gnomic code, the code of shared cultural knowledge about the world, nor the rich and diffuse code of connotations designated by Barthes as the code of semes. What is lost is the complex interplay of signs, Barthes' 'weaving of the voices' across different registers, the 'perspective of quotations', the 'mirage of structures', the 'multivalence of the text'. These are replaced with a wide band of sensory information refering to specific and schematic aspects of a situation - the proairetics of flight, the hermeneutics of battle.4 At the same time this schema is reinvested with narrative order via the subjectivity of the participant - as if subjects have a will- to-narrative which asserts itself even in the sparsest of contexts. This is a narrative which issues from the identifications the participant makes within the interactive construct - a personal narrative unlegitimated by the external figure of the author.

Ontology of the interactive image

I saw the movie last week. I want what happened in the movie last week
to happen
in the movie this week too, otherwise what is life all about?5

The principal distinction to be made between an interactive representation, like Hellcats, and narrative representations like those of the cinema and literature, lies in the representation of time. Narrative refers to the past. It is an account of events which have already taken place. Its temporal referent is once upon a time. This relationship to time is not affected by the verb tense - the present tense is often used to bring immediacy and drama to an account - nor does it depend on the reality of the events being described - fiction gives an account of things which happened, which is nonetheless untrue. This characteristic of narrative appears to be part of its very nature as representation, its ontology. The simulator on the other hand operates in the present. If in a narrative an event happened, in an interactive narrative, multi-linear or spatio-temporal, an event is happening, its temporal referent now. This ontological change has important consequences.

A linear narrative exercises a textual authority which is dispersed by interactivity. In the linear narrative, the reader submits to the authority of the text. Only the author has the power to make decisions about the story line or point of view, and the invention of narrative events is his or her sole perrogative. The text is certain of itself. Moreover this certainty has a legitimising function. Hayden White writes:

'We cannot but be struck by the frequency with which narrativity, whether of the fictional or the factual sort, presuposes the existence of a legal system against or on behalf of which the typical agents of a narrative account militate. And this raises the suspicion that narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the 'annals' to the fully realised history, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy or more generally 'authority''.6

Now this authority is expressed, and legitimacy conferred, at the moment of closure. By recounting what happened an author is also closing of those things which didn't happen. A character picks up the phone rather than letting it ring, someone walks down the street and turns left instead of right. Closure in this sense is dispersed throughout the narrative. The events unfold as a pattern which progressively resolves itself into an image, each event integrating those which precede it into progressively higher level of narrative sense, until the final closure, the end of the narrative, when the gobal event, the meaning of the story is revealed at last, and is revealed to have been immanent in all the events all along. Closure can be considered as a function of time, or more precisely of the way in which time is represented, whether as past and complete or present and ongoing.7

A story is an account of something beyond itself. The referent of a story is an event which has already taken place. A simulation or interactive story on the other hand is the event in waiting; it refers to a principle, a set of rules, an algorithm, a stasis outside of time which can simulate events in time. The referent, the thing other than itself to which the simulation refers, is the condition for events, not the events themselves. Closure - the cutting out and sequencing of events from the mass of possibilities - is effected by the spectator, albeit within a framework of conditions designed by the author.

It is here that we find the apparent disjuncture between the nature of interactivity and that of narrative. The moment the reader intervenes to change the story (at the nodes of multi-linear narrative or at every moment in a spatio-temporal simulator) is the moment when the story changes from being an account of events which have already taken place to the experience of events which are taking place in the present. Story time becomes real time, an account becomes an experience, the spectator or reader becomes a participant or player, and the narrative begins to look like a game.

Herbert Quain

In An examination of the works of Herbert Quain, Borges invents an English multi- linear novelist of the 1930s. Less often referred to than Garden of Forking Paths, this short story is no less remarkable for its dystopian vision of a banal and meretricious interactive literature - what Borges terms the 'regressive, ramified novel'. Borges prefigures the transformation of reading into playing when he makes Herbert Quain say of his second novel, 'April March',

'I lay claim in this novel... to the essential features of all games: symetry, arbitrary rules, tedium. Indeed, 'Quain was in the habit of arguing that readers were an already extinct species. 'Every European,' he reasoned 'is a writer, potentially or in fact.' He also confirmed that of the various pleasures offered by literature, the greatest is invention.''

Symetry, arbitrary rules, tedium. Those familiar with interactive artefacts of the last few years will recognize these depressing qualities in countless CD-roms, computer games and pieces of multimedia. The question becomes - is this what interactivity is really about - is this poverty an aspect of its nature, or is it a failure of imagination so far by interactive producers and designers? Does something which is interactive have to be like a game? And if so, does a game have to be as uninteresting as Borges suggests?

I first heard the interactive story being described as a kind of game by Max Whitby. Max Whitby heads the MultiMedia Corporation, a company producing interactive titles on CD set up in 1990 as an independent offshoot of the BBC. Max argues that the term interactive narrative is an oxymoron - and believes that an interactive narrative can never be as satisfying as a traditional linear story. The interactivity, Max suggests, gets in the way. At the same time he recognizes the tremendous potential of new media and understands why so many people get so excited about it.

'Something happens to people, especially people who come from a film or television background when initially exposed to the idea of interactive multimedia. When you first realise that computers are not just tools, but a new medium through which information can be delivered in completely new ways, a lightbulb goes on - it certainly went on in my head and I've seen it go on in lots of other people's heads. Instead of the high priests in their ivory towers deciding what a TV programme will be, you can hand over your programme material to your audience and they can construct their own experiences. Now that basic premise is very exciting. The trouble is it doesn't sustain. When you actually get in there and try to make things in an interactive way, the premise falls apart.

The problem is - and its terribly obvious really - that most successful communication involves a great deal of craftsmanship and authorship and point of view and storytelling and narrative. Every successful form, be it a novel or a feature film or a play or a comic, needs a skilled storyteller to weave together a spell in the mind of the audience, suspend their disbelief and take them on a carefully planned emotional roller coaster through the story. Every successful form of communication involves protaganists, a set of conflicts and experiences, and at the end some sort of resolution so the thing has a satisfying shape. Interaction largely destroys all that. By giving the audience control over the raw material you give them precisely what they don't want. They don't want a load of bricks, they want a finished construction, a built house.

Although the light bulb still goes on in my head and I'm still excited by the possibilities, I have realised you can't apply the notion of interactive multimedia to an awful lot of successful existing forms. One form that does make sense on a computer is that of the game. Computer games are as spellbinding and absorbing as a good movie. However, what is going on in people's heads in a game is very different from what is going on with a play or a novel. I don't want to say that one is better than the other, but you can obviously do things in films, theatre or the novel that you can't do in a game, and vice versa. Most of what is generally regarded as being interesting belongs to the world of cinema and theatre and most of what we could regard as simply diverting or just a pastime belongs to the form of the game.'

[MFJ ordering] [MFJ Special Ordering] Games and Stories

So what then is the difference between games and stories, and what value does this difference entail? I have argued for a distinction based on the different way each represents time, leading on to differing modes of spectatorship. However, games and stories also have very different cultural values attached to them. The game is frivolous whereas narrative is serious - the form of the game is agonistic and ephemeral, it deals in a transient athletic display. The game is an exercise which can exist only in the present (if it persists in memory then it does so as an account).

There is a general assumption here that narrative representation - literature, history, cinema and so on, has a deep and lasting significance which the game lacks. In the end Shakespeare or Proust or Pasolini seem to have more to offer than a game of football or Sonic. The game is outside of history, unworthy of serious remembrance. At the M.I.T. multimedia conference in Dublin in 1993 a speaker bemoaned the fact that his son spent too much time playing computer games and not enough time reading books. Thinking of my own child, I found myself nodding in agreement. Yet when a woman asked from the floor why reading a book was better than playing a computer game, he couldn't explain his assumption and neither could I. Two other speakers gave a fascinating account of an elastic movie. This was a multi-screen installation constructed as part of a student workshop at M.I.T. which the spectator moved through and interacted with. The speakers called it an interactive media environment, an installation, a transformational space, fine art circumlocutions for the obvious term game which they managed to avoid entirely throughout their paper. Then they showed a video of their undergraduate students discussing the design of the project and the word game cropped up over and over again. Finally, throughout the whole 2 day conference on interactivity, discussion of console and TV computer games was almost entirely absent, in spite of the release by Sega of CD drives and non-linear cinematic games on CD, in spite of the astounding commercial success of Nintendo in the youth market, in spite of CD-i, in spite of 3DO...

In my class in interactive media at the University of Westminster I encourage the students to play computer games - Hellcats, Spectre, 4D boxing and so on - to give them a sense of the possiblities - and limitations - of the crossover between interactivity and the story. This did not initially meet with the approval of the department and there is still a lingering suspicion that those students who take the module in interactivity just want to play computer games. Yet nobody accuses the film students of just wanting to watch films. Many college computer rooms have a notice on the wall warning that the playing of games is banned. The game is not work but a diversion from work, nor is it a proper object of serious study. The game is something which, although tolerated, the law must seek to repress, to keep to its proper place.

A Literary Youtopia

If the repressed reading of interactivity is that of the game, the preferred reading is interactivity as Post-Modernism come true.

In S/Z Barthes describes two types of writing, readerly writing and writerly writing. What happens if we take the notion of the writerly at face value, innocently? Let us reproduce the notion of the writerly - or rather, let us post-produce it. Let us abolish the distinction between the producer (Barthes) and the reader (me, you) and rewrite the writerly. Let us read excessively, irresponsibly, futuristically.

'The goal of literary work (of literature as work) is to make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text...

The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing...

In this ideal text, the networks are many and interact, without any of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can see ...' 8

In this excessive reading the writerly becomes a fantasy of the multi-linear text, Barthes a kind of Nostradumus of literary theory, writerly writing the uncanny prophecy of an interactive literature come to pass. Indeed, a number of commentators have noted the way in which poststructuralist writing seems to anticipate the non-linearity of new technology. In Hypertext - the convergence of contemporary critical theory and technology, George P Landow suggests that the literary theories of structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers (especially Barthes and Derrida) find their embodiment in interactive hypertextual forms made possible by new technology. Hypertextual and non-linear structures promise Barthes' writerly text, never far from the possibility of rewriting, multivocal, decentred, without boundaries, a text which can break free from the chains of closure, a text whose instability lies not in our postmodern apprehension of it but in its very condition of being. Hypertext for Landow is post-structuralism made flesh, transubstantiated - Foucault's death of the Author a corpse, Derridean dÈbordement actualized as hypertextual annotation... 9

The problem with this kind of literal and utopian mapping of post-structuralist theory onto new technology is that it fails to acknowledge its own excessiveness. It is ironic that a set of theories which stress plurality and indeterminacy should be employed in the service of a reductive equivalence between very different types of discourse, a critical discourse of interpretation on the one hand and an instrumental discourse of interaction on the other.

Instrumental stories

'Science has always been in conflict with narratives'10

We have seen how a putative theory of interactivity might oscillate between the preferred register of the post-modern (serious, plural, decentred and legitimated by the academy) and the frivolous register of the game (playful, ephemeral, banal and without value). A further approach is suggested in 'The Postmodern Condition' in which Lyotard outlines an opposition between narrative knowledge (convivial, traditional) and instrumental knowledge (cybernetic, scientific). The game can be considered as a cybernetic construct (a goal directed system of control and feedback) and as such, placed on the side of the instrumental, whereas narrative knowledge, argues Lyotard, is an older form - 'narration is the quintessential form of customary knowledge...' and 'what is transmitted through narrative is the pragmatic which establishes the social bond'.16 Legitimation and authority are immanent to narrative form and are established within and through the act of narration itself. By contrast authority and legitimation are extrinsic to the form of instrumental knowledge. In scientific discourse legitimation must be fought for. Moreover, instrumental knowledge according to Lyotard is set apart from the language games that constitute the social bond. The analagous oppositions may be summed up thus:

Instrumental knowledge Narrative knowledge

science history

simulation narrative

game story

uncertain legitimate

synchronic diachronic

These oppositions sketch out the structural differences between two different kinds of representation. The question of legitimacy and certainty is central - the simulation remains a model which does not have the ability to auto-legitimate itself in the way an account does. The simulation or game is never more than hypothetical.12

Interactive critical theory

How then to approach the question of a critical theory of interactive representation? We might start by looking at early prototypes of interactivity on CD-Rom and laserdisk. It is vital here to insist upon the distinction between the multi-linear (Forking Paths) and spatio-temporal (VR) models. In a multi-linear construct the author can play with the space between linear sections - versions of what happened, or different points of view, connected within an authored network of simultaneity and sequence. What is explored here is the space between alternative sections of writing or video - the space is a properly literary or cinematic space rather than the cybernetically governed mechanical space of VR, and one can imagine this hyperliterature being opened up to an expanded literary criticism.

The author of a simulator or VR representation works with a different set of opportunities. Here it is not so much a question of writing in space but of designing a model. Although the author describes the characteristics of the model, he or she is not the author of the events that happen within the model once set in motion. Here, as I have already discussed, it is more difficult to talk of authorship at all. An as yet unformulated critical approach to the simulation will probably be informed by cybernetics, architecture and the theatre.13

A number of experiments can be considered as prototypes for multi-linear writing and as pointers to a criticism of new cultural and literary/cinematic forms. These demonstrate a tension between repression and freedom, offering the reader the illusion of control within a tightly authored set of possibilities. The multi-linear model has the advantage of being based upon and incorporating an older model, that of linear writing - a model grounded at least partially in the narrative tradition, although exceeding and threatening that tradition at the same time.

In Graham Weinbrene's interactive cinema piece 'Kreutzer Sonata' the viewer is offered control over the aspect14 of the narration - the screen is divided into four temporal regions, left for flashback, right for the present, up for an expanded present and down for filmic elements which are outside of the time of the story altogether. In Tolstoy's original short story the narrator unburdens himself to a stranger on a train - telling how, consumed with jealousy over an imagined affair between his wife and her music teacher, he knifed his wife to death. In Weinbren's version the viewer is able to control the flow of narration and view the events either as perfective - seen from within the time frame of the events, or imperfective - from the external vantage point of the future.15

Thus if you point at the right of the screen you get the murderer recounting his story in the railway carriage, and if you point at the left you get the dramatic events played out in flashback. The sequence of events represented by Weinbren stays the same, however the mode of telling can throw the spectator inside or outside of those events. By pointing up or down you can overlay the fevered imaginings of the jealous husband (a sex scene between wife and music teacher), the mouth of the wife of Tolstoy cursing her husband's misogyny, references to Freud's The Wolf Man and the classical image of Judith with the severed head of Holofernes. The climax of the piece is an interactive wipe which the spectator controls by waving a finger at the screen - outside the music room the agitated husband paces up and down while inside the wife and teacher practise the Kreutzer Sonata unaware of the tragedy about to befall them.

The experience of viewing 'Sonata' is both exhilarating and dislocating. Unlike a fully interactive fiction in which story events themselves are switchable, The Kreutzer Sonata progresses inexorably from beginning to bloody end, but the route taken is profoundly different with each viewing. One showing might be as grammatically correct as a costume drama on the BBC, another as obliquely avant garde as a French art movie. The interactivity here doesn't 'get in the way' as Max Whitby suggests, but provides an extra dimension within which to write and read the movie.

Claudia Frutiger, Alejandra Jiminez and Kate Reddit have recently authored an interactive eternal triangle in which 3 strangers, thrown together for the night in an isolated hotel, ponder which of the other two they can bear to share the only room with. The story offers the viewer the chance to control their identifications with the characters - by choosing a character's point of view, that character becomes the protagonist around which the story organises itself. Each point of view is partial - what is concealed from each character is more important than what is revealed. The story is cyclical, complex, enigmatic and without resolution.

What these experiments reveal is a tension between gameplay and the story, between the instrumental and the narrative function. To put it simply, the more of a story it is, the less of a game, and vice versa. A reconciliation of this impasse suggests itself from a surprising quarter. The form of pornography is both narrative and goal directed, referring to fictional events and a kind of arousal game with a clearly defined outcome. The pornographic story joins the reader in a cybernetic construct - within this cyborg-text the body of the reader and the body of the text respond to each other. Pornography has been well represented in early interactive commercial products and the notion of virtual sex is the dominant popular fantasy about VR (at least among journalists).

Conclusion

There are two potential endings for a discussion like this, either optimistic or pessimistic. Neither is appropriate in this case. The 'interactivity is post modern' school of thought sees interactive representation as a liberation from the repressive authority of traditional narrative form. There are echoes here from the avant-garde and anti-narrative movements in cinema and writing which have their source in the utopian ferment of the 60s. (See Zap Splat... Malcolm le Grice) Yet the consequences of the opening up of closure - that interactivity will be 'commonplace, unlaborious, shallow, un-literary, heterodox'16 are more difficult to accept.

Others see the simulator as promising post symbolic representation, bypassing the patriarchal distortions of perspective and the controlling point of view. VR in this argument offers not the representation of objects but the representation of relations between objects within which the participant can select their own point of view. By using immersion interfaces the participant can gain, so the argument goes, direct (ie unmediated, objective) access to pure data, (a realm both digital and noumenal). However, in characterising this as a shift from coded representation to experiential post-representation what is glossed over is the coding and mediation involved in constructing the experience in the first place.

If the politics of a change in representation is centred on the move away from narrative with its baggage of authority, certainty and closure, the politics of interactivity at a more general level are about the end of mass culture. Interactive television or video telephony promises profound transformations in cultural and political life by fundamentally reordering the communications infrastructure away from a broadcast architecture in favour of a fully distributed network like that of the telephone system. A clue to the nature of this transformation is provided by the rapid growth of TV shopping operations in the US. The largest home shopping network, QVC (quality, value, convenience), now has a turnover of well over one billion dollars, more than double last year's figure. An indication of the crossover from shrink wrapped interactive products to an interactive infrastructure is provided by the Sega games cable TV channel which will go on line in late 1993.

As some see in interactive representation a liberation from the repressive authority of narrative, so the interactive infrastructure seems to promise liberation from authoritarian political control. Mitch Kapoor percieves a radical opportunity for libertarian democracy in the digital network. He asks 'What if Thomas Jefferson had designed cyberspace?' and goes on to propose a Jeffersonian model of a decentralised global information network in which the notion of a free and equal community of participants replaces that of the centralised state. The network has the potential, according to Kapoor, to realise Jefferson's vision of 'putting power in the hands of the people to use as they see fit'. But which Jefferson are we talking about here - the 'democratic' apostle of the rights of man, or 'Massa Tom', theorist of white supremacy and owner of 150 slaves? And which people? The problem with 'Jeffersonian cyberspace' is that it has the potential to further exclude from politcal participation those too poor or too black to buy into the vision. And yet the vision is a compelling one, sufficiently so to quash troublesome political doubt from those who might be expected to know better. When the clean-shaven millionaire homophobe Ross Perot announced, during his Presidential run in 1992, his dream of participatory democracy based on the Electronic Town Hall even an impeccably liberal commentator like Brenda Laurel felt able to consider offering him her vote17.

Is this the end of the road for narrative, grand or otherwise? Are we to become a people without stories? The linguistic category of aspect provides a useful analogy here. The shift from narrative to the simulation entails an aspectual shift like that from perfective to imperfective, from outside to inside the time of the situation being described. Thus narrative representation and interactive representation might be different ways of viewing the internal temporal constituency of a situation'18 As interactivity increases the spectator is thrown inside the representation to become a participant. Yet at the heart of the interactive representation narrative reinstates itself through the subject narrativising the experience. If narrative is a technique for producing significance out of being then simulation can be seen as its inversion, a technique for producing being out of significance. Rather than a people without stories, interactivity offers the promise of a people within stories, and rather than the end of narrative, an explosion of narrative within the simulator.

Like any other form of representation, interactivity is an illusion. It puts itself in the place of something that isn't there. What is the absent referent of interactivity? If interactivity promises the spectator freedom and choice, it is precisely the lack of such freedom and choice that interactivity conceals.