Additive to Expressive Form

• The early days of film• Cradle Films– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nj0vEO4Q6s– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FrdVdKlxUk

• Invention of major elements of filmic storytelling– Close up– Chase scene– Feature length

• Movement of camera, changes in focus, cut up and assembly of film

• Photoplay = Photography + Theater

Computational Media

• Are we at the incunabula stage?– Early stories on the web were pretty bad

• But what about the computer as a meta-medium?

• Exaggeration: every start-up is trying to create a new medium.

Computer-based Characters

• Eliza– Many versions of

this story• What does this

story tell us?• Limitations of Eliza

as model for characters?

Digital Environments

• Interactive1. Procedural2. Participatory

• Immersive3. Spatial4. Encyclopedic

• Eliza is procedural in that it has a procedure for selecting response based on the most recent and prior comments by the user.– Coming up with those procedures can be difficult.

Participatory

• The user must participate in the story• Zork– Text-based adventure game– Modeled on understood type

of world (fantasy)– “The computer was

programming the player.”– Not NLP but more natural

than before• Lessons?

Spatial

• The myth of PARC– First graphical user interface? Well, not quite.

• Aspen movie map– Tour of Aspen that gives a sense of presence

• Zork (again)– Imagined world with imaginable layout

• Space can be abstract– Victory Garden – intersecting lives during the 1st gulf war

• “The event is happening now. The event is happening to you.”

Encyclopedic

• Computers have huge capacity.• Value in narrative?– Think of Tolkien's Middle Earth or the Star Trek

universe– Others?

• Negative effects?• Simulations – exposing the assumptions– “the interpretive framework is embedded in the rules

by which the system works and in the the way in which participation is shaped”

Digital Structures of Complexity

• Memex – “human knowledge is a solvable maze, open to

rational organization”• Xanadu – “hummingbird mind”, “all things are deeply

intertwingled”• Time steps – the game of life– Emergent structure/behavior