creative approaches to visual narratives

Visual Studies – Week 5.

creative approaches to narrative

“Within-time-ness ... possesses its own specific features which are not reducible to the representation of linear time, a neutral series of abstract instants [...]“Let us say that that a story describes a series of actions and experiences made by a number of characters, whether real or imaginary. These characters are represented either in situations that change or as they relate to changes to which they then react. These changes, in turn, reveal hidden aspects of the situation and of the characters and engender a new predicament that call for thinking action, or both [...]Following a story, correlatively, is understanding the successive actions, thoughts, and feelings in question insofar as they present a certain directedness. By this I mean that we are pushed ahead by this development and that we reply to its impetus with expectations concerning the outcome” ...

creative approaches to narrative

“Narratives ... represent a person acting, who orients him – or herself in the circumstances he or she has not created, and who produces consequences he or she has not intended. This is indeed the time of ‘now that... ,’ wherein a person is both abandoned and responsible at the same time.” Ricoeur, P (1980) Narrative Time, in Mcquillan, M (ed) (2000) the Narrative Reader. London, Routledge. p 255.

creative approaches to visual narratives

• The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

• Fear and Loathing of Structuralism• Songs of the Doomed : searching for

difference• Generation of Swine : new media, new

stories? “When the going gets weird the weird turn pro” – Rauol Duke

DUKE

hitchhiker

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal formsVirtuality

(e.g. Goal to be obtained)

Actualisation(e.g. Act required to obtain goal)

Goal attained(e.g. Act Successful)

Goal not attained

Absence of actualisation(Inertia, impediment)

Logic of Narrative Possibilities – Claude Bremond

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

Amelioration to obtain

Amelioration process

Amelioration obtained

Obstacle to eliminate

Elimination process

Obstacle eliminated

Possible means

Means to be taken

Means successful

Logic of Narrative Possibilities – Claude Bremond

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

Exposition – Meir Steinberg‘It is the function of the exposition to introduce the reader into an unfamiliar world, the fictive world of the story, by providing him with the general and specific antecedents indispensible to the understanding of what happens in it ... of the canons of probability operating in it; of the history, appearance, traits and habitual behaviour of the dramatis personae [actants]; and of the relations between them.’Steinberg, M (1996 [1978]) What is Exposition? An essay in Temporal Delimitation, in Onega, S and Landa, G (eds) Narratology. Harlow, Longman Group Ltd. P. 104We were somewhere

around Barstow on the

edge of the desert when

the drugs began to take

hold ....

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

Fabula Sjuzhet

Story Narrative

Plot

Steinberg sees the exposition as always being at the beginning of the Fabula or Story.

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

“... the time-ratio of a narrative time-span or event generally stands in direct proportion to it’s contextual relevance: one whose representational time approximates its represented time is implied to be more central to the work in question...”Steinberg, M (1996 [1978]) What is Exposition? An essay in Temporal Delimitation, in Onega, S and Landa, G (eds) Narratology. Harlow, Longman Group Ltd. P. 111

Our trip was different. It was going to be a classic affirmation of everything right and true in the national character; a gross, physical salute to the fantastic possibilities of life in this country. But only for those with true grit.

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

Vladimir Propp – Character Types (Spheres of Action)

1. The Villain2. The donor (provider)3. The helper4. The sought for person (and her father)5. The dispatcher6. The hero7. The false hero

object

subject

sender

helper

receiver

opponent

A. J. Greimas – Actantial Models

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

Subsequent – past tensePrior – predictive, generally future tenseSimultaneous – present, contemporaneous with actionInterpolated – between moments of action (“What in broadcasting language is called the live and the pre-recorded account after the event.”)

The narrator can operate inside or outside of the story world. The narrator can therefore be visible or invisible. The narrator is NOT necessarily synonymous with the author/director– think duke (not Thompson), think Robinson Crusoe (not Daniel Defoe).

Gerard Genette – Narrative Discourse

I remember saying something like: “I feel a bit lightheaded. Maybe you should drive.”

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

“Is it not structuralism’s constant aim to master the infinity of utterances by describing the language of which they are products and from which they can be generated?” Barthes, R (1966) Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives in Ibid.

“A narrating situation is, like any other, a complex whole within which analysis, or simply description, cannot differentiate except by ripping apart a tight web of cennections among the narrating act, its protagonists, its spatio-temporal determination, its relationship to the other narrating situations involved in the same narrative...” Genette, G (1972) Voice, in Ibid p.174.

The Great Shark Hunt : finding universal forms

“For the traditional critic, the most profound hidden design in a narrative was its unity”, writes Mark Currie, and “in the critical quest for unity there was a desire to present a narrative as a coherent and stable project. In the view of the poststructuralist critic, this was just a way of reducing the complexity … of a narrative”. (Currie 1998, p. 3)

Fear and Loathing of Structuralism

“Thought about narrative has traditionally concerned itself with two distinct kinds of space. The connection between them is profoundly ideological. On the one hand, there is the space of representation. This is understood as the space of the real, the homogenous space of the world. On the other hand, there is the space pf the model or describable form. In this second dimension, the narratological imaginary has been haunted by something like the reverse of poetic intuition, by dreams of the geometric.” Gibson, A p. 3

“Narrative theory ... Has repeatedly constructed the space of the text a unitary, homogenous space, determined by and organised within a given set of constraints. Narratological space has seldom been disturbed by blurrings, troubling ambivalences or multiplications. In it, boundaries are clearly defined and categories clearly distinguished. Proportions and regularities establish and maintain certain harmonious and orderly relations. The most recent developments in narratology have hardly disturbed those relations at all.” Ibid. P.7

Fear and Loathing of Structuralism

“[A study of narrative] must concentrate on perturbations and turbulences, multiple forms, uneven structures and fluctuating organisations. The ‘site’ such an aesthetics indicates for the knower, thinker of observer is not the apparently stable site of the narratologist.” Ibid,p. 13

Fear and Loathing of Structuralism

Fear and Loathing of Structuralism

Metaphorical substitution

“Take... Serres’s account of the metaphors of fire and mist in Zola, of clouds, flows, turbulences, motors and so on ... Narratives are conceptualised in terms of a reservoir of metaphors internal to them.” Ibid.

Fear and Loathing of Structuralism

Fear and Loathing of Structuralism

Songs of the Doomed : searching for difference

Songs of the Doomed : searching for difference

The term multiplicity is associated with Deleuze and Guattari: its basic definition is ‘a large number or variety’. On one hand we can make sense of a multiplicity, it can be organized, it can be divided up - like the specific players of a football team. But on the other hand it is much more sensual, unconscious, about feelings - like the action and interaction of football players during a game. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, p.36) In this way it forms a tension between what we can understand and what we can’t.Another philosopher who used the term multiplicity was Michel Serres, he writes: “We are fascinated by the unit; only a unity seems rational to us. We scorn the senses, because their information reaches us in bursts. We scorn the groupings of the world… For us they seem to enjoy a of the status of Being only when they are subsumed beneath a unity… A cartload of bricks isn’t a house.” (Serres 1995, p. 2)

Cornelia Parker, Heart of Darkness (2004) Cold Dark Matter (2007).

Songs of the Doomed : searching for difference

Anthony Gormley

Martin Creed (2007) Work no. 370 BALLS

• Matrix Reloaded

Generation of Swine : new media, new stories?

Generation of Swine : new media, new stories?

Miller, Robin and Rand, Myst (1993 Macintosh) Cyan Worlds

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQ0T59qKK-s

Miller, Robyn and Wende, Richard.(1997 win/mac) Riven, Cyan Inc.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=p2HipedgM3I

Demarle, Mary and Saunders, Phil. ( 2001 win) Myst III: Exile, Presto Studios