| Narrative Space: |
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Computers as Theatre: Dramatic Techniques for Orchestrating Human Response I include this extract from Laurels Computers as Theatre in the context of the Spectactor Project (see below) in order to question some of her statements, the role of the reader/author/spectactor/performer, and of course the technological interaction. Dramatic Techniques
for Orchestrating Human Response The goal of the previous two chapters was to establish a groundwork in dramatic theory that involves principles of dramatic form and structure. This chapter will explore techniques for applying that theoretical knowledge to the task of designing interesting, engaging, and satisfying human-computer activities. The effectiveness of these techniques relies on the relationship between form and experience, in terms of both the ways in which form influences content and the direct impact of the formal and structural qualities of a work on human thought and emotion. Drama Versus Narrative Why have we chosen drama rather than narrative as a global model for human-computer activities? How are human-computer activities more like plays than stories? Can't we get the same kind of intellectual and emotional gratification from a good book as we do from a good play? To focus on the key differences, recall the basic Aristotelian definition of drama: the imitation of an action with a beginning, middle, and end, which is meant to be enacted in real time, as if the events were actually unfolding. Incidents are selected and arranged by the playwright in a way that is true to the causal relationships among them. The key differences between drama and narrative can be summarised as follows: o Enactment, meaning to act out rather than to read. Enacted representations involve direct sensing as well as cognition. To state it more simply, the stuff of narrative is description, while the stuff of drama is action. o Intensification, meaning that incidents are selected, arranged, and represented, in general, so as to intensify emotion and condense time. Narrative forms generally employ the reverse process, extensification, where incidents may be reported from a number of perspectives and in ways that expand or explode time (for example, perceptions that take only an eye-blink in the "real time" of the characters in a novel by James Joyce or Virginia Woolf consume whole chapters with perceptual and cognitive detail). The common-sense observation is simply that time has a different scale when you are acting out than it does when you are reading. In Aristotelian terms, this is one of the formal differences between drama and narrative. (For a semioticist's view of the way in which drama accomplishes the condensation of action, see Hilton [1991], especially p. 4.) o Unity of action versus episodic structure: Another basic difference between drama and narrative is in the structure of incidents. Dramas typically represent a strong central action with separate incidents that are causally linked to that action, something the neoclassicists called the unity of action. Narrative tends to be more episodic; that is, incidents are more likely to be quasi-independent and connected thematically rather than causally to the whole. Drama is typically more intense, tightly constructed, economical, and cathartic than narrative. And it is very important to remember that these things are part of the form itself; that is, drama affords these qualities because of the kind of thing it is. The notion of enactment is intrinsic to human-computer activity because of its multisensory nature, as we discuss at length in this chapter and in Chapter 2. Another strong advantage of a dramatic model is illustrated by the simple observation that there are limits on the amount of time that a person can comfortably spend actively engaged in a representation. I know from many years of acting in and directing plays, and even from playing cowboys and Indians in my youth, that when you're acting something out, three or four hours is about the upper limit of your emotional energy. I know from the many hours that I spend humped up over a hot computer that the energy limit, at least for a person of my age range, is roughly the same. Fundamentally, this is an issue of magnitude and closure. The criterion of magnitude (discussed near the end of Chapter 2) suggests that the limitation of duration of an action has aesthetic and cognitive aspects as well as physical ones.
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| Reading The Satanic Verses |
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And this commentary on Barhte's Death of the Author is also pertinent 7 Reading The Satanic Verses GAYATRI CHAKRAVORTY SPIVAK Here is a metropolitan aphorism. 'The birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.' Faced with the case of Salman Rushdie, how are we to read this sentence? I have often said that the (tragic) theatre of the (sometimes farcically self-indulgent) script of poststructuralism is 'the other side'. The aphorism above is a case in point. Let us read slowly, word for word. Barthes is writing here not of the death of the writer (although he is writing, quite copiously, of writing) or of the subject, or yet of the agent, but of the Author. The author, who is not only taken to be the authority for the meaning of a text, but also, when possessed of authority, possessed by the fact of 'moral or legal supremacy, the power to influence the conduct or action of others'; and, when authorising, 'giving legal force to, making legally valid' (OED). Thus, even on the most 'literal' level of the dictionary, 'the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author' takes on a different resonance. Barthes is speaking of the birth not of the critic, who, apart from the academically certified authority of the meaning of a text is, also, in the strictest sense, a judge. It is not of such a being that Barthes announces the birth. He announces the birth of the reader who 'is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted'. It is the birth of this someone that is conditional upon the death of the Author. The writer is, in this robust sense, a reader at the performance of writing Or, as Barthes writes, writing can no longer designate an operation of recording..., rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy, call a performative... in which the enunciation has no other content... than the act by which it is uttered'. When Barthes writes, further, that 'the reader is without history, biography, psychology', I believe he means there is no specific set of history, biography, psychology, belonging to the writer-as-privileged-reader or the ideal reader implied in the text, that gives us the Reader as such. When the writer and reader are born again and again together, the Author(ity)-function is dead, the critic is not mentioned. There is the pleasure of the text. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Reading The Satanic Verses. The Postmodern Arts, N. Wheale ed. Routledge, 1995
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| SPECTACTOR: |
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The Spectactor Project is an ongoing vrml based narrative which explores issues of narrative structure, the narrative of space, online writing and digital performance. By clicking below you will enter the spectactor website which provides and interesting model for an invisible architecture. By clicking this link you will leave the web-lecture but still retain the Digital Futures main navigation.
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