thinkingserially-engberg
TRANSCRIPT
MARIA ENGBERG, PHDASS. PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF MEDIA TECHNOLOGY & PRODUCT DEVELOPMENTMALMÖ UNIVERSITY (SWE)
RESEARCH AFFILIATEAUGMENTED ENVIRONMENTS LAB
GEORGIA TECH (US)
I LOVE YOUR WORK: SERIALITY, PROCEDURALITY & NARRATIVE
Penelope Umbrico > Sunset Portraits self-portraits with the sun taken from Flickr> 2011
ALGORITHMS +
DATA STRUCTURES =
PROGRAMS
Eivind Senneset > Algorithms Research Group at UiB
Niklaus Wirth, 1975
CONTENT +
PROCEDURE =
NARRATIVE
Jonathan Harris > The Whale Hunt > 2007
Jonathan Harris > The Whale Hunt > 2007
“To write procedurally, one authors code that enforces rules to generate some kind of representation, rather than authoring the representation itself.”
Persuasive Games Ian Bogost (2007) p.4
“After the novel, and subsequently cinema privileged narrative as the key form of cultural expression of the modern age, the computer age introduces its correlate—database. Many new media objects do not tell stories; they don't have beginning or end; in fact, they don't have any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.”
“Database as Symbolic Form” Lev Manovich 1998On Broadway - http://www.on-broadway.nyc/
“No database can function without a user interface, and in the case of cultural materials the interface is an especially crucial element of these kinds of digital instruments. Interface embeds, implicitly and explicitly, many kinds of hierarchical and narrativized organizations. Indeed, the database—any database—represents an initial critical analysis of the content materials, and while its structure is not narrativized, it is severely constrained and organized”
Jerome McGann “Database, Interface, and Archival Fever.” 2007
“Interfaces are not simply objects or boundary points. They are autonomous zones of activity. Interfaces are not things, but rather processes…”
Alexander Galloway The Interface Effect 2012
Mark Lafia and Fang-Yu “Frank” Lin > The Battle of Algiers > 2006
Manovich, Douglass > TimeLine > 2009
“visual strategy of the YouTube interface, however simple and limited, encourages the user to construe her visit in terms of an open-ended, exploratory mission. In the movement from clip to clip, the gridded, mosaic view of the frame becomes a navigational system, representing the layout of new terrain the user can enter with each click or tap, continually returning to the mosaic-map after each foray.”
Stephen Monteiro, “Mapping Moving-Image Culture: Topographical Interface and YouTube.” 2014
Jonathan Harris > I Love Your Work > 2013
Jonathan Harris > Today > 2010
Harris & Kamvar We Feel Fine 2005
“…code has felt like the most appropriate medium to express the times in which we live. It
communicates the speed, complexity, and interconnectedness of everything around us, but it also expresses the beautiful patterns that can
emerge from that chaos.”Jonathan Harris > interview in The Great Discontent > July 2014.
“Is narrativity a matter of kind or of degree? Are texts either narrative or not-narrative, with no intermediate or partial options? Or is narrativity a matter of degree: more or less narrative; perhaps a scale ranging from, say, nonnarrative to minimally narrative to fully narrative?”
“ Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry” Brian McHale (2001), 165
“poorly, distractedly, with much irrelevance and indeterminacy … [so] as to evoke narrative coherence while at the same time withholding commitment to it and undermining confidence in it; in short, having one’s cake and eating it too.”
“ Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry” Brian McHale (2001), 165
“the notion of weak narrativity…finesses the question of whether narrativity is more aptly characterized as a matter of degree or one of kind, for here difference in degree (relatively less narrativity) entails a difference in kind (weak narrativity as distinct from figural, proliferating, braided, dilute, anti-, etc.)—quantity becomes quality, and vice versa”
“ Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry” Brian McHale (2001), 165
thank you.