multimedia

“Making PIE: Closing the gap between story and experience” elaborates and expands on existing relationships between story and experience, using e-lit and game examples to demonstrate the importance of PIE environments for creative and scholarly communication.

Story is a way of rendering, essentializing, curating, crystallizing and communicating experience. Like the way that food preserves process the bounty of harvest moments into forms that extend the benefits of that harvest through longer durations and broader spaces, story is a method of processing, preserving and extending experience beyond the moment of actual or imagined events. However, given that “contemporary media is experiential,” (Arbuckle and Stewart) multimedia e-lit and digital game experiences are ways of reconstituting such story preserves into participatory interactive experiences (PIE). PIE comes from Dene Grigar’s extension of Vince Dziekan’s ideas on multimedia museum curation. Dzeikan proposes a “movement away from what might be termed as a broadcast model of distribution (entailing a one-way communication approach) by introducing degrees of openness (access, participation) and feedback (exchanges, transactions). This shift entails ideological choices that challenge the museum’s ability to respond to a changing mandate, from one founded on its presentation role to that of providing an infrastructure for aesthetic experience” (70). While Grigar migrates Dzeikan’s idea of curating participatory, interactive experiences to the practice of curating e-lit, she also asserts that e-lit is already a multimedial PIE. Story becomes lived experience in these environments and such experiences are more communicatively and rhetorically impactive than traditional written and oral forms of storytelling.

The act of integrating physical, virtual and textual conceptual spaces to create a unified new media artifact can be challenging. In our work we embrace a constant state of reconceptualization, as we transition between physical aspects of a performance and AI based manipulations that are both visual (art abstraction) and semantic. In these experiments the AI system works with meaning in terms of semantic keywords about the emotions and descriptions of a work. To fully explore the capabilities of these new immersive, virtual and semantic technologies, we can no longer rely on traditional creation, editing and production techniques, but must develop new practices and styles. We propose a new framework for creating what we refer to as ‘multimodal media-spaces.’ These media-spaces include interactive and video-based work that seek to combine physical, virtual and textual entities. This paper details our framework and its uses in several juried multimedia pieces. In our work we use 360 VR and multi-camera filming, movement performance from amateur and professionals, distortions of space and time using AI cinematic projections. We then process this footage using AI Deep Learning systems we have written that take text based cues and artfully abstracts the performance footage to create layers of emergent meaning. We explore and define this framework in relation to previous hybrid multimodal media-spaces we have created, and describe how this framework has led to the development of existing works and can be used by other media artists to explore emerging physical, virtual and textual conceptual multimodal media-spaces

Christine Wilks is an awarded digital writer, artist and developer of playable stories who participated in different projects in the field of electronic literature. In this interview, she talks about her interest in electronic literature, her activism in the different projects as well as the use of different media tools and of ludic elements in her works.

This is the first interview of a series called Electronic Literature Review Featuring. I re-publish interviews of other web pages with the permission of the interviewer or the interviewee.

Katherine Acheson’s free-standing hypertext demonstrates how design can reinforce what’s said, offer a counterpoint, and, occasionally, convey a critique of the critic.

(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/illuminated)