hybridity

What Do We Call This?

Between 2019 – 2020 The University of South Wales collaborated with a consortium of creative commercial practitioners dubbed Fictioneers in a UKRI funded, Audience of the Future R&D demonstrator project designed to further develop digital storytelling within the UK Creative Industries. Using the popular Wallace and Gromit IP, the consortium drew upon their combined skills in games production, animation, creative marketing and new technology development to create a location-based experience targeting young audiences entitled Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up, designed to propel new and playful identities for a traditional narrative media.

Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up is an ambitious and complex production. Through their research and development efforts, Fictioneers sought to develop a viable production alternative to branching tree, digital story-telling structures which risk combinatorial explosion. Instead, the application delivers a rich tapestry of serialised, short media elements. Linked by a central, enhanced mobile application, the multi-platform media include YouTube videos and comics, as well as augmented reality game-play challenges. The application aims to engage new audiences and provide innovative ways for long term fans to interact with media favourites. Mimicking a variety of social newsfeed items these media elements are variable, chunked and optional to view. They are also pre-determined and closely networked via the central newsfeed. The story-flow is complex nevertheless, incorporating enhanced augmented reality story-telling, multi-platform media and mobile game-play.

The hybridity of this experience posed new challenges regarding the most definitive way to describe the experience on offer, as well as the most helpful frameworks to evaluate it. With few alternative terms on hand to describe this genre, the term experience was often used to describe the sort of hybrid encounter made possible via this complex network of media influences, but experience is still an open-ended concept that can be hard to pin-point. Alternative terms like digital story-telling may also be useful place-holders to help delineate interactive and narrativised experiences from traditional media encounters, nevertheless such terminology is still only useful to an extent. Narrative frameworks such as characterisation, pace and tone are relevant to projects like Wallace & Gromit: Big Fix Up, but they don’t capture all the elements that audiences encounter in real time. Describing the experience as a game can be equally problematic, since it can set up expectations of a very different type of challenge-driven, dramatic experience than this application delivers.

In this paper I explore what additional insights can be gained by also considering the interplay of technology and creativity within the research and development process. Technology is a defining feature of this digital storytelling experience. Augmented reality technologies, for example, offer dynamic, enhanced tracking and visualisation opportunities, whilst also demanding strict file-size constraints, comprehensive audience testing and extensive cross-disciplinary collaboration. By evaluating the creative and technical processes shaping the development of this hybrid media identity, I explore the ways in which any effective definition of this new type of distributed genre is likely to be as much about co-ordination, as new experience.

The 2015 ELO Conference’s call for papers states that "[e]lectronic literature is situated as an intermedial field of practice, between literature, computation, visual and performance art. The conference will seek to develop a better understanding of electronic literature’s boundaries and relations with other academic disciplines and artistic practices."

This roundtable discussion, led by both established and emerging e-lit scholars and artists, will explore the idea of electronic literature as an intermedial practice, looking at the topic from a wide range of forms including literature, performance, sound, computation, visual art, and physical computing. Drawing upon artistic work they have produced or studied, each panelist will provide a five-minute statement that touches on qualities related to intermediality like hybridity, syncretism, and collaboration. Following this series of brief presentations, the panelists, then, encourage engagement in a wider conversation with the audience.

Because it is our contention that multiple media in combination in a work of art provide endless opportunities for innovation, contemplation, and “fresh perspectives” (Kattenbelt), rendering the notion of an “end” impossible to reach, the goal of the panel is to engage the ELO community in a discussion about the shifting boundaries of electronic literature and its ongoing development as an art form.

(source: ELO 2015 conference catalog)

In the *Location of Culture*, Bhabha uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. A major site of ambivalence in the realm of digital art and literature lies in the fact that so much of this work exists outside of the economy of exchange and commodified culture. Where lies the future in an art that generates no income for its creators? In a user-generated culture, arts exist at a social interstice (in Nicolas Bourriaud's terms) that might provide a model to evade the pitfalls of consumer culture, commodified objects and monetary exchange. How might the social nature of these works and open source approaches create a space for a new literary/artistic model?

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference)