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Additive to Expressive Form
• The early days of film• Cradle Films– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4nj0vEO4Q6s– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FrdVdKlxUk
• Invention of major elements of filmic storytelling– Close up– Chase scene– Feature length
• Movement of camera, changes in focus, cut up and assembly of film
• Photoplay = Photography + Theater
Computational Media
• Are we at the incunabula stage?– Early stories on the web were pretty bad
• But what about the computer as a meta-medium?
• Exaggeration: every start-up is trying to create a new medium.
Computer-based Characters
• Eliza– Many versions of
this story• What does this
story tell us?• Limitations of Eliza
as model for characters?
Digital Environments
• Interactive1. Procedural2. Participatory
• Immersive3. Spatial4. Encyclopedic
• Eliza is procedural in that it has a procedure for selecting response based on the most recent and prior comments by the user.– Coming up with those procedures can be difficult.
Participatory
• The user must participate in the story• Zork– Text-based adventure game– Modeled on understood type
of world (fantasy)– “The computer was
programming the player.”– Not NLP but more natural
than before• Lessons?
Spatial
• The myth of PARC– First graphical user interface? Well, not quite.
• Aspen movie map– Tour of Aspen that gives a sense of presence
• Zork (again)– Imagined world with imaginable layout
• Space can be abstract– Victory Garden – intersecting lives during the 1st gulf war
• “The event is happening now. The event is happening to you.”
Encyclopedic
• Computers have huge capacity.• Value in narrative?– Think of Tolkien's Middle Earth or the Star Trek
universe– Others?
• Negative effects?• Simulations – exposing the assumptions– “the interpretive framework is embedded in the rules
by which the system works and in the the way in which participation is shaped”
Digital Structures of Complexity
• Memex – “human knowledge is a solvable maze, open to
rational organization”• Xanadu – “hummingbird mind”, “all things are deeply
intertwingled”• Time steps – the game of life– Emergent structure/behavior
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