INTERNET’S ORGANIC NARRATIVE_MARIANATSCHUDI

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Mariana Tschudi / Camberwell College of Arts

Internets Organic Narrative

By Mariana Tschudi

MA Digital Arts, Camberwell College of Arts.

Internets Organic Narrative - UAL, UK - 2011 1


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INTERNETS ORGANIC NARRATIVE

Is technology and interactive narrative allowing us to connect with the organic

flow of life? An exploration of the work of Chris Milk and Katerina Cisek as

examples of how interactivity in new media art is influencing video artists to

grow into organic structures of narrative.

ABSTRACT

If we consider art as an anticipatory thermometer of how human mentality is

going to change, it can be interpreted from the development of virtual art that

we are shifting from the rational and logic approach that has governed the world

to a more intuitive and organic one.

We are currently experiencing a revolutionary shift from an economy based on

industrial production to an economy based on digital information. As stated by

some new media theorists like Lev Manovich, this new revolution seems to be

more profound than any previous one, and we are just feeling its initial effects.

This affects people in different realms of life. In the visual arts a new

terminology was created to situate works of art based on digital code or

numerical representations: new media art. The traditional notion of the

isolated artist seeking for inspiration is shifting to artists working collaboratively

in cooperative processes of work. Art pieces are also shifting from being

contemplative to interactive, and the concept of the spectator is increasingly

changing from being the witness of an artistic project to becoming apartner in

crime.

Considering this collaborative artistic atmosphere, I wonder if narrative is

reconfiguring itself into a sort of collage-generated nature where authors

appropriate content and source-code of the World Wide Web for the egoless

co-creation of different alternatives. Is narrative developing into organic

structures so that it will resemble the genetic evolution of cellular networks?

In this paper I will discuss the role of new media arts interactivity in the



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evolution of film/video narrative by analysing the works of contemporary virtual

artists Chris Milk and Katerina Cizek.

KEY WORDS:

Organic filmmaking, collaboration, interactivity, new media art, virtual art,

interactive narrative, Chris Milk, Katerina Cizek.

INTRODUCTION

Artists are considered to be perceptive people who question and challenge

societys deepest parameters, bringing awareness and allowing for social

change to happen. Therefor, artists play the same roll as scientists. Both along

history have questioned the established and have innovated to make society

move one step forward.

Very much of todays art is being developed with software application programs.

Such digital art is power-free art, with no control of how the work of art may

evolve on the web. The process of making art over the Internet means

interconnecting all disciplines in a selfless process. There is a growing tendency

to see artists working in collaboration. The World Wide Web allows a system of

interactive complexity in which a collective of artists work under their own

management helping each other by networking, pooling resources, information

and knowledge. Artists are breaking from the egocentric vertical power

structures and sharing instead, ownership, risk and benefits. The power of

collective creativity goes beyond the traditional notion of film stories developed

by a single author for a single release movie. In the virtual world it is difficult to

control authorship because we seem to be getting rid of it through its anarchic

structure.Many programmers create open source programs anonymously and

for free so that anyone may contribute to their development. The solitary



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anguish of an artist seeking to be understood dissipates in a fluid network of

different disciplines finding coherence in a constantly flowing artistic process.

This is a forever-morphing concept of art growing in the Internet that resembles

the organic flow of life.

Natures evolution of genes and Internets evolution of art

While this new revolution is taking place in the arts, there is a new concept of

evolution being studied by biologists. It is called evo-devo, short for

evolutionary developmental biology. I find a strong similarity between the

concept of evo-devo and how things develop on the web. Evo devo statesthat all animals share the same basic toolkit or body-building genes (from a fly

to a human being) and what varies is the context in which the genes develop. If

the context or network doesnt vary, there is no evolution in the morphology of

the animal. And as stated by scientist Sean B. Carroll, Professor of Molecular

Biology, Genetics, and Medical Genetics, Only those variations that make the

organism fitter will be preserved in evolution; the rest disappears. (Brouwer,

Mulder, 2007, p 6)

As Joke Brouwer and Arjen Mulder state in the book Interact or die (2007),

Exploratory behavior is about creating as much variation as possible, and then

letting the parts of the network that function and interact select themselves and

letting the nonworking parts degenerate. (Brouwer, Mulder, 2007, p 4)

Digital artists working in collaboration resemble the genes of a living organism

as described in the evo-devo concept of evolution. In the digital culture, there

is a notion of living art that emerges from codes or digital genes through which

the living art replicates, recombines and deviates.

Genes interact through their developmental network, (their RNA) the same way

digital artists interact through the World Wide Web. And in the same way that

the functioning parts in genetics select themselves to survive and be stronger,

users of the Internet select successful programs or codes to interact and make

them grow better. The more ranking artworks have over the Internet, the better



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placed and faster they appear on search engines and the more succesful they

become. If there is no interaction, they vanish. Perpetration of art works in

virtual world history will depend on the success of the interaction between the

work of art and the viewer/user.

Interactive Story Telling in the Web.

In traditional storytelling, narrative is a chain of events in a cause-effect

relationship occurring in time and space (Bordwell and Thompson (2008) p.

75). This definition of narrative can be broken down into plot and story. In a film,

a sequence of shots is considered the plot and what the viewer imaginesbetween sequences of shots, is the story. Narrative has dramatically changed

this traditional structure on the Internet. A new 'cinema' with much more

flexibility is rising in which the users subjectivity while interacting with an ever-

changing interactive movie is crucial. Choices made by the viewer/users create

the story. The movie can be played innumerable times, can have more than one

entry point to the story, and is created through different threaded webs without

ever exactly repeating the same image sequences, screen layouts and

narratives.

When narrative moves to the computer it combines text, video, and navigable

spaces, and deals with interactivity, collaboration, databases and even real-time

databases. But even when it combines the confusing multiplicity of these

mosaic media, the computer offers us new ways of mastering fragmentation. It

gives us search engines and ways to tag the fragments so that it can find

things that are related to one another (Murray, p 156)

We are only experiencing the very beginnings of the interactive story-telling

capacities of the web. Its potential is unpredictable and immensurable.

There are innumerable examples of interactive narratives in the web. I have

chosen to research two artists who, through their work, illustrate the potential of

narrative in the cyber world.



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KATERINE CISEK, and the potential of documentaries in the web

Katerine Cisek is a Canadian documentary filmmaker and web creator who has

won several prizes like the 2000 Montreal New Talent Award, the International

Documentary Film Festival of Amsterdam, or the International Digital Emmy, for

her innovative way of using media and creating programs to reach real

communities. I consider Cisek to be a great example of a filmmaker who has

adjusted to the digital environment aftera long career as a traditional

documentary filmmaker.

While being a Filmmaker-in-Residence from the National Film Board of Canada,

Cisek has been directing community-based documentary projects that innovate

in the use web platforms. Working collaboratively with artists, urban planners,

urban theorists, activists and residents in different countries they developed

various ideas and projects that are all integrated under the HIGHRISE

concept, which is described in their main webpage as a multiyear project to

document human experience in vertical suburbs. The aim of HIGHRISE,

however, is much more ambitious than simple documentation; is rather to

create a series of projects to help re-imagine and re-invent the experience of

being an urban species living in the 21st century.

A big global project, winner of several awards that came out of the High Rise

project was Out Of My Window, a 360-degree documentary project built in

Flash, which documents the phenomenal diversity that exists behind the

concrete walls of 13 high rise neighbourhoods in the world.

When Katerina Cisek wanted to understand the experience of living in towers

she did not simply interview people and edited the audiovisual material to

illustrate her point of view; rather she let the story come to her by using the

web.As she said in an interview with CollabDocs Its not about deciding what

happens and going and grabbing everything thats going to prove your case.

(Cisek, K. to CollabDocs, 2011)

Out of my Windowhas a formidable web scenario esthetically conceived, where

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stories of real people are being told in a very natural way. Cisek offers the users

the chance to view real-life scenes and situations inside someones apartment.

The viewer is infused with curiosity navigating all around a strangers room

through the 360 degree interface. It is possible to find random stuff, click in

different objects to learn more about the person living in that space. However,

every one of the 13 people presented in the project seem to have been carefully

selected, and therefore, Out of my Windowwas not free from content

manipulation. To retrieve this problem another sub-project of the Highrise

concept started to come alive to: Participate. This Project permits spontaneity to

happen, by allowing people around the world to send pictures and stories of

their life in tower blocks. In Participate the sense of collaboration and crowd

sourcing comes truly alive and Katerina Cisek seems to act more as a

facilitator, than as a narrator. As Katerina said, in a collabDocs interview Were

trying to keep a balance: allowing the research, the story, and the technology,

to develop in tandem, and speak to one another along the way and its really

a fantastic process to be part of. (Cisek, K to CollabDocs 2011)

Katerina and her team wanted to explore even deeper how documentary films

can unfold inside a web browser, therefore they created their latest project so

far: One Millionth Tower. This interactive project plays with 2D and 3D

representations of 6 different towers of Toronto, and has the potential of

expanding to many more towers of the world. It tells the story of how it is

possible to transform a physical space by transforming the virtual

representation of that same space online. Using the arrow keys the user walks

through the virtual 3D space. There are several layers of assets in the project:

every building is a 3D object, the floor surface is separate, videos, photos and

graphics appear at different points, but they all play out together through code

in a way that you cant tell one apart from the other. The project is created with

the support of two new trend technologies: webGL which allows the 3D

experience to happen in the browser, and Popcorn.js, a tool for linking video to

real time information from the web. This allows for real weather information to

affect how the virtual world looks in the project. For example, if you are

navigating through the One Millionth Towerproject and it is foggy in Toronto,then the weather looks foggy in the project.



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One Millionth Toweropens up a real-time relationship with reality and is an

example of how the cyber world allows a more spontaneous form of narrative

through the use of powerful tools that connect the virtual world with the real

one.

Together, all of the projects that are branching out of the HIGHRISEconcept

are creating a network documentary that portrays the world we live in. The

Kaleidoscope power of the computer allows us to tell stories that more truly

reflect our turn-of-the century sensibility. We no longer believe in a single

reality, a single integrating view of the world, or even the reliability of a single

angle perception. (J. H. Murray, p 160)

Chris Milk Deeper Audiovisual Experiences in the Cyberspace

Chris Milk is an American music video director who comparable to Katerina

Cisek, has also been developing innovative ways of using the cyberspace as a

medium to engage the viewer in a deeper audiovisual experience.

One of his projects called The Wilderness Downtown, was created for the music

group Fire Arcades song We Used to Wait. This is a different type of music

video, one that brings the viewer's own childhood associations into the work.

The Wilderness Downtown project, usesHTML5and Google maps to



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personalize the experience by showing satellite Street View images of the

viewers first house and neighborhood, bringing old memories back. The project

interweaves publicly available databases (Google Maps) with multiple-window

actions in the screen.

The synchronized video content showed to the viewer makes him/her

experience the feeling of virtually running through the streets where he or she

grew up. This project assembles together the audio of a bittersweet song with

personalized video to create an individualized nostalgic visual experience. The

era of globalization, in which we are currently living, dyes us all with the

common sensation of being homogenized. Projects like The Wilderness

Downtown, brings back to the viewer the sense of individuality.

Another project directed by Chris Milk is The Johnny Cash Project, a Google

Chrome project created in 2010. This crowd-sourced venture is a tribute to

Johnny Cash and a beautiful example of the power of communitariancollaboration on the web. The projects aim was to construct Johnny Cashs last



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music video clip. Chris Milk took the musicians last song Is not No Grave,

recorded in the studio before his death. He then put together an extensive

collection of Johnny Cashs pictures and developed an onlinedrawing tool with

limited range of brushes, colors and textures. Fans were invited to participate

and share their visions of Johnny Cash through choosingone of the

many pictures (frames) available to create their own portrait of Cash. Currently,

there are over 250,000 contributions, but as specified in the projects main

webpage, it will continue to grow one frame at a time. All the portraits run one

after the other in a timeline during the flow of the song, and together they create

the music video. This wonderful idea resulted in a really touching collaborative

piece. Chris Milk laid out the parameters of the work and ordered the frames to

create a cohesive story line but allowed any person in the world to enrich it by

making each frame personal and thoughtful.

3 Dreams of Black, the latest project directed by Chris Milk was released in May

2011. It is a truly immersive 3D world created exclusively for the web. 3 Dreams

of Black, produced by Radical Media, features a song from the album Rome by

Danger Mouse and Daniele Luppi and is told from the point of view of a little girl

who goes to sleep and has three dreams, each with its own interactive

adventure experience.

3 Dreams of Blackis created with code, most of what we see is not video but

real time rendering of visual models. The technology used for this project is

webGL. With the use of the mouse the user can move around the virtual world

navigating in three dimensions, to create objects that people will vote on. The

most popular objects will be incorporated into everyone elses experience of the

film. 3 Dreams of Blackis a dreamy trippy environment, riddled with surprises,

and the experience never unfolds the same way twice.

http://www.radicalmedia.com/http://www.radicalmedia.com/


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Chris Milk has directed these pioneering interactive narrative experiences in the

web to move beyond the classic music video concept. Both, Katerina Ciseks

One Millionth Towerand Chris Milks 3 Dreams of Black, release their code to

the public so anyone can learn about these technologies and built on top of

what they already created. As Branden Bratuhin, One Millionth Towers

Technical Director, said in a Youtube video posted by the NFB: Everything that

youve seen in the site you can go back and explore at the technology page.

Find out exactly how is made, see the code line by line, and take it and make it

something of your own. (Bratuhin to NFB, 2011)

This open source characteristic is a tremendous detachment from the traditional

artistic egocentric way of creating and it is helping us to understand the cyber

language.

The dark side of cyber-narrative

We are currently experiencing the shift from a passive reception of narrative

films, to active interaction through computer narratives. This has the potential to

engage the viewer on a much deeper level, although the technique has still not

been mastered. There remain some big problems concerning hyper narrative.

The post-modern cinematic strategies of de-centering and non-closure through

non-cohering narrative threads are strategies that engender the viewers

distraction rather than deep engagement. (Ben Shaul, N. 2008, p21)



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According to Nitzan Ben Shaul the only way narrative will adapt successfully to

the computers nature is when the human cognitive strive for coherence are

taken into consideration. I consider however that through the computer we are

accessing another reality that goes beyond the cognitive stimulus, which brings

with it even bigger problems. There is a risk that the increasing capacities of

virtual narratives to generate the feeling of real presence in virtual worlds will

create significant problems of perception. The serious contradiction between

corporeal reality and artificial image illusion is likely to be at a level that almost

precludes rational access. (Grau, O. 2003 p 203)

Conclusion:

Story telling tools and programs are constantly being created for the web,

allowing people to access a more personal, intuitive and organic way of

communicating and understanding a story. The Internet enables artists to pull in

real-time information to their projects, so that reality influences their narrative.

Adapting our brains to this new fluid narrative will take some time, but we are

already facing a new world where the rational mentality is opening up and we

are learning to cohabit with spontaneity and personalized experiences.

Based on the open source code characteristic on projects in the web, it is

undeniable that the Internet is fomenting selfless thinking instead of rational and

egocentric desires. Modern capitalist life emphasizes individuality to the point

where a personal computer turns into an extension of a person. The sense of

community is lost. Paradoxically, the computer is bringing this back.

The Internet embodies the notion of interconnectivity. This allows collaborative

ways of developing narrative, which combined with databases and powerful

search engines, altogether connects the right person with a particular story.

Therefore, real people living a specific situation enrich online stories by sharing

their reality, and those stories become even more subjective since Internet

allows for real time connections to the viewers personal reality. Viewers and

creators are merging into one another. Furthermore, the network opens up

kaleidoscopic narrations, which mirroring real life situations, never unfold the



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same way twice.

Narrative in cyberspace is adapting to the flow of life. If there is no interaction

with the story, it fades out of existence. How much time do we need to open up

to this organic and intuitive way of interactive narrative? The tool to connect into

a deeper level of narrative, one that brings together intuition and rationality,

individuality and community, is already created. We just need to follow suit.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us

(Mcluhan 1964, xi-xii).



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BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Aarseth, Espen J. (1997) Cybertext Perspectives on Ergodic LiteratureThe John Hopkins University Press. Baltimore and London.

Ben Shaul, N (2008) Hyper-Narrative Interactive Cinema. Problems andSolutions. Ed (Rodopi B.V. Amsterdam New York, NY)

Brouwer, J, Mulder, A. (2007) Interact or Die: There Is Drama In The Networks

Bordwell, D. & Thompson, K. (2008). Film Art: An Introduction (Eighthed.). New York: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc

Grau, O (2003) Virtual Art: From illusion to Immersion

Manovich, L. (2001). The Language of New Media.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, (2006) Art des nouveaux medias.TASCHEN

McLuhan, M. (1964). Understanding Media: The extensions of man. NewYork: McGraw-Hill.

Murray, J.H. (1997) Hamlet on the Holodeck. The Future of Narrative in

Cyberspace. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Wilson, S. (2003) Information Arts, intersections of Art, Science andTechnology. First MIT Press paperback edition.

WEBSITES:

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Kinder, M. (1999) Doors to the Labyrinth: Designing Interactive Frictions with NinaMenkes, Pat O'Neill, and John Rechy. Available athttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2342/is_2_33/ai_59586987/ [Accessed10 October, 2011]

Amerika, M. Networks Installations, creative exhibitionisms and virtualrepublishing: an attempt at contextualizing the ongoing ungoing. Story ofbeing in cyberspace.Available at [Accessed 5November, 2011]

National Film Board of Canada (2011) Highrise/One Millionth Tower - Open

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Technology. Internet. October, 2011Available at [Accesed 31October, 2011]

Cisek, K (2011) Kat Cisek on Highrise. Internet. Agust 11, 2011Available at [Accessed 20 October, 2011]

Rose, Mandy (2011) COLLAB DOCS. Internet [Accessed 28 October, 2011]

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[Accessed 23 September,2011]

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