New Tools for New Stories
Last Thursday, artists Jean Rasenberger and Tom Knechtel invited me out to Art Center to give a talk. The topic? Tools. Yes, it's an odd subject, but the seminar is what's known as a "transdisciplinary studio," in which students explore a single concept from multiple perspectives; the collision of ideas is often exhilarating and unexpected.I decided to talk about digital storytelling and the intersection of media-making tools and culture. I'm curious about new kinds of stories as the computer influences cinema. What happens when cinema is no longer confined to movie theaters or DVD players? What is cinema when it's on your cell phone or computer, on giant billboards scattered around the city and on mini-screens at the bank? And what are the tools that make this cinema happen?
LA-based artist Doug Aitken calls the new form "broken screen" storytelling in his book Broken Screen: Expanding the Image, Breaking the Narrative.His multi-screen video titled Sleepwalkers, projected on the outside walls of New York's Museum of Modern Art last year, is a prime example. With a cast that includes Cat Powers, Donald Sutherland and Tilda Swinton, the story centers on the daily lives of five characters as they move through the city in the course of a single day. The project created a kind of site-specific urban movie, the characters joining the city's inhabitants outdoors at night as the projection and the city's own drama merged.
While outdoor projections are becoming increasingly common, I'm also fascinated by online projects that use digital tools to tell stories in new ways. I'm thinking specifically of Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's We Feel Fine project from 2005, for example. It uses a data collection engine that searches the Web every 10 minutes looking for he words "I feel" or "I'm feeling." When blog entries with these words are found, they are connected to a database that can then be accessed by visitors to the We Feel Fine project. The result is an evolving portrait of global emotion that is at once immense and incredibly personal and poignant.
Alex Dragulescu uses a similar tactic in What I Did Last Summer, a project from 2006. In this case, he created what he calls a "blogbot" that lets users find text based on a certain theme. For What I Did Last Summer, Dragulescu collects text from two blogs, namely "My War," which is written by a US soldier in Iraq, and text from the Bahgdad blogger. These text fragments then create a dynamic graphic novel using characters from the game Civilization 3. The story spills across the screen in a form that's part documentary portrait and part videogame comic book.
Finally, Jonathan Harris has a newer project titled The Whale Hunt, which is based on nine days he spent with a family of Eskimos in Alaska last year; Harris joins them on a whale-hunting exhibition, and records the entire trip in a sequence of more than 3,000 photographs.
Harris might have made a very compelling, linear documentary film about his trip. Instead, he opted to create what he calls "an experimental interface for storytelling." The site lets users configure the story in multiple ways, even in arranging the database of images as a mosaic, timeline or pinwheel, and it encourages you to select characters, themes and the pace of the story to find multiple versions and sub-stories.
While the resulting control is totally opposed to the pleasures of traditional Hollywood narratives, which, in the best cases, leave you in the hands of expert storytellers, The Whale Hunt has its own unexpected pleasures. The moments of boredom that make up a large part of the story would most certainly have been left on the cutting room floor. However, in the project, some of these "boring" images are also incredibly lovely, and moving through them reveals a quotidian beauty that would be lost in a traditional linear adventure.
In each of these cases, stories are broken into multiple screens and it's up to viewers to put them together again. The new tools are databases and algorithms. What, I asked the class, does this tell us about who we are? We're a culture always on the go, said one; we're networked or we're lost, said another; it's about participating and doing it yourself, said a third. Tom Knechtel pointed out that these projects are about an urban space - these are not rural experiences - and Jean Rasenberger said that they're about multiple times and spaces and require a kind of agility to navigate. All so true - and this is why I love going to Art Center!