Narrative Architectures: Bodies, Spaces, Technologies in Contemporary Media Experience
Imago. Studi di cinema e media No. 22/2020
edited by Enrico Carocci and Adriano D’Aloia
In which aspects and to what extent can one regard as “narrative” the spatial experience provided by a museum route, a urban building, a multimedia interactive environment, or an immersive videogame? Under which conditions may spatiality be constitutive of a narratively organized interactive experience? What are the relationships between a represented pictorial space and a designed material space, when their narrative roles are taken into account? And what are the socio-cultural or political implications of the mediated interactions between individuals and environments?
Taken together, the possible answers to such questions allow us to grasp some specific features of contemporary media experience, which is broadly characterized by a special emphasis on the articulations between bodily interactions, spatial constructs, and technological innervations. At the same time, the distinctive features of contemporary media experience – irrespective of whether they take place in everyday, entertainment or artistic environments – allow us to rethink on a general theoretical level issues of narrativity, interaction, or immersion.
This special section of Imago aims at investigating the narrative configurations which emerge from the interaction between bodies, spaces, and technologies in contemporary media experiences. More specifically, it addresses the projects which prefocus and orient those experiences, and the forms they assume depending on the medium which is taken under consideration.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Enrico Carocci and Adriano D’Aloia, Designing Spaces, Enacting Stories: Embodied Ecology and Media Experience
I. Enacting Diegesis
Steffen Hven, Narrative Architectures and the Diegesis-as-Environment Abstract
This article proposes the concept of the diegesis-as-environment, a film narratological tool designed to explore aspects of the narrative film that have been systematically neglected by textual film analysis: the nonrepresentational, affective, atmospheric, material, kinesthetic, multisensorial, and sonic production of film worlds. In recognizing narrative worlds as more than texts, the diegesis-asenvironment marks both a return to, and an elaboration of, the broad filmological definition of the diegesis as the world posed by a work of art. Unlike the dominant textual conception of the diegesis, however, the diegesis-asenvironment relies on the embodied spectator’s transformation of the movements of the film into a lived environment, habitus, atmosphere, milieu, or Umwelt . This is not a move away from verbal or linguistic signification nor from the more complex organization of narratives, but an attempt to resituate these as components of a larger material-affective semiotics of cinema.
Elio Ugenti, Exploring Media Space in a Narrative Way: The Ongoing Desktop Narration Between New Digital Media and Contemporary Cinema Abstract
This article takes into consideration some narrative traits in the experience of the media user within contemporary screen interfaces. I will start from the assumption that the research, visualization, and appropriation of media contents of a different nature (textual, photographic, audiovisual, etc.) necessarily passes through the exploration of different environments with respect to which the interfaces define the degree and modality of the interaction that is determined. Secondly, I will stress some hypotheses on the emergence of an ongoing narrative based on “topological choices” and allowed by those forms of interaction described in the first two sections. I will consider this form of narrative as not structured a priori but determined moment by moment by the actions performed by the media user: an embodied and situated narrative. In the last section, I will analyse how this form of spatialized ongoing narrative is staged within the desktop film Searching by Aneesh Chaganty, and I will move some considerations on its role in the construction of a “situated parallel plot”.
Luis Rocha Antunes, The Viewer’s Point-of-View in Fleabag: Constructing a Perceptual Participation in the Narrative Space Abstract
The concept of narrative, within audiovisual media such as film and television, has traditionally been defined as something internal, or contained, in the medium itself. It would be unusual to refer to the narrative of an audiovisual medium and include viewers as part of that narrative. Viewers are commonly thought of as entities external to a story who experience audiovisual stories through the senses, their emotions, and their cognition in general. Consequently, the space of a narrative is also internal to the medium, it resides inside the device used to screen a film or a television show. This essay looks at the viewer’s participation in the TV series Fleabag story to argue that narrative space can be extended to viewer’s physical space. This goes one step beyond arguing that the spatial narrative of an audiovisual medium finds embodied representation in the viewer’s mind. The underlying idea in this essay is that the actual, physical space of the spectator is an integral part of Fleabag narrative space. Recent uses of the dramaturgical device of breaking-the-fourth-wall in televised series have challenged the assumption that the narrative space exists only inside the medium. Specifically, Fleabag takes the use of breaking-the-fourth-wall to a level where the main character establishes and develops a relationship with the viewer so that the narrative space of the series transcends the medium and expands to the experiential space of the viewer. The goal is to argue that Fleabag represents a paradigm shift in the conception of narrative space in audiovisual media.
Francesco Sticchi, Enacting the Neoliberal Turn: Exploring the Narrative Architectures and Ecology of The Deuce Abstract
The Deuce observes the transformations of the notorious 42nd street of New York across the 1970s and 1980s. Aim of this paper is demonstrating how the series enacts this urban mutation through the integration of the affective and experiential texture of the story-world into a unitary, yet multifaceted and transformative, ecology. The analysis will be carried out by drawing from Mikhail Bakthin’s notions of chronotope and dialogism, demonstrating the pragmatic power of artistic experience in enacting spacetime dimensions characterised by an intrinsic emotional and conceptual polyphony. These concepts will be examined within the framework of an enactivist and film-philosophical understanding of cinematic experience addressing the ethical power entangled in viewers’ aesthetic engagement. I will resort to these ideas to discuss how The Deuce offers a complex and critical enactment of the socio-economic dynamics of the Neoliberal Turn, metonymically embedded, in its conflicts and contradictions, within the series’ mutating environment.
II. Building Stories
Yanna Popova, Narrativity and Metaphor in Architectural Form: An Enactive Engagement Abstract
This article deals with the question how meaning is created and sustained in the process of interaction with an architectural work of art. The approach is broadly phenomenological in that it distinguishes between the different strata in the make-up of a work of art, i.e. the material foundation of the specific work and its respective concretization, accomplished by a perceiver. At the same time, the active, embodied and processual nature of engagement with architectural works lends itself to productive analysis when put in conversation with the cognitive scientific paradigm of enactivism, which has emerged in recent years as a cohesive account of the profound relationship of a living organism and its natural, social and artefactual environment. Such a description of what constitutes architectural experience for an embodied and situated agent is undertaken here. It is also argued that works of art and architectural art forms can be profitably spoken of and understood as two fundamental ways of sensemaking for human beings. One is metaphorical and has to do with perceiving similarity among categories; the other is schematic and is based on relations of contiguity, such as temporality or causality. Both play a role in the enactive engagement with architectural forms.
Alex Whee Kim and M.C. Overholt, En-actors at the Vessel: Architecture, Neoliberalism, and Queer/Crip Refusal Abstract
In this article, we argue that the Vessel – the architectural centerpiece of New York City’s Hudson Yards development – demonstrates the political, economic, and aesthetic properties of neoliberalism. As part of a privately-owned “public” space, the Vessel is productively understood through its structural similarities to immersive theater and game play, forms of ludic media that similarly promote neoliberal values of “choice” and free navigation while simultaneously extracting labor from participants. Out of this construction emerges what has been called a “culture of circulation,” in which bodies, images, and capital flow through spatial and digital environments, generating profit for real estate developers like the Vessel’s patron, Related Companies. The second half of this paper turns to “queer” and so-called “crip” critiques of neoliberalism and the built environment to explicate how discriminatory ableism is inscribed in the design of the Vessel, even as its designers attempt to bring the structure into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. One activist group, led by artist Shannon Finnegan, provides a useful methodology for “curb-cuting” the culture of discrimination perpetuated by the Vessel. In proposing that an “Anti-Stairs Club Lounge” be built next to the Vessel, these anti-ableist protesters suggest alternative space-making practices centered on mutuality and inclusivity.
Philipp Röding, Requiem for One World Observatory Abstract
Narrative architectures help up us to come to terms with the disruptions of history. The so-called Viewing Platform, designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro and erected a few months after the 9/11-attacks, allowed the public to view the recovery operation ongoing at the former World Trade Center site. Opening up a view toward “The Pit” provided a sense of historical reality to an event that, to some commentators, appeared unreal. One World Observatory, which opened in 2015 and is housed at the top of One World Trade Center, presents an altogether different view on New York and its history. These two elevated viewpoints represent two instances of how the public gaze is staged and choreographed. In this article, I take a comparative look at how these two architectures re-tell and re-mediate the (hi)story of New York City and examine the role audiovisual media play in that regard.
Cosetta Saba, Self-operating Machines in the Art Practice of Philippe Parreno Abstract
For at least the past decade, artists have utilized diverse media to reconceive the art exhibition as simultaneously an object and vehicle for theoretical reflection on artmaking itself, on the conditions determining the appearance and possibility of art, on the formats and the modes of action it entails, and on its institutional status. In many cases, the display of such exhibitions depends not only upon the employment of new technologies (mechanical, digital, biological); rather, technology undergirds and activates programs whose interfaces manifest material contents and immaterial contexts that take the form of experiential eco-systems and/or bio-semiotic environments. These exhibition projects take place in heterotopic public spaces (various museum setings, parks, gardens, urban spaces) which are critically reactivated by artistic practices interested in the “performativity” of the processes involved in constructing the exhibition’s physical settng and “prefiguring” the experience of the spectator. We propose to investigate how, in Philippe Parreno’s work, certain exhibition spaces come to function as sensitive autopoietic environments, and how within these environments the sensorium, fictionality, narration, the conceptual and an- thropological dimensions of the image, and production/experimentation with “reality” still pass through an interrogation of the conditions of probability – situated, historical, and cultural – of contemporary art in all its forms.
III. Gamifying Interactions
Vito Zagarrio, Il corpo dello spett/attore. La logica ludica e interattiva nei racconti audiovisivi contemporanei Abstract
This essay aims to reflect on the relationship between body, space and time in con- temporary audiovisual universe. The spectator (which the essay calls – with a play on words – “Spect / Actor”) tends to change his position towards the screen/screens. The perception of time also changes, because of the influence of a gamification that imposes multiple, parallel dimensions, where both narrative and chronological time expand. The case studies range from the “videogame logic” (Jumanji and sequels, Ready Player One), to the Virtual Reality (Carne y Arena by Iñarritu), from some episodes of Black Mirror (the case of Bandersnatch is emblematic) to various Netilix series in which the mutation of bodies is combined with a revolution of both time and space (for example The Umbrella Academy or Alice in Borderland).
Elisabetta Modena and Andrea Pinotti, Making Room for the Story: Storytelling and Interaction in Virtual Environments Abstract
How is Virtual Reality “narratopological”? How can VR impact the intersection between space construction and narrative strategies? These issues must be tackled by comparing VR to non-VR media such as video games and cinema. In the first section, we will reconstruct the debate between narratologists and ludologists, which gave birth to the Game Studies discipline. In the second, we will consider the transition from non-VR to VR video games, trying to define a narratopological specificity of the latier. Subsequently, we will examine the role of the user as a “situated” subject in relation both to space and to the story. We will address interactivity by considering the user’s agencies in VR environments according to different degrees of freedom. In the last section, a comparative analysis of point of view in cinema, video games and VR will clarify a narratopological specificity of VR itself in relation to the “situated” viewer’s gaze.
Francesco Toniolo, Gardens (of Eden) as Narrative Meta-spaces in Video Games Abstract
This paper explores – within a general game design-oriented approach – the metaphor of the “garden as a game world”, comparing the self-enclosed worlds of video games with the concept of western garden. The first part presents the state of the art of previous studies about gardens in video games and gardens as a metaphor for video games. Then, the paper links the synthesis between nature and culture – connected to the deep roots of western gardens: the Garden of Eden – to the actions of players. Video game players, just like Adam in the book of Genesis, are invited to «cultivate and care for» (Gn 2,15) a land/garden they will never truly own, perceiv- ing their own limitedness.
See and purchase on the publisher web site »
Comments RSS Feed