Abstract

Many years ago, Andre Bazin wrote about the cinema as an invention in process. “If cinema in its cradle lacked all the attributes of the cinema to come, it was with reluctance and because its fairy guardians were unable to provide them however much they would have liked to.” (_Bazin, 1967:21). With today’s electronic genesis, all those emergent computer-driven video environments may indeed move the familiar cinematic narrative to a transcendent other world of lofty ideas. Or, as Seymour Chatman describes it in his volume STORY AND DISCOURSE (Chatman, 1978:30), “the indeterminacies -phenomenologists call them Unbestimmtheiten– that arise from the peculiar nature of the medium” may create a much more worrisome, albeit much more exciting medium of control. In a society where increasingly everyone directly or indirectly becomes wired to generic forms of the electronic cinema, from remotes and joysticks to power gloves and HMDs (Head Mounted Displays), to what extent does cinematic narrative reach into the psyche and become inseparable from other operating systems? My lecture will address those concerns. It will discuss how older narrative structures operate within newer interactive systems by focusing on spectator reception and on the effects of machine driven spectator position.

• Dr. David Tafler began writing on interactive video art in the mid 1980s. His early publications chronicled the work of artists Peter d’Agostino (DOUBLE YOU and X,Y,Z.), Lynne Hershman (LORNA), Grahame Weinbren and Roberta Friedman (The Earl King), whose installations pioneered the field. Tafler observed v/user engagement with those installations over months of observation in 1987 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the Whitney Museum. Those observations formed the basis of Tafler’s doctoral dissertation, awarded in 1990. Dr. Tafler has authored and published many articles on interactive media, camcorder activism, avant-garde cinema, electronic art, and community media. davidtafler.com

This paper is part of the Nordicil seminar on the New Narrative of Cinema, organized in context of ISEA94

Full text [PDF] p. 204-205