Abstract

In my presentation, an interactive installation, Marina’s Garden, which is currently in its development phase, is studied as an example of research-based practice -case focusing on narrative, poetic and dramatic aspects of interactive design. Marina’s Garden is a multilayered narrative space, physical as well as virtual, following an associative poetic structure. The work challenges the participant viewer to become a subject of responsibility in an intimate relationship with the poet, Marina. In my presentation Emmanuel Levinas’s thoughts on dialogue and responsibility and poetic notions on caesura are looked at as conceptual background for creating the conditions for an intimate narrative experience in the art work. With my presentation I want to emphasize, that in the interactive drama the role of the
participator should be considered as a position enabling such an agency, which can lead the person to become aware of his or her responsibility for the development of the narrative and its characters rather than just creating a sense of heroic freedom in a fictive world.

• Riikka Pelo (Finland) is a digital media screenwriter and a researcher working on the poetics of interactive narrativity in the Medialab, University of Art and Design Helsinki,
  currently working with her interactive installation Marina’s Garden. The screen writer in a virtual tv production and in the documentary on media arts. Her collaborative artistic work consists of interactive installations, cyberpoetry and hypertexts, narrative experiments with virtual communities, chatterbots and chat-environments, radiophonic poems and poetic short films .The collaborative works of her, recently the installation Game of Imaginary Beings, were shown in the Salon de Arte Digital in Cuba, Cambridge University Moving Image Studio, England, Participatory Design Conference in Sweden, in Lume-keskus, Finland and in the Interactive Frictions, University of Southern California, USA. Published articles are in Digital Creativity (forthcoming), Avek, Mediumi and Arttu. Contributed in the Practice- based Research -symposium in the Cambridge University (2003), in the Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference in Malmö (2002) and in the Cultural Usability Conference in the University of Art and Design Helsinki (2001). Will present a paper in the Research Symposium of Mind Trek 2003, Tampere. Has a background in literature in the University of Helsinki, where she now teaches digital narrativity. The manuscript of her first novel won two literature competitions during 2002 and will be published in the near future.

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