Computational and spatially-organised narrativity

In the first quarter of the 21 century, there is no sign of conventional linear storytelling disappearing or losing its expressive power; but at the same time, new genres of non-linear games, television, music, drama and cinema, supported by the computer, have become a reality—rather than a theoretical possibility. On the one hand, these rely on the heritage of conventional storytelling genres; on the other, they draw on—and sometimes generate—new, contemporary, interactive-media technologies and approaches. In these emerging art-forms, developed in what Murray terms a ‘processcentred medium’ (Murray 1997, p.182), linear narrative thinking is expanded to include—or inhabit—the space of narrative potentials. The spatial organisation of narrative has become a shared ground for many kinds of creativity, enabling a range of conceptualisations and interaction-frameworks, designed to activate these potentials as new kinds of narrative experience that are engaging and immersive. “Of the three types of immersion”, claims Ryan, “the spatial variety has the most to gain from the built-in spatiality of pictures” (Ryan 2001, p.263)—and visualising storyspace is as important as structuring the story itself. With the inclusion of the computer, the borders between screen-space and participatory space, action and participation, shift and re-form to compelling dramatic effect. At the symposium Computational and Spatially Organised Narrative held at Media Centre LUME, Helsinki, April 26–29 2006, a representative sample of practical and theoretical work in the field was brought together for discussion; and from that process emerged all the articles in this special issue of Digital Creativity. In this context, computational narrative and spatial organisation appear as already well-established phenomena, of which the historical roots deserve attention. The light of historical discovery is shed by Alifragkis and Penz, who revisit, for example, Vertov’s work and Kuleshov’s ‘artificial landscapes’, mining them for metadata categories to create new portraits of the city using interactive digital media. Prager, who reviews the work of Moholy-Nagy, Schlemmer and other Bauhaus artists, finds models for the computational treatment of visual cinematic narrativity today, while Tikka, Vuori and Kaipainen revive Eisenstein’s ‘montage machine’ for the algorithmic generation of narrative flow. Spatial organisation is discussed in two senses in this issue: the ontological space of content, and the physical space of installation—which interact and relate to each other in various fertile ways. Artopoulos and Condorcet elaborate an idea for parametrically generative physical viewing-space as the matrix for generative video narrative, which embodies the practice of gamelike ‘what if? ’ storytelling. In a similar spirit, Sussner, Thomas and Richens formulate the topography of cinematic narrative as architectural construction, refashioning Kevin Lynch’s urban categories (Lynch 1960, p.6) and Christian Norberg-Schulz’s concept of place (Norberg-Schulz 1986, p.29) as design ontology for both 3D-environment and cinematic narrative structure. This approach has strong similarities with the work of Tikka, Vuori and Kaipainen, who propose a formal definition of virtual narrative space in terms of ontological dimensions—that is, multidimensional characterisations of the content which constitutes the nature and existence of a particular storyworld, and carry meaning when associated with storylines that cross its space. In these conceptualisations, ontological dimensions constitute the co-ordinate system in which the building-blocks of the story reside, and which allows the fixing of waypoints for navigating the space, and generating narrative sequences algorithmically. The narrative spaces of several works presented in the current issue can, in principle, be analysed as such ontological space—Obsession (Tikka, Vuori and Kaipainen), Gormenghast Explore (Sussner and Thomas), House of Affects e d it o ri a l