Interactive Fiction in Cinematic Virtual Reality: Epistemology, Creation and Evaluation

This dissertation presents the Interactive Fiction in Cinematic Virtual Reality (IFcVR), an interactive digital narrative (IDN) that brings together the cinematic virtual reality (cVR) and the creation of virtual environments through 360\ub0 video within an interactive fiction (IF) structure. This work is structured in three components: an epistemological approach to this kind of narrative and media hybrid; the creation process of IFcVR, from development to postproduction; and user evaluation of IFcVR. In order to set the foundations for the creation of interactive VR fiction films, I dissect the IFcVR by investigating the aesthetics, narratological and interactive notions that converge and diverge in it, proposing a medium-conscious narratology for this kind of artefact. This analysis led to the production of an IFcVR functional prototype: \u201cZENA\u201d, the first interactive VR film shot in Genoa. ZENA\u2019s creation process is reported proposing some guidelines for interactive and immersive film-makers. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the IFcVR as an entertaining narrative form and a vehicle for diverse types of messages, this study also proposes a methodology to measure User Experience (UX) on IFcVR. The full evaluation protocol gathers both qualitative and quantitative data through ad hoc instruments. The proposed protocol is illustrated through its pilot application on ZENA. Findings show interactors' positive acceptance of IFcVR as an entertaining experience

Mosaic narrative a poetics of cinematic new media narrative

This thesis proposes the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative as a tool for theorising the creation and telling of cinematic stories in a digital environment. As such the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative is designed to assist creators of new media narrative to design dramatically compelling screen based stories by drawing from established theories of cinema and emerging theories of new media. In doing so it validates the crucial element of cinematic storytelling in the digital medium, which due to its fragmentary, variable and re-combinatory nature, affords the opportunity for audience interaction. The Poetics of Mosaic Narrative re-asserts the dramatic and cinematic nature of narrative in new media by drawing upon the dramatic theory of Aristotle’s Poetics, the cinematic theories of the 1920s Russian Film Theorists and contemporary Neo-Formalists, the narrative theories of the 1960s French Structuralists, and the scriptwriting theories of contemporary cinema. In particular it focuses on the theory and practice of the prominent new media theorist, Lev Manovich, as a means of investigating and creating a practical poetics. The key element of the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative is the expansion of the previously forgotten and undeveloped Russian Formalist concept of cinematurgy which is vital to the successful development of new media storytelling theory and practice. This concept, as originally proposed but not elaborated by Kazansky, encompasses the notion of the creation of cinematic new media narrative as a mosaic – integrally driven by the narrative systems of plot, as well as the cinematic systems of visual style created by the techniques of cinema- montage, cinematography and mise-en-scene

The Essay Film and Space: The Essayistic Filmic Space as aLocation of Thought

This practice-led research investigates the function of filmic space in essayistic discourse through the dialogic relationship between the essay film My Pink City that reflects on post-Soviet urban space in Yerevan and a written thesis that examines the role of space in the essay film. The research considers essay film as a distinct modality of thought in moving image practices that incorporates multiple processes, a diversity of forms and heterogeneous material in its discursive logics. Reacting against the privileging of the temporal in the thinking operations of the moving image, the research addresses the renewed importance of spatial imagination, as a first step in establishing the significance of filmic space in cinematic consciousness. Filmic space has been mainly conceived as a static space that forms a background to action by centring movement, thus restricting the thinking potential of the moving image. Mapping a series of theorisations of filmic space in film theory, in geography of film and in the Deleuzian conception of cinema, the research identifies that filmic space can contribute to the thinking operations of the image when it precisely opens up to movement. Locating moments of spatial thinking in fiction and avant-garde film, the written thesis redefines filmic space as open, relational, heterogeneous and always under construction and relates this expanded notion of filmic space to the thinking modality of the essay film. The written thesis and My Pink City both demonstrate how the expanded notion of a fluid and dynamic filmic space, expressing thought via a variety of strategies, functions on multiple levels in the essay film and thus contributes to the thinking operations of the moving image. Following essay film’s ability to continuously makes visible its own thinking operations, the research proposes that filmic space (as the spatial imagination inherent in the image) also makes visible its own procedures, resulting in an essay film that does not only think about (the changes and complexities) of space but also thinks through filmic space

A dramaturgy of intermediality: composing with integrative design

The thesis investigates and develops a compositional system on intermediality in theatre and performance as a dramaturgical practice through integrative design. The position of the visual/sonic media in theatre and performance has been altered by the digitalisation and networking of media technologies, which enables enhanced dynamic variables in the intermedial processes. The emergent intermediality sites are made accessible by developments in media technologies and form part of broader changes towards a mediatised society: a simultaneous shift in cultural contexts, theatre practice and audience perception. The practice-led research is situated within a postdramatic context and develops a system of compositional perspectives and procedures to enhance the knowledge of a dramaturgy on intermediality. The intermediality forms seem to re-situate the actual/virtual relations in theatre and re-construct the processes of theatricalisation in the composition of the stage narrative. The integration of media and performers produces a compositional environment of semiosis, where the theatre becomes a site of narration, and the designed integration in-between medialities emerges as intermediality sites in the performance event. A selection of performances and theatre directors is identified, who each in distinct ways integrate mediating technologies as a core element in their compositional design. These directors and performances constitute a source of reflection on compositional strategies from the perspective of practice, and enable comparative discussions on dramaturgical design and the consistency of intermediality sites. The practice-led research realised a series of prototyping processes situated in performance laboratories in 2004-5. The laboratories staged investigations into the relation between integrative design procedures and parameters for composition of intermediality sites, particularly the relative presence in-between the actual and the virtual, and the relative duration and distance in-between timeness and placeness. The integration of performer activities and media operations into dramaturgical structures were developed as a design process of identifying the mapping and experiencing the landscape through iterative prototyping. The developed compositional concepts and strategies were realised in the prototype performance Still I Know Who I Am, performed October 2006. This final research performance was a full-scale professional production, which explored the developed dramaturgical designs through creative practice. The performance was realised as a public event, and composed of a series of scenes, each presenting a specific composite of the developed integrative design strategies, and generating a particular intermediality site. The research processes in the performance laboratories and the prototype performance developed on characteristics, parameters and procedures of compositional strategies, investigating the viability of a dramaturgy of intermediality through integrative design. The practice undertaken constitutes raw material from which the concepts are drawn and underpins the premises for the theoretical reflections

Between Stillness and Motion

New technological media such as film, photography and computers have altered the way we perceive possible relations between stillness and motion in the visual arts. Traditionally, cinema theory saw cinema and especially the 'illusion of motion' as part of the ideological swindle of the basic cinematic apparatus. This collection of essays by acclaimed international scholars including Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, Mark B.N. Hansen, George Baker, Ina Blom and Christa Blümlinger, starts out from a different premise to analyse stillness and motion as part of a larger ecology of images and media. They argue that the strategic uses of stillness and motion in art and entertainment since the 1850s illuminate and renegotiate urgent issues within both aesthetics, film, art and media history on the one hand, and, on the other, new perspectives on affects, memories and the contemporary patterns of communication and image circulation

VR Storytelling

The question of cinematic VR production has been on the table for several years. This is due to the peculiarity of VR language which, even if it is de ned by an image that surrounds and immerses the viewer rather than placing them, as in the classic cinematic situation, in front of a screen, relies decisively on an audiovisual basis that cannot help but refer to cinematic practices of constructing visual and auditory experience. Despite this, it would be extremely reductive to consider VR as the mere transposition of elements of cinematic language. The VR medium is endowed with its own speci city, which inevitably impacts its forms of narration. We thus need to investigate the narrative forms it uses that are probably related to cinematic language, and draw their strength from the same basis, drink from the same well, but develop according to di erent trajectories, thus displaying di erent links and a nities

Robert Wilson and an Aesthetic of Human Behaviour in the Performing Body

This practice-based research investigates movement and gesture in relation to the theatre work of Robert Wilson. A group of performers was established to explore Wilson’s construction of a code of movement during a series of over fifty workshops and films including: a feature film Oedipus; a live performance Two Sides to an Envelope; and a theatre production The Mansion’s Third Unbridled View. The creation of an embodied experience for the spectator, perceived through the senses, is central to Wilson’s theatre. Integral to this are the relationships between drama and image, and time and space. Wilson’s images, in which the body is presented in attitudes of stillness and repetition, are created through these transitional structures. Taking these structures as a starting point for my own performative work, the research led to an abstracted form of natural behaviour, where the movements and arrangements of bodies defined specific movement forms. Subsequently, the relationship between movement and images in Wilson’s theatre was reconsidered through Deleuze’s analysis of the cinematic image. Deleuze identifies subjectivity with the ‘semi-subjective image’, in which traces of the camera’s movements are imprinted in the film. In films made to register these movements, images of moving bodies evincing a sense of time passing were also created. This led to my discovery of film as a direct embodiment of performance, rather than as a form of documentation. Critical to these films, the theatre production, performances, and workshops was the relationship between images and continuous motion predicated upon Wilson’s idea of space, the horizontal: and time, the vertical. This idea enabled me to consider Wilson’s theatre and video works in relation to Bergson’s philosophy concerning duration. The research discovered new ways of interpreting Wilson’s aesthetic through Bergson’s idea that motion is an indivisible process which can also be perceived in relation to the position of bodies in space. Through this understanding, an original performance language was created based on the relationship between stasis and motion, and the interplay between the immersive, semiotic and instrumental modes of gestural communication

Landscapes of the invisible: sounds, cosmologies and poetics of space

In this PhD by Publication I revisit and contextualize art works and essays I have collaboratively created under the name Flow Motion between 2004-13, in order to generate new insights on the contributions they have made to diverse and emerging fields of contemporary arts practice/research, including digital, virtual, sonic and interdisciplinary art. The works discussed comprise the digital multimedia installation and sound art performance Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies (2004-5), the sound installation and performance Invisible (2006-7), the web art archive and performance presentation project promised lands (2008-10), and two related texts, Astro Black Morphologies: Music and Science Lovers (2004) and Music and Migration (2013). I show how these works map new thematic constellations around questions of space and diaspora, music and cosmology, invisibility and spectrality, the body and perception. I also show how the works generate new connections between and across contemporary avant-garde, experimental and popular music, and visual art and cinema traditions. I describe the methodological design, approaches and processes through which the works were produced, with an emphasis on transversality, deconstruction and contemporary black music forms as key tools in my collaborative artistic and textual practice. I discuss how, through the development of methods of data translation and transformation, and distinctive visual approaches for the re-elaboration of archival material, the works produced multiple readings of scientific narratives, digital X-ray data derived from astronomical research on black holes and dark energy, and musical, photographic and textual material related to historical and contemporary accounts of migration. I also elaborate on the relation between difference and repetition, the concepts of multiplicity and translation, and the processes of collective creation which characterize my/Flow Motion’s work. The art works and essays I engage with in this commentary produce an idea of contemporary art as the result of a fluid, open and mutating assemblage of diverse and hybrid methods and mediums, and as an embodiment of a cross-cultural, transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge shaped by research, process, creative dialogues, collaborative practice and collective signature

Immersive Movies: The Effect of Point of View on Narrative Engagement

Cinematic Virtual Reality (CVR) offers filmmakers a wide range of possibilities to explore new techniques regarding movie scripting, shooting and editing. Despite the many experiments performed so far with both live action and computer-generated movies, just a few studies focused on analyzing how these cinematic techniques actually affect the viewers’ experience. Like in traditional cinema, a key step for CVR screenwriters and directors is to choose from which perspective the viewers will see the scene, the so-called point of view (POV). The aim of this paper is to understand to what extent watching an immersive movie from a specific POV could impact the narrative engagement (NE), i.e., the viewers’ sensation of being immersed in the movie environment and being connected with its characters and story. Two POVs that are typically used in CVR, i.e., first-person perspective (1-PP) and external perspective (EP), are investigated through a user study in which both objective and subjective metrics were collected. The user study was carried out by leveraging two live action 360° short films with distinct scripts. The results suggest that the 1-PP experience could be more pleasant than the EP one in terms of overall NE and narrative presence, or even for all the NE dimensions if the potential of that POV is specifically exploited