Introduction : Total Cinema: Film and Design

The movie screen is up in flames and the audience flees in panic, thinking an atomic bomb has just been dropped. The director rubs his hands: film and the outside world have blended into one—at least in Joe Dante’s Matinee (1993), set in the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. May this be the “myth of total cinema” described by André Bazin in 1946, according to which the art of film was never really driven by its accidental technological history but by a desire to grasp reality in its entirety, to reconstruct “a perfect illusion of the outside world in sound, color, and relief”? Dante’s larger than life director pays homage to B-movie showman William Castle, who shied away from little when it came to engagement, be it narrative, visual, or somatic. Castle appeared on screen offering the audience a (faux) choice between alternative endings, used 3D illusionism, and installed “buzzers” in the seats and skeletons flying over the auditorium—not unlike Eisenstein’s Proletkult theatre which included tightrope-walkers over the viewers’ heads and firecrackers under their bottoms. Is it possible to unite the effects of agitprop theatre, the illusion of agency in American trash films and the immersive formats of our time into a single conceptual framework? And if it is, would that be cinema? Film theorist Andrew Dudley already claimed in 1997 that “[t]he century of cinema offered a fragile period of détente during which the logosphere of the nineteenth century with its grand novels and histories has slowly given way—under the pressure of technology, of the ascendance of the image, and of unfathomable world crises—to the videosphere we are now entering.

INDCOR White Paper 2: Interactive Narrative Design for Representing Complexity

This white paper was written by the members of the Work Group focusing on design practices of the COST Action 18230 - Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation (INDCOR, WG1). It presents an overview of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) design for complexity representations through IDN workflows and methodologies, IDN authoring tools and applications. It provides definitions of the central elements of the IDN alongside its best practices, designs and methods. Finally, it describes complexity as a feature of IDN, with related examples. In summary, this white paper serves as an orienting map for the field of IDN design, understanding where we are in the contemporary panorama while charting the grounds of their promising futures.Comment: 11 pages, This whitepaper was produced by members of the COST Action 18230 - Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation (INDCOR - https://indcor.eu

INDCOR white paper on the Design of Complexity IDNs

This white paper was written by the members of the Work Group focusing on design practices of the COST Action 18230 - Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation (INDCOR, WG1). It presents an overview of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) design for complexity representations through IDN workflows and methodologies, IDN authoring tools and applications. It provides definitions of the central elements of the IDN alongside its best practices, designs and methods. Finally, it describes complexity as a feature of IDN, with related examples. In summary, this white paper serves as an orienting map for the field of IDN design, understanding where we are in the contemporary panorama while charting the grounds of their promising futures

Sending Shivers Down the Spine. VR Productions as Seamed Media

According to Rebecca Rouse’s concept of “media of attraction” (2016), the mediums of virtual reality have four characteristics: they are participatory, interdisciplinary, unassimilated and seamed. The author’s hypothesis is that even though 360-degree films and virtual reality experiences as seamed mediums are remediating the medium of film, they have the characteristics of the medium of live performance. She points out that the characteristics of performance art based on Fischer-Lichte’s taxonomy (2008), such as liveness and co-presence, are influencing the development of 360-degree films and virtual reality experiences. As an argument, she analyses three virtual reality productions created by performing artists, which operate with the specificity of intermediality and the longing for immersion, the main characteristic of virtual reality. These productions lean on the immediacy characteristics of the medium of film and performance by using cut-scenes, linear narratives, live streaming, but also by including the “human interface,” i.e., the actor, who ensures a higher level of absorption.

INDCOR white paper on Complexity IDNs

This white paper was written by the members of the Work Group focusing on design practices of the COST Action 18230 - Interactive Narrative Design for Complexity Representation (INDCOR, WG1). It presents an overview of Interactive Digital Narratives (IDNs) design for complexity representations through IDN workflows and methodologies, IDN authoring tools and applications. It provides definitions of the central elements of the IDN alongside its best practices, designs and methods. Finally, it describes complexity as a feature of IDN, with related examples. In summary, this white paper serves as an orienting map for the field of IDN design, understanding where we are in the contemporary panorama while charting the grounds of their promising futures