Corona Haikus @ Women's Stories Exhibition

The Corona Haikus transmedia project has been selected to be part of the Women's Stories Exhibition (Ekate, Cyprus, 13-20 October 2021

Corona Haikus: a case study of interactive factual narrative that uses reflexive and evolutive agency as a strategy for deep personal and community change

When I moved from linear documentary production to the newly emerging field of interactive storytelling in the early 2000, I was excited by the potentialities of the Web, especially the possibility of co-creation in factual storytelling. Looking back, I can clearly see that what attracted me was the exploration of how factual narratives could make use of two affordances that are unique to digital media: user agency and interactivity. More than twenty years later, I am still experimenting with ways to use interactivity to facilitate co-creation of reality and move away from simple representation in documentary making (Gaudenzi 2013). In this paper, I will use the Corona Haikus project (2020), to question the current understanding of user agency in participatory interactive narratives. I have chosen such project because I have personally been involved in it as a co-author, but also as a participant, and therefore I have both co-designed its user’s agency, and experienced it as a user. I will argue that agency in interactive documentary (i-doc) should be considered as a space of user empowerment that does not always have to affect the interactive narrative itself, because it can also be placed outside of the narrated story. The Corona Haikus example will be used to demonstrate that, in participatory narratives, deep individual and societal impact can be designed by mixing different types of mini-agencies and by orchestrating them as a journey of empowerment that is gradual and evolutive. Reflexive and evolutive agencies will be defined and presented as new ways to approach impact design in interactive narratives

The WHAT IF IT Process, Moving from Story-telling to Story-experiencing

The WHAT IF IT process is a unique concept development methodology that has been designed to facilitate the ideation of digital interactive narratives. While the production of narrative driven digital artefacts has been developing fast in the last fifteen years, very little research has been done on ideation processes, and no academic methodological evaluation has been shared to date. By sharing the results of a three years action research project where existing storytelling, design thinking and agile prototyping techniques have been mixed to create an innovative methodology, the aim of this paper is to formulate a framework for interactive narrative development

The role of magnetic field for quiescence-outburst models in CVs

In this paper we present the elementary assumptions of our research on the role of the magnetic field in modelling the quiescence-outbursts cycle in Cataclysmic Variables (CVs). The behaviour of the magnetic field is crucial not only to integrate the disk instability model (Osaki 1974), but also to determine the cause and effect nexus among parameters affecting the behavior of complex systems. On the ground of our interpretation of the results emerging from the literature, we suggest that in models describing DNe outbursts, such as the disk instability model, the secondary instability model (Bath 1973) and the thermonuclear runaway model (Mitrofanov 1978), the role of the magnetic field is at least twofold. On the one hand, it activates a specific dynamic pathway for the accreting matter by channelling it. On the other hand, it could be indirectly responsible for switching a particular outburst modality. In order to represent these two roles of the magnetic field, we need to integrate the disk instability model by looking at the global behaviour of the system under analysis. Stochastic resonance in dynamo models, we believe, is a suitable candidate for accomplishing this task. We shall present the MHD model including this mechanism elsewhere.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, CTU Proceedings, Acta Polytechnica (accepted

The IF Lab Field Guide to interactive storytelling ideation

This practical booklet is a field guide that can be used by any student, or audiovisual producer. wishing to conceive a digital interactive story. It contains the main phases of the WHAT IT IT process - a methodology of digital ideation created through 4 years of research and practice at IF Lab, a professional workshop funded by the EU. You will find hands-on canvases and "how to" explanations that will help you in your ideation process

Far from the Particle Crowd: Shugyosha Nambu and Michizane Wheeler

In the late 1940s many physicists embrace the surging particle physics regarding it as potentially resolutive of the crisis of nuclear physics. Against this backdrop, two thinkers of peculiar taste choose otherwise. Here we trace the roots and consequences of their decisions

Looking Stereoscopically at Goethe vs. Newton: Heisenberg and Pauli on the Future of Physics

Goethe’s polemics against Newtonian optics is not rarely men- tioned as a singular instance of incompetent stubbornness, or quickly dis- posed of as an embarrassing incident, not worthy of Goethe’s stature. None- theless, Goethe’s presence in the mind of 20th-century physicists is not a neg- ligible chapter, not only due to the pre-eminence of his literary work but to a suffused Naturphilosophie as well. Even more significantly, physicists of the calibre of Heisenberg and Pauli, while openly recognizing the ‘mistakes’ of the Goethean polemics in optics, tried to extract from that episode important lessons and expectations about the future of science