designed space

To me it’s interesting how we control movement and meaning by concocting structures with windows, doors, and other forms of openings and paths. Take a book. In a novel we may “enter into” the story and stay there, following the paths that Aureliano Buendia takes through his life. This is a descriptive issue: we “follow” the story along, we’re “into” the story, we’re immersed in the action.

We “enter” the book store, however, in a different way that we “enter” a novel. Calvino writes, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade.”

As readers we follow the path that the designer has provided. “Y-o-u-a-r-e-a-b-o-u-t-to- . . .” et cetera.

Page 25 of my copy (no other person has this copy) of Calvino, goes this way:

You have now read about thirty pages and you’re becoming caught up in the story. At a certain point you remark: “This sentence sounds somehow familiar. In fact, this whole passage reads like something I’ve read before.” Of course: there are themes that recur, the text is interwoven with these reprises, which serve to express the fluctuation of time. You are the sort of reader who is sensitive to such refinements; you are quick to catch the author’s intentions and nothing escapes you. But at, at the same time, you also feel a certain dismay; just when you were beginning to grow truely interested . . .

This passage leads to an interesting twist in the novel, but, regardless, the habit of reading, the “novel” itself, authorial process, and the reader (a fiction) are all being called up as “subjects” we should pay attention to “to read” If on a winter’s night a traveler. Even so, the “reader” still becomes engaged (depending on the reader), who may not “like” this kind of a novel. To continue, Calvino writes

You are thunderstruck. Reading Marana’s letters, you felt you were encountering Ludmilla at every turn. . . . Because you can’t stop thinking of her: this is how you explain it, a proof of your being in love . . . And it isn’t only jealousy: it is suspicion, distrust, the feeling that you cannot be sure of anything or anyone. . . . The pursuit of the uninterrupted book, which instilled in you a special excitement since you were conducting it together with the Other Reader, turns out to be the same thing as pusuing her, who eludes you in a proliferation of mysteries, deceits, disguises. . . .

Exactly!

Anyway, design creates a surface of story we expect to move in a we are used to. This surface is populated by characters who do things, sumount challenges, then live happily ever after. It is possible, however, to read a story where the surface of the story merges with another surface, say a substory surface, as in A Continuity of Parks, wherein a novel being read by a protagonists takes the plot over and climaxes in the room where a man is reading a novel about a man who is about to be murdered while reading a novel about a character who is about to kill a man who is reading a novel about a man who is about to kill a man et cetera or supposedly. Or, maybe it’s all some major coincidence. But who believes in those?

media lines

I’d like to set up a hypothetical scenario.

Imagine a point anywhere, relative to any other point in space. A line extends from the point to infinity, right or left directional. Any other point, marked 1, 2 et cetera, on the line represents a linear sequence in relation to the beginning point, say the first page of a book, 17 indicating it’s last page, the first point, 1, beginning the linear sequence of the technology. The last page, in this example, is never 16.

We turn the pages of a book to get to its end, reading across the page and down, depending on how we were taught. The book is used in a linear way, even though we can always look for something that came before. But what element of the book makes it a linear technology, as opposed to a DVD where a menu will grant access to other entertainments?

The mind often works out of logical sequence. One thought will lead to another thought, often at randon. Digital hypertext can be linear and non-linear, creating an interface where one “starting point” could be represented by any link, any point in a sequence, formally speaking. The link “dog” could be placed next to “gem stone.” These two unrelated items could link back on their own referents. A reader could click on the link “dog” and read a story about “gem stones,” finding out later, maybe ironically, that the link “gem stone” told a story where everything in “dog” was colored blue, whereas “gem stone’s” similar objects were colored red, creating a world where coolness acts differently on the protagonist’s decisions. One links leads to the protagonist voting Republican. In the other, the protagonist votes Democrat, creating two different versions of history.

narrative and space

The Guardian’s gameblog states

From politics to plot, it seems now that the technology is suitably up to scratch the focus has moved away from this gadget or that graphics card and is now on getting people involved in play through narrative.

The comments that follow the post reveal a thoughful curiosity and concern with the idea of narrative, plot, and story “in games.” But I think the differentiation between “plot” as a devise to motivate story and narrative, where the plot “fits,” are important to these kinds of discussions.

I’ll always remember encountering Rembrandt’s intense “Raising of Lazarus” in Los Angeles back in the mid-eighties. The painting is huge, and I sat studying the thing (and others) for some time, just stunned to quite, watching. The visual power for me came between two points: Christ’s raised hand and the dead man thrusting out of the grave. I was trying to find the supernatural string puppeting Lazarus out of his coffin. We have the story that the representational space tells, the drama, the moment when only one thing matters. I’ll never forget that power and what such an image can connect to now. The painting is the Aleph.

Immersiveness is a potential of all kinds if narrative, but how to sustain it, make it durable? But that immersive power doesn’t depend on myth and theology, although it helps. The painting would engross on its own due to the great drama on the canvas and how the laying of the paint draws the eye (has the eye re-draw the painting).

An interesting house (an architectural maze) can have the same effect as it takes us room to dramatic room in space “in a sequence.” But how does an architect or designer create the potential for drama in a space that may or may not be new?

It will be interesting to hear how people react to Doom 3 in this regard: will it immerse, engage, add to what has come before for its audience? We know that powerful narratives keep people coming back. I.e., Shakespeare, della Porta, the American elections.

Discourse

After listening and reviewing the Zell Miller speech at the RNC (here’s one response, take it or leave it), I just have to say that I’m pretty much sickened by the state of affairs. Deplorable. Embarrassing.

scales and image

In Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Aleph, “Borges” is shown a small object called the Aleph in Carlos Argentino’s basement. Here’s how the Aleph is described:

Under the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brightness . . . The Aleph was probably two or three centimeters in diameter, but universal space was contained inside it, with no diminution inside.

The Aleph contains infinite space “contained” in a container about the size of a square inch. Here’s how the space inside is described:

Each thing [inside the space], the glass surface of a mirror, let us say) was infinite things, because I could clearly see it from every point in the cosmos. I saw the populous sea . . . saw in a rear courtyard on Calle Soler the same tiles I’d seen twenty years before in the entryway of a house in Fray Bentos . . . saw every letter of every page at once . . . saw the oblique shadows of ferns on the floor of a green house . . . saw the Aleph from everywhere at once . . . saw your face . . . the inconceivable universe.

Depending on point of view, such an object makes perfect sense. The Aleph is spherical, thus at whatever point it rests, it faces “all directions” outward and inward simultaneously. This doesn’t explain the object; the Aleph is an unexplainable mystery and dangerous, destructive, and wondrous. As space it is all of space, just as one circle is all circles. It’s a mystery of massive potential: a poem that reflects or contains all poems, a structure that is every structure simultaneously.

In this number, for example, 10, we can conceive of all numbers and combinations of numbers.

Thus, the “story” The Aleph IS the Aleph. It’s also The Zahir:

Tennyson said that if we could but understand a single flower we might know who we are and what the world is. Perhaps he was trying to say that there is nothing, however humble, that does not imply the history of the world and its infinite cancatenations of causes and effects . . . Perhaps he was trying to say that the visible world can be seen entire in every image, just as Schopenhauer tells us that the Will expresses itself entire in every man and woman . . . of one were to believe Tennyson, everything would be–everything. . .

New Media Perspectives

NMC is finally up and running and things seem to be moving “into time.”

To consider: we’ve talked through and shown examples of some element of new media and raced through the fundamentals of narrative structure, story, and media space, such as the issue of diagesis.

But I’m reminded of a scale issue, especially due to recent discoveries. The larger (more abstract) the space, the more time becomes necessary to mark scale.

In story, characters in the frame move through the envelope of time/space, as the reader or watcher does. But do they both inhabit the same space? (Of course not!)

In class we talked about the 4th wall, that border between one and another world, a border against which we can begin to talk about interactivity, immersion, and space and what these mean.

Sometimes at the dinner table I will jump and claim: “What am I doing here? I was just on the bridge of the Enterprise!” This is a frequent phenomenon on Star Trek, where a character will leap in and out of space time and be believed with minimal need to convince others that this is “real.” In my case, the family yawns, making the connection, then moving on to the gravy.

on the spectator

An interesting little tid bit for entanglement: (source)

To begin his discussion of Borges’ fiction as an alternative to mimetic realism, Fuentes commented that he had never wanted to actually meet Borges. In fact, he didn’t even want to know what Borges looked like. It seemed proper that only the work should exist, that Borges was his work, and that by reading it, one became the blind Argentine, much in the way that Borges himself once wrote: “All men who repeat one line of Shakespeare are William Shakespeare.” This provocative idea is central to the idea of the “open work,” a conception of literature that sees each book as a work forever in the process of being written. Given that each reader engages a work with a different set of preconceptions, notions, and cultural biases, the real nature of the book is inextricably bound to the creative act of reading it, and is therefore never truly a contained universe. (It was a point Mr. Fuentes would reiterate several days later in a short lecture about Italo Calvino at Cooper Union.) Borges is particularly appropriate here because he does not utilize mimetic or historical realism: his works are primarily about the workings of the mind itself. They are carefully structured to engage the reader, to make the reader into an active participant. Fuentes compared Borges to the writer of detective stories where the true mystery is the thought process of the detective himself, as if “Poirot were investigating Poirot, or as if Holmes discovered that he himself is Moriarty.”
Thematically, Borges is always concerned with the mystery of absence vs. presence, a mystery that may be resolved differently for each reader. As a chess player might say, “The moves we do not make are as important as the moves we do make.” This is indeed an apt metaphor for reading Borges, where each reader may take a different branch in a garden of forking paths. Fuentes drew upon the story “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote” to further illustrate this point. The Don Quixote of Cervantes means something different to the Don Quixote of the later Menard, even though the text is identical: times have changed; language has changed; readers have changed. As Fuentes would restate again throughout his lecture, a book is never finished, for it belongs to the future.

August Update

At the moment, this log has been slow because I’ve been busy readying for the Fall semester. Garden work, fencing, and other things have been making for long days and added “work streams” to the school work.

But here’s a quick note. The two most important issues in American culture and politics are the economy and energy (not the moral issues so common and so arbitrary to the babble in the news). It’s a capitalist country, after all, and, as China is a recent example, energy of many types is its fuel.

Along with the gardens, the fences, and the interior work, I’ll be embarking on updating the house to solar power over the next couple of years (I like C C-Ewing’s brief mentions on the topic of domicile ideas, and thus I make this comment.)

It’ll be interesting, at least. For Susan Gibb–we now have a semi-porch.

More coming

story and biology

I had a great time at Narratives. Good food, good talk, good friends. And we’ll be missing one of our members as she moves on to other hopefully fulfilling enterprises. We had a discussion in the midst of which I had to leave about publishing issues. Aside from the process, the subject got me to thinking about basics, storytelling at the biological level, although biology might be a little breathtaking.

The question goes to need. Humans are animals who need the company of others; they need friends, talk, sharing, conflict, some measure of society. Story meets many of those needs. A story develops during the card game, a thread that makes the time mean something, good, bad, in the middle. We need the narrative to get the punch-line, the story. We need to experience stories because without them the world wouldn’t make a lot of sense. “What happened” is a basic question that goes to making sense of events. From explanation to analysis to description to demonstration–all can or may manifest as story narrative. But kinds of story (narrative poems, ballads, flash fiction) really aren’t what I’m hinting at here. The telling is what matters: the form is the way we experience.

Some people I know love telling and writing stories. I have a good friend who tells “true” stories about his life that run the range of human experience and story forms. Nobody asked him tell them, although he was often encouraged. “Tell him about the time that . . . ” one friend says to another, and then the listeners listen, laugh, or react with a shake of the head at the the sad end of the protagonist. Circumstance dictates.

“Hey, remember when . . .”

“Yes. Tell me.”

Mythological space is vast. This is where publishing comes in. The industry, the profession, the byline. Publishing is a necessary means of getting the story, the message, the letters out; it’s linked to the industry, the machine, the network of the existence, distribution, and storing of creative thought, a manifestation of social organization, political form, media, and tradition. No publishing without letters or a means of recording voice. “Something” has to be published. The “something” has to be transferred from one hand to the next. We worry about it, want it, like it, and profit from it in many ways. It’s a method of meeting human need and investment.

There are a lot of things we don’t need. Blue toothpaste, for example.

But discussion of markets, publishing, papers, prestige, and the business of storytelling and media will always lead the writer and the reader back to the basics. Without story we can’t live. We need to hear stories, need to tell them, whatever their forms. Bravo to the audience.

Everybody wants the good guy to win. But not everyone will agree on the criteria. The audience wants Odysseus to make it home and drive off the suitors. Luke Skywalker aims and fires, and does anyone wish for a glancing blow? Out there under the purple clouds (you can just see the twinkle) is a flash of light. You begin to move toward it. The hero sets off to find that grail so needed for salvation. We have the departure, the test, the return, the protagonist slimmed by fire and cold. The hero rises then falls. The search, the fall, the rise, the winning and the losing.

Same old story. And keep ringing it.