A few months ago I heard a radio programme about ‘marble hornets‘ and their protagonist, slender man. I was doing something else at the time – but something about the ideas and the language stuck with me. I heard tell of trans media story telling – where
- stories get told across many many different platforms, all at the same time
- there is a new relationship with ‘authors’ and ‘authoring’ – where ‘readers’ themselves are protagonists in the story and the way in which it unfolds
- forms of narrative create experience which is fractal – where as you actively seek out content, you go deeper and deeper into the story, to the extent that narrative is less like a story, and more like a ‘kinetic immersion’
- ‘readers’ get so emotionally involved, they behave more like ‘fans’ with lots and lots of ways into the world of the content
I followed this up – reading the Art of Immersion (by Frank Rose), and checked out Convergence Culture (by Henry Jenkins). It reminded me of Rupert Goold’s remarks about ‘narrating yourself into the story…’ and how this somehow makes the ‘experience more dense’. One can see how immersion takes you into the story; and how – when you look around, so to speak, when you are in the story – the experience of being in the story has different qualities than when one is not immersed.
What might the metaphors for non-immersive experience of story telling be?
- Being beached – like that epitome of vulnerability, a whale on land;
- having lost the plot;
- being all at sea…
…..all images that have in common a quality of ‘being over-whelmed’, dis-orientated, abandoned, even. There is something immersive about intimate innovation – blurring the boundary between me and you and you and me in the process. And this seems again and again to be what the innovative experience is derived from: it comes from our immersion in our mutual narrative.
Slingshot