native media/natural media
This article originally appeared in the June, 2000, Number 9 issue of *spark.
Be still. Slow down. Take in your environment. Listen to the hum of your
computer or feel the texture of the paper in your hand. Hear the whir of your
air conditioner or feel the sun on your face. Feel your heart beat. Look at the
contours of whatever is in front of you; I'll bet they aren't as smooth as you
thought. Look closer. Look at the colours of whatever is in front of you; there
are probably more shades than you at first thought. These types of sense
impressions are always there, and many more besides. Yet, most of the time, we
are not aware of them. Our brains filter the raw information they get from our
sensory organs. Why?
Evolution, of course. A species that could not pick important elements out of
the raw data its senses were constantly funneling to its brain would miss the
prey that was coming to attack it, and soon die out. We don't live in such an
environment any more, of course. Still, if I were unable to filter information
not relevant to an immediate task at hand out of my perceptions, I would not be
able to concentrate on completing that task, whether it be finishing my
dissertation, hugging a friend, or...writing an article for an online magazine.
This is why I believe Mike Figgis' Time Code will ultimately be a failure. A
worthy experiment, to be sure, but a failure nonetheless. Time Code is a film
that displays four images. Nothing new here: Split screen effects have existed
in film since Abel Gance's Napoleon. Each image contains a continuous 90-minute
take. The viewer is invited to watch as much or as little of each story as
interests him or her.
Unfortunately, human beings are not equipped to follow multiple storylines that
unfold simultaneously. It's that damn evolutionary attention thing. Worse,
Figgis cheats. Rather than have four overlapping soundtracks, he fades dialogue
from the four scenes in and out throughout the film. In this way, he uses sound
to direct the audience's attention, rather than allow viewers to choose for
themselves which story to follow.
Imagine a different way of achieving what Figgis has attempted with Time Code.
There are four images, one in each corner of the screen. By choosing one of the
four images, the viewer causes it to appear--larger--in the middle of the
screen. In this way, the viewer has complete control over what she or he sees.
Better: Beside each of the smaller images is a sound icon which, when activated,
allows the viewer to hear the soundtrack associated with the image. The viewer
can listen to what is happening in the main image, or listen to an unrelated
soundtrack. This can't be done in film. It can, however, be done in truly
digital media such as CD-ROMs or the World Wide Web.
I've been arguing for years that hypertext and hypermedia are fundamentally new
art forms, with their own "language" and esthetic challenges and possibilities.
Time Code is an attempt to create the interactivity (in the way viewers can
choose which scene to follow) and multiple storylines that are the hallmark of
digital hypermedia in an analog medium.
Time Code is not the first film that aspires to interactivity. In the mid-1990s,
a film called I'm Your Man had a brief, limited release. Each seat in the
theatres where it was shown was equipped with a device that had three buttons.
At strategic points in the short film, viewers were given three choices of where
to take the story; a computer tallied how many people chose each branch, and
displayed whichever one got the most votes. The film was panned (Roger Ebert
called it the worst film of the year) and that particular experiment hasn't been
repeated. There have also been texts that have tried to break out of the bonds
of linearity. Ancient Hebrew religious books, for instance, often feature a
central block of text surrounded by commentary that accumulated over centuries.
In the early 20th century, a French poet published a book that contained
passages written on 100 loose pages; readers were encouraged to arrange and
rearrange the pages in order to create their own narratives.
The problem with these (and other) experiments in interactivity is that they go
against the nature of the media in which they were conducted. Print text, as all
good students of McLuhan know, is linear; devices such as tables of contents,
footnotes and bibliographies notwithstanding, it is natural for us to start at
the beginning and read to the end of a text. In a similar vein, a film may
contain many temporal or physical shifts, but, no matter how complex, we expect
it to unspool from the first reel to the last.
While it is possible to tell interactive stories in linear media, it isn't
natural to do so, and the results are usually not esthetically satisfying. This
suggests that some works are better suited to a given medium than others.
Interactive narratives seem best suited to digital media; we could say that the
World Wide Web is interactive fiction's native habitat. So, why waste your time
with wannabes when the real deal is only a click away?
Can’t get enough of *spark? For more intellectual stimulation, go to the source: *spark online.
