Session 7: Digital Art and Interactive Storytelling

4th Global Conference

Friday 13th March – Sunday 15th March 2009
Salzburg, Austria

Print Novels and the Mark of the Digital: Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006) and Media Convergence
Tatiani Rapatzikou
School of English, Department of American Literature and Culture, Aristotle University of Thesssaloniki, Greece

N.Katherine Hayles, in her study entitled Electronic Literature (2008), talks about mutability as a trait of electronic texts that print novels attempt to imitate. In the case of Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel Only Revolutions (2006), this is exactly what happens when the two characters’ stories – Sam’s and Hailey’s – that the book brings together turn into two constantly mutating, evolving and intertwining storylines. As for the book in itself, it has no formal starting or ending page: the reader can start from either side of the book since whichever cover one opens, one accesses a different “plot” line. The text format that Danielewski adopts is more than challenging since he resorts to simultaneously interweaving “stories” which, on the page, appear in an upside-down or in a colored and multiple-sized font fashion. This book description may well resemble Danielewski’s previous hit The House of Leaves (2000) but it definitely signals a new kind of convergence between print and electronic media. Troy Patterson, reviewer in The New York Times, talks about this text as an “exercise in narrative gamesmanship” (2006). This is quite apparent in the way the text is presented to the reader, since the writer makes excellent use of the interactive quality digital media is endowed with when it comes to the functionality of this book’s typesetting as well as the navigational quality of its design. It may not be accidental the fact that the characters throughout the whole narrative never grow old; their youthfulness could metaphorically imply the ongoing refreshment of the storyline itself.

Thus, digitality is not simply a “significant component of the twenty-first century canon,” as Hayles claims, it does indeed promote literary innovation and “intermediation.”  What this paper will attempt to explore then is the extent to which the interpenetration of digitality and printed textuality has further fortified narrative experimentation and storytelling interactivity by taking the printed media on to a new level of production. Special attention will be paid to the kind of sensation Danielewski’s book creates, since its storyline is not solely determined by print narrative models. A way of viewing Danielewski’s novel will be suggested: the intermingling of print and World Wide Web practices result in the formation of a much more aesthetically diversified and fortified print book culture. Subsequently, Danielewski’s book will serve as a case study through which the “benefits” of crossmedia will be assessed and commented on as well as its impact on the formation of new habits in terms of thinking, reading and expressing ourselves in a literary manner.

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It is well recognised that performance practices and their development are intricately linked to media and technology. The intermedial in live performance is both a technological and a performative phenomenon. It points at once to the incorporation of digital processing for inter-media communications within performance; and, correlatively, to performance that occurs within this in-betweeness of mediality. The incorporation of digital technology does not just expand and alter the sensory and temporal aspects of live performance, but it affects process as well as content and form.

Systems of varying complexity are developed to enable inter-communication between different media and elements in real-time. Through feedback loops between different elements, dynamic and non-linear events could be generated real-time. Performance becomes the choreography of a relational system – playing through the field of combinatorics, patterning and the transformational. Translation between media means that the boundaries and distinctions between media becomes blurred or even fused. The implication of this is not only ontological; it affects meaning and signification as well as performativity.

Intermedial performance is a form of multi-medial staging where media are not just layered and juxtaposed with one another; instead modalities and media are being transformed and mediated through the other, producing a fabric of inter-relations where often the other is the transcoding of the one thing in another form. Representation or remediation through transcoding involves a reductive process; this materialist idea of translating quantitative qualitative values and relations from one medium to another transposes our conventional idea of meaning creation.

Intermedial performance presents an expansion of how we construct and think about meaning and performance through the process of mediation and remediation. The exploration of this paper includes a case study of “Quartet” presented by Margie Medlin.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)