Only minutes into the first panel of the first day of this Second Digital Storytelling Festival, Chris Crawford raised what remains the fundamental question about using computers to tell stories: "Are we just doing the same old shit with a computer, only faster and cheaper?"
If that were the case, there wouldn't be much to say. Yet in fact there's an embarrassment of stuff to talk about here -- a good sign that, as Crawford put it, "there's something fundamentally different going on."
Crawford went on: "The only thing the computer brings to the party that is different is interactivity. But we don't have a very clear idea of what interactivity is; we are like people in 1908 discussing what is 'cinematic.'"
Yet discuss it we will, we must. There's too much interesting work being made, despite all our confusions and all the limits of the technology we have today, to duck the debate -- even if we know we're only groping at the beginnings of a vocabulary.
Here are some of the questions we face, and some comments culled from the day's proceedings.
Is interactivity a function of what happens between a reader or "user" and a digital artwork? Or is digital technology more valuable as a tool to connect artist and audience -- or transform the audience into the artist's collaborators?
What about linear narrative -- the tried-and-true design of a million classics -- versus experiments with non-linear talespinning?
John McDaid: "All previous media have been trapped in the linear model. Linearity is a bug, not a feature."Is the World Wide Web ultimately a vast database/library/information warehouse, the way its earliest visionaries and creators imagined it? Or is it the global stage of the future, with room enough for everyone on the planet to tell their stories to one another? And what shape will that space take?Dana Atchley: "For myself, I like a beginning, middle and end."
"Two dimensional pages will become the grafitti of three-dimensional space."How does the interactivity of the Web transform the relationship between writer and reader, storyteller and audience?
-- Tim Berners-Lee, quoted by Jonathan Delacour
Rebecca Farwell of Discovery Online said, "We see every piece of editorial material as the start of a conversation." She told the story of a talented writer who at first bridled at the notion of answering email from his readers" "I'm a writer -- I don't talk to the audience." He later relented, discovering that the email was a splendid relief from the isolation of his assignment, a wilderness excursion.
How far can we take the Web as an intimate, confessional medium?
Justin Hall referred to the improvisational online autobiography he has pursued at his site, www.justin.org, as "hypertext personality download."
He also wondered what would happen as the line between his life-as-lived and life-as-reported-on-the-Web grew thinner and thinner: "I've had a friend in the Web for three years -- I've told all the stories -- It's all there."
Can "story engines" like Chris Crawford's Erasmotron transform the complex dynamics of storytelling into fine-tunable algorithms?
Can multimedia artists like Adriene Jenik -- who described her difficulty getting her "Mauve Desert" CD-ROM published -- find a home for their work?
Is the Web just another mirage of liberation, to be digested by existing media institutions with barely a burp?
Or can we escape the "tyranny of the purely technical" (Delacour's phrase) and use digital technology to pry open a new world of hitherto unheard stories and visions?
Same old shit? Maybe; but not inevitably. One of Farwell's comments suggests one starting point: "We need to let go of the arrogance of assuming we have all the answers."