Finding your place in the “Space Between…”
Klein’s chapter addresses the way in which the vastness of the novel might be approached and redesigned by interfacing with the software model of the database. In the discussion of his own ‘database novel’ Imaginary Twentieth Century, Klein describes his employment of the computer interface less as a tool (or medium), and more as a form of architecture that enables and bolsters the narrative through an accretive process. Klein supplies his reader with the tools necessary for database novels; those being: new points of origin (the book as Renaissance computer), the aperture, bleeds, the space between, wormholes, streaming/gliding, and the picaresque. Klein constructs a lattice from these tools: a structure that he assures the reader is more valuable because of its gaps than the interweaving data-rich strands. Gaps, absences, apertures, space; words that Klein uses to draw the reader’s attention to the incomplete structure of the database novel. Moreover, they are words that are used to describe the altered role of reader, who must develop new techniques in order to navigate through narratives abound with mental leaps and sutures.
Klein proposes that the computer’s interface generates gaps that force substitutions so vivid that the viewer literally enters the space that moves the story along. From this perspective, gaps in the interface allow the viewer/reader/user to mentally set the speed, determine the rhythm, enter the shocks, etc. In this way, the reader becomes repositioned as maker and/or engineer; encouraged to negotiate and navigate amongst the gaps and shortcuts inside the interface. Thus, by Klein’s endeavor to extend the novel across different platforms, he is ultimately expanding the definition of media and consequently processes of consumption.
The questions I would like to pose in response to Klein’s article are:
1) How does the “instaniety” of information afforded by contemporary technologies affect the tripartite relation between viewer, narrative and program in digital media storytelling?
2) In Klein’s discussion of apertures in storytelling, he asserts that “if the gap is too wide, no mental leap can bridge it”. Can we think of the ways in which mediums control the distance of their authored apertures?
Nick
To answer your second question – I don’t think there is a way of creating a measure for the aperture by the will of ‘creators’. In regards to storytelling, there is hardly a way in which a storyteller can decide how big a gap he will leave for the audience to cover. Especially in regards to interactive storytelling, where the role of the spectator is suppose to be amplified, there is hardly a way, or need, to create a definitive boundary of the aperture, because the whole point of the aperture is to provide the spectator with the means of creating content the way he likes it. If we follow that rule, we conclude that the spectator (I am referring again to the present day interactive spectator, mainly) determines the nature and measure of the aperture itself. The only way the creator of the original content can manipulate the aperture is to let it emerge on its own (which is bound to happen in any text), the rest is up to each of the spectators to restructure, re-imagine and create.
Radojka