Designing a Database Cinema
Marsha Kinder – Designing a Database Cinema
Who is Martha Kinder:
- From the information on her her faculty page (http://college.usc.edu/faculty/faculty1003413.html), Marsha Kinder is University Professor and Professor of Critical Studies, Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Southern California. She is a cultural theorist and film scholar, and specializes in narrative theory, digital media, children’s media culture, and Spanish cinema.
- A quick peruse around the internet turns up her writing about topics as wide raging as the oedipal themes in Super Mario Brother 3 (Playing with Power in Movies, Television, and Video Games) to the use of cinema in the construction of national identity in Spain (Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain) to interactive database narrative.
- She is the director of the Labyrinth project (http://college.usc.edu/labyrinth/about/about1.html) which is an art collective focusing on interactive cinema and database narrative.
- On the Labyrinth site, database narratives are described as,
“narratives whose structure exposes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and are crucial to language: the selection of particular narrative elements (characters, images, sounds, events, and settings) from a series of categories or databases, and the combination of these chosen elements to generate specific tales.”
- The project site contends that while a database narratives do not have a traditional beginning, middle and end or a clear chain of causality, they do present a “narrative field”. This field can arouse in the user, curiosity and desire which the narrative will engage to propel searches into its database to generate connections which they state will lead to “a rich array of sensory and intellectual pleasure.”
- The database narrative that reveals alternative forms of narrative. In doing so they challenge the normative or inevitability of the master narratives by exposing their arbitrariness.
Designing a Database Cinema.
- Kinder’s article discusses her ideas about database cinema against the backdrop of three specific projects from the Labyrinth Project: Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill; Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986; and the Danube Exodus: The Rippling Currents of the River.
- These projects were a collaboration with experienced artists who’s work was already like non-digital database work.
- It was not easy to find documentation on this work other than the write ups on the Labyrinth Project website. The only one I could find any video on was the Danube Exodus: http://www.strimoo.com/video/13517127/The-Danube-Exodus-The-Rippling-Currents-of-the-River-Installation-Vimeo.html
- Rather than leap into notions of “new media”, they chose to work using analogies to older forms of media. Just as Eisenstein used theatre and literature to develop a rich vocabulary around early cinema, Kinder based her projects on what she calls “vintage” artists who’s work created a demand for a new form of expression. (Like John Cayley’s idea that poetics would be a solid methodology for digital practice rather than some loose notion of a new media methodology)
- Rather than summarizing her descriptions of the projects she worked on, I would like to move on to her claims. The first of which is that database and narrative are not sworn enemies as Lev Manovich. She says that they are not, as he puts it, “two competing imaginations, two creative impulses, two essential responses to the world”.
- She sees all narratives as made from selected items. In traditional narrative, this database of items remained hidden. In addition to this, she sees databases as selective – the instant that a category is created and that one tries to retrieve data, a narrative has begun. In these senses, the database is not only compatible with narrative, it is integral and vice-versa. The creation of categories involves social and historical context and retrieval involves desire and ideology.
- For Kinder, the database narrative involves selection and combination which is at the core of stories and of language. (See Roman Jakobson’s description of the poetic function in language in Closing Statements: Linguistics and Poetics)
- As an example, she discusses Luis Bunuel’s synoptic table of the American cinema in which he created a table consisting of Ambiance, Epochs, Main Characters etc. He did this to illustrate that one could predict the plot of a film based on these main categories.
- Citing The Milky Way and the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Kinder highlights that Bunuel’s films offer the possibility of following an array of interwoven narrative paths, none of which, in the end, cohere. She describes these films as “a networking [of narrative strands] enabling the viewer to observe the narrative engine in action”
- In the Labyrinth Project films, users are encouraged to “spin” stories from the database through a combination of design, chance and choice. The users, though, are asked by each of these projects to forgo closure. The push closure is, in fact, plays a roll in, The Decay of Fiction, in which it is suggested that it is fueled by paranoia.
- The Labyrinth Project films play on the notion of narrative expectations, closure and contextualization. She asks the question, when encounters a radical new kind of story can one change their cognitive schemata or can one only make small adjustments. This is the point at which, she states, the idea of a performative approach to interactivity comes in.
- Interactivity is not new to new media and has been a part of literature and theater for all time. Narrative meaning is created by the interaction of the individual subjectivities of the user, author and the social, political and cultural conditions surrounding their reading conventions and language.
- Interactivity has become a normative term – either held up as the ultimate pleasure or condemned as a deceptive fiction. Kinder sees the way out of this binary opposition by casting the user as a performer, like a musician reading a chart of an actor interpreting a role, the user will bring their own set of memories, associations and inflections to their performance of the work.
- Kinder sums up her article by stating that non-linear narrative, database narrative, allows us to see the “narrative engine” – narrative structure as a mediating force, a way of “patterning and interpreting all sensory input and objects of knowledge.” The question for her is how do we change and how are we changed by interactive narrative.
- She wraps up by relating the database narrative with the process of biological evolution. The database narrative is a stochastic system that creates stories through the combination of design, choice and chance.
Questions:
- Leading from Kinder’s description of the interactive component of non-digital narratives, how does the database narrative change the quality of the viewer/users engagement of a narrative?
- What happens to the “author function” in database works and how does this effect how we perceive and engage a work?
- What are some of the contributing forces behind the development of database narratives?
- To pick up on Kinder’s final question, what are some of the ways in which database narrative might be changing us?