Questions from Michaela Oct 9
Vannevar Bush, similarly to Aarseth, puts text and our interaction with the world through text in the forefront. And yes, more than a half a century later, text (coding languages, databases etc) is still a major part of our technological age. However, in the recent decade, video, image, sound and haptic features have strengthened their position the new reality. Bush, similarly to Papagiannis envisions communication paths happening through different brain processes such as sound, smell and touch. ‘By bone conduction we already introduce sounds: into the nerve channels of the deaf in order that they may hear. Is it not possible that we may learn to introduce them without the present cumbersomeness of first transforming electrical vibrations to mechanical ones, which the human mechanism promptly transforms back to the electrical form?’ How can we explore this aspect of new media further and why are we still so heavily reliant on text?
If ‘cybertext is a perspective on all forms of textuality’ (Aarseth 1997), what is the relationship between cybertext and ludo-narrative – the experience the user co-creates themselves? And how can we apply the concept of maze to the ludo-narrative? What would be an example of this?
How would Aarseth’s semiotic triangle (text/machine: verbal sign – medium – operator) and Kinder’s / Manovich’s database narrative apply to a communication with a chat bot and then differently with or through artificial intelligence?
In my opinion, Kinder’s article has a similar attitude to space, architecture and text as Aarseth’s. The works they built as instances of their project of Future Cinema are ‘built on the assumption that spatial exploration is not an alternative to narrative but a dimension that has always been pivotal in its structure.’ This concept leads directly to our understanding of narrative in AR and MR (and sometimes even VR), how can we use the insights of these narrative structures in AR and MR?