dpwolf/blog

Next day I chaired Christy Dena’s paper at Critical Animals: Towards a Poetics of Multi-Channel Storytelling.

“Transmedia storytelling is, simply put, franchises: a movie is followed by a game, then perhaps a comic, website and so on. This paper outlines the poetics being developed for multi-channel storytelling; suggesting narrative schema intended to guide story creation and literary criticism.”

A couple of weeks before I was a little scared about chairing and running out of things to say or ask but once I read the paper I realised that it would be no problem at all - I had a million questions to ask. Christy began her current research topic when she was writing a novel and thought it would be interesting to let the reader chat online with a character (a bot) from the book as they read. When she looked into what had been written and done before she found quite a gap. While much had been written about spin offs and franchises such as Star Wars, there was very little on multi-channel storytelling whereby a single story is told across multiple media.

Some interesting research in this area (referenced in Dena’s paper) is Jane McGonical’s Avant Game and her paper from melbourneDAC. McGonical looks at alternate and mixed reality gaming whereby the use of multiple media such as websites, email, faxes, telephone answering machines and posters are required to traverse and piece together a story. (After I saw McGonical’s presentation at DAC I really wanted to produce an alternate reality game for my MA along the lines of The Beast. I soon realised how massively complex and time consuming its production it must have been.)

Christy’s paper can be found here: Star of Dena: Multi-channel Poetics paper

Later that day was Michelle Phillipov’s presentation on Death Metal vocality. It drew by far the largest crowd of all the Critical Animals sessions I saw. I wrote a little bit about it back here

I headed over to the Cambridge Hotel to help set up the video projectors etc for the weekend’s gigs. I brought my laptop with me just in case there was a need for an emergency VJ. Sure enough, I ended up playing a set in the main room with a band who’s name I never found out. It was quite good, with guitars and beats played live with a MIDI drumkit I think (it all happened very fast). I continued to play through until the next band and VJ were set up. Again, I used the Vidget.

On the Friday night I also documented Ben Frost (sound) and Khalid Abdullahi’s (video) School of Emotional Engineering set. It was cool to watch and listen intensely as I focused, framing shots. I got some really nice silhouetted images of Ben and Khalid with the video projections behind them. I also got some good closeups of their faces which were softly lit by their laptop screens. Hopefully some excerpts will show up online at some point soon.