In 1928, Milnam Parry radically restructured western critical understanding of how Homeric poetry is composed. Parry's proposed that oral poetry was a process of following metrical structures and drawing on a large repository of epithets or formulaic phrases to fill in the blanks. Instead of inspiration and memorization of words, oral poets follow metre, and then utilize an archive of phrases. (Drawn from Ong, Orality and Literacy, p.17-21)
In 2001, Lev Manovich, developed theories about database logic, repeatedly stressing how the ability to access lists of data and link to other data "contribute to the anti-narrative logic"(Language of New Media, p.221).
Comparing these two theories it is possible to see how oral composition is interpretable as database narrative: the archive of epithets and formulaic phrases are retrieved from the cultural database and used to fill slots according to metrical criteria. Perhaps this compositional method offers a viable model for anticipating how larger scale narratives will emerge from databases in spite of the bias against narrative that Manovich has chronicled.
As an empirical case-study, I offer the methodology I used for creating Interstitial: mp3 titles became phrases which sorted into chapters were stored in an archive (although formally a database structure, they conceptually are comprehensible as a database). Phrases from the correct archive were retrieved stochastically; proto-narrative emerged at the confluence of database and choice.
Labels: database, narrative, orality
[+/-] Passion Maps Narrative tension is a product of its discharge in our physiognomy. Where it discharges (the adrenal glands, the neurological modules of fear or love) is the author's choice. Most contemporary plots leverage sex and death; these are easy pathways. Who will kill who when where or how? Who will fuck who when where or how? The style of killing or fucking may differ over genres, but the mssg is the same: struggle reproduce slaughter ejaculate. Occasionally the need for comfort predominates: we develop appetites for soft, fuzzy, gentle nurturing stimulus. But between the primal violence and primal nurturance there is a similarity of style: orientation in time space, calculation of potential futures, assessment of wants, needs, desires, actualities, fantasias. These are the quanta at the root of behavior. Innate knots of intrinsic tension in the programming of the body.
Grief, ecstasy, comedy, yearning: roles intertwined with strategies, planning, creative perturbations of possible paths, choices cascading to choices. Disguise, pretense, destruction, rejuvenation, reverberation, and resilience. Ceaseless restless waves of rapturous reflex.
Most image, speech and action (in art as in life) is designed to disguise; even sincerity is a disguise of doubt. Narrative interest arises for the audience in guessing what characters might be thinking but not saying. Others are potential sites of deceit. The mythology of our contemporary civilization is that of a gift, a betrayal and ultimately vengeance.
Civilization is now highly habituated and addicted to war.
Conventional society has opened war on all fronts. One is the war on drugs. Yet, endogenous chemicals secreted by our own blood internally in situations of extreme stress (war, loss, death) are not considered to be drugs: not yet at least. Society misdiagnosing its own addiction to the endogenous chemicals elicited by war as justice, exports guilt on those addicted to exogenous chemicals (known as street drugs). This makes for a social atmosphere perpetually inflamed by passionate tensions.
Art is an addiction to the external information visualization of internal glandular disruptions which occur to humans in their most passionate moments. Art is, in other words, a passion map. Sometimes, it is the passion of extreme boredom, utter inertia, despair, sensuality, innocence. Each of these constitutes a state space of chemical parameters. In the age of L-dopa and diverse neuro-leptic pharmaceuticals, the Passions mapped by artists are being directly manipulated by scientists. Passion maps allow others to navigate emotions. Such maps do not only occur internally to the tribe, they are secreted by masses of organisms, diffused throughout space. Where no cognitive capacity exists for converting perception into meaning, it will be labelled simply pattern.
Passion is spatio-temporal: it evolves. Passion maps must be updated in real-time; that is why culture evolves relentlessly. Appetite, food. Language licking the land.
Labels: discharge, emotions, narrative, passion
[+/-] Human fiction authors are story harvesting machines. John Vaillant's astonishing 2005 tale of The Golden Spruce tends to sprout tangents: the book is a rich exploratory ecosystem of vivid meditations on human destructiveness, ecology, spirituality and anomalies.
When reading about bunch-fellers(p.219) (which are automated logging machines that fell and strip trees), a tangent vision of future robotic industry occurred to me. In the next few years, forestry, mining, fishing, farming, slaughterhouses will become manga-esque zones: humans will hone their capacity to extract whatever they need from the environment by releasing semi-autonomous harvesters into the wilderness. Burrowing robots will mine; swimming robots will fish; cutting robots will harvest; grappling robots will log. The pace of destruction could accelerate extremely.
I felt compelled to look for representative automation research into the :"...behavior integration and ...control of a robotic ...type machine. "[1]
In the cultural sphere, imagine a narrative harvester roaming over a heap of blog stories, stripping them of identifying features, inserting semi-imaginary replacements for locations and names, and sewing them together into a wad of congealed cyber-narrative. ( These cyber-authors could create work that is kinda like Golan Levin's The Dumpster. Or Kate Armstrong's 'Grafik Dynamo' which extracts images from web and recontextualizes them in a comic strip motif with a database of text entries. )
By incorporating affective computation modeling, future stories like these ones, will like biochemicals adapted for specific receptors evolve to match the cognitive structure of readers.
As Thecla Schiphorst said (in conversation): "the future is immanent in the present".
Source
1. A Control Architecture for Robotic Excavation in Construction
Q. P. Ha, D. C. Rye
Computer-Aided Civil and Infrastructure Engineering 2004 19:1 28
Labels: narrative, robotics, spruce
[+/-] Grand Text Auto is a group blog about interactive narrative, games, poetry, and art.
Labels: autonomy, blog, game, narrative, text
