7.21.07 NYC: Knee Plays, Interactivity vs. Storytelling, The Living Rock

Mastered the Knee Plays recordings for a re-release this fall (October). Last week we dug into the archives to see what was available as bonus tracks and unseen visual materials — there’s a truckload of stuff. My hoarding pays off!

There are early sketches by Bob Wilson (probably can’t use those) and some by myself and Adelle, quite a few unused texts, storyboards and lots of photos, notably a set of 400 B&W shots of the whole production taken by JoAnn Verburg (who has a show at MoMA now!) that were taken every 30 seconds or so. These can therefore be turned into a slideshow of the stage production, accompanied by the music. Conveniently, JoAnn was in town for her MoMA opening, so we met and discussed that possibility — which it turned out was exactly how she had hoped to use those shots, although when she took them there was no web or other simple means of presenting them that way.

On the music end, Frank discovered a couple of reels of multitrack analogue tape that contained my aborted attempts at using Kabuki percussionists (augmented by stuff I added) as the music for this project. There were about 7 pieces on the tape. Pat Dillett and I mixed about 5 of them for this re-release. They’re pretty nutty-sounding — mostly spacey atmospheric pieces with piercingly loud percussive explosions. Some of them also have the percussionists vocalizing as they would during a specific scene in a Kabuki play. Groaning and moaning ominously, for example, in a scene meant to evoke ghosts. The vocal sounds are remarkably similar to the way kids at Halloween presume that ghosts go “ooohhhhhh”.

Interactivity vs. Storytelling

In a NY Times article the writer ponders if videogames will ever move us as much as traditional art forms (he sites a Mahler symphony as an example). The writer appears to be an avid game player — so he’s not looking down his nose at gamers.

I would say, for the most part, no — at least in their present form games cannot be as emotionally engaging. I would hazard that all interactive forms and self-generating artworks, as beautiful and amazing as they might be, lack the “story” that touches us — whether that “story” is narrative or more abstract, as in a symphony or piece of art.

Seems to me that, as with myths and fairy tales, we marvel and get sucked into minor but infinite variations of the same limited set of tales. The Joseph Campbell “Hero with a thousand Faces”. We can listen or watch or hear the same story re-told over and over, with the characters replaced and the settings updated, and we are endlessly engaged and moved. How those narratives resonate in our own hearts and minds seems almost genetically predetermined, it’s that strong — like when we feel a filmmaker “pushing our buttons”.

Here is one way how the games allow you to engage with the narrative. As the characters interact you are given some options as to how they might respond to a given situation. In some cases this gives them character/personality — ruthless, caring or passive. This from Mass Effect:

Songs don’t have narratives in the sense that books or films do. They are emotional snapshots of a moment, augmented by a little bit of context that gives specificity to the emotion. Likewise in other forms — art — it’s a snapshot, a slice. We listen to the same pieces of music over and over; maybe because they’re more abstract we can insert ourselves in varying ways into their “narrative”, or the implied little piece of a presumed narrative that they present.

We don’t really want to decide how a story goes or ends by ourselves, as is the mode in videogames, because the arc of the narrative is what moves us: how the characters struggle, how they are transformed and grow. The characters in videogames don’t change — so far — so there is no transformation, there is nothing there to resonate in that part of us.

That could change. A game that had a story, and arc built in, in which we as a character — a different one each time — play out the same narrative in slightly differing ways. A game like that might have the emotional pull of a movie or opera or a song, yet it would reward repeated viewings, which movies usually don’t. The Times writer marveled that videogame players devote hundreds of hours to playing a game, far more (at one sitting anyway) than one would ever devote to a piece of music or a movie. He also ascribed the lack of emotional involvement to the limited surprises that we are given — if we choose the branching outcomes ourselves they’re not a surprise. (But an element of surprise could be programmed in, no?) Likewise, if we believe it’s all random then it’s less engaging, too. Cage and Cunningham may feel that chance is nature’s way, but look at all the order that has emerged out of chaos.

Of course, we assign cause to effect on our own, and seem to have an inbuilt tendency to ascribe story to what are chaotic random events — our need for narrative or connection is so strong. So any videogame, for example, that left that open as a possibility might connect to that part of ourselves. Maybe narrative is like a religion — it is a way of explaining that things happen for a reason.

I wonder if there is a part of the brain that connects the perception of narrative to the amygdala — the center of ancient animal emotions like lust, pleasure and fear. Strands of connectivity that gives these forms their power…and their reason for existence.

Emergent narrative? Can there be such a thing as a narrative that emerges, by itself, from a seemingly random or chaotic structure or series of events? The way forms, fractal shapes and complex structures arise out of certain kinds of chaos. Are there “forms” — narrative cells I guess you could call them — that in sufficient quantity spontaneously give rise to what we call stories? If the existence of these things is possible then perhaps emotionally moving arcs, transformations and series of events could simply emerge by themselves given the right conditions — and could those conditions sometimes be man-made?

The Living Rock

Is there any difference between what is living and what is dead? Are rocks living, but changing so slowly that we will never ever perceive it as life? Is everything alive but moving on vastly different time scales — super fast or incrementally slow compared to out own sense of time? Is what we call life merely what transforms and evolves and reproduces in a time frame we can measure? Is this what the Gaia idea is about — that the planet is a hive of living things if one somewhat broadens one’s definition of what is living?