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Human Computer Interaction Group
Department of Communication
Cornell University
We would like to illustrate the relevance of phenomenologically-inspired
film theory, including the works of the German film commentator and theorist
Siegfried Kracauer and of the phenomenological film theorists Allan Casebier
and Vivian Sobchack, to an understanding of the composition, content, form
and consumption of digital, "interactive"1
compositions, in particular, to interactive media. Because these film theories
address the interplay of the visual, aural and kinetic, of the expressive
and the perceptive, of the spectator's and filmmaker's2
embodied film experiences, they provide perspectives that differ significantly
from those of the cognitively, verbally oriented literary, linguistic and
semiotic theories that have dominated discourses on emergent multimedia
technologies. They offer the richness of embodied perception, movement
and emotional engagement. Film theories such as Kracauer's attempt to draw
upon the embodied dimensions of the film experience to catalyze psychological
and social action and transformation. Casebier's and Sobchack's explications
of the workings of perception and communication through film contribute
a non-naive realist framework for understanding the intersubjectivity upon
which such transformations can be premised. This framework accommodates
a more mutually constitutive and dialectical relationship between perception
and langugage than do current film theories.
During the early emergence of cinema as a technology and as an art form,
surrealists saw the new medium as "unhampered by tradition" (Everett, 1998,
p.141) and as enabling new modes of expression because of this freedom
from convention. Such freedom was seen as inherent in various technological
characteristics of film, and served to enhance the role of the spectator
as co-constructor of cinematic meaning. These claims parallel current discussions
of emerging technologies, which are likewise understood as affording new
forms of expression, as challenging static and linear notions of "the text,"
and as enhancing the role of the "reader" or "spectator" in the construction
of the text. Aarseth (1997, p.1) employs the notion of "ergodic" text (from
the Greek ergon and hodos, "work" and "path" to characterize the more active
role allowed the reader/spectator/navigator in the traversal of such compositions.
Understanding the potentialities of film lauded in the early formative
years of the medium and understanding the processes by which conventional
text-based modes of expression were eventually codified and institutionalized
in cinema (such as linear narrative, narrative closure, etc.) might provide
useful insights for enhancing discourses surrounding new digital media
-- particularly the notions of mediated realism (Casebier, 1991) and of
distraction, abstraction, and redemption (Aitkin, 1998, p.126) in the consumption
of digital multi-media materials.
We
draw out the parallels between these cinematic theories and current perspectives
on interactive technologies through an
analysis of an interactive video, El Avion, and student-spectators'
engagement with it. We explore how the video incorporates surrealist film
conventions and draw upon Kracauer's and Sobchack's phenomenological understandings
of film to understand students' computer-mediated engagements with the
interactive video and their sense-making practices. We draw upon Sobchack's
understanding of film as a system of communication based in film's intersubjective
nature as it connects filmmaker and spectator with the world and with each
other in a "concretely inhabited" and "mutually lived...transcendent space"
(Sobchack, 1992, p.25).
In order to explicate students'
sense-making practices as they engage the film/video, particularly
their reliance upon narrative configuration, we will turn to Ricoeur's
hermeneutic phenomenology as well as Sobchack's dialogical model of the
cinema experience. These perspectives contribute to the construction of
a composite, multi-dimensional understanding of the multi-media experience
that acknowledges the diversity of experiences involved in the creation,
perception, navigation and interpretation of multi-media, multi-linear,
ergodic compositions; they support the conceptualization of the "text"
(multi-media, filmic, literary, digital, interactive...) as the intersection
of expression and perception (Sobchack, 1992) and as a form of mediated
engagement with and praxis in the world. Moreover, the unique characteristics
of digital multi-media enable new experiences such as the emotional and
cognitive discomfort, even anxiety, resulting from the pervasive awareness
of "untaken paths" (Aarseth, 1997), unanticipated by film theory.
A common thread throughout these approaches is the centrality of mediation as a process connecting the author/filmmaker, the spectator and the text or film. Mediation in these theories entails seeing through, that is, experiencing the film and the world to which it refers by means of mediating technologies such as the camera, the film itself, the projector, the computer (Sobchack, 1992) or by other mediating cultural resources such as language and narrative. Drawing upon Ricoeur (1984, p.53), mediation can be understood as a process that conducts someone or something from one place or state to another via a process of configuration. Mediation, discussed at greater length below, occurs simultaneously at many levels:
The phenomenological enterprise entails describing the perceptual act,
or the relationship between the perceiving subject and what is perceived,
as it is perceived. Phenomenology "brackets" questions of ontology, i.e.,
identifying what the perceived is independent of the process or relation
of perception. This objective and its motivation differ significantly from
other approaches to understanding cultural artifacts that assume a more
ironic stance, attempting to distinguish the real from the apparent, the
illusory, the imaginary or the ideological.
We have found the descriptive enterprise of phenomenology useful for
understanding students' experiences of an interactive video designed for
Spanish language practice. But our discussion of the relevance and utility
of the approach for our project as well as for understanding multimedia
communication more broadly requires developing a common understanding of
some fundamental terms and concepts, including intentionality, perception,
embodiment, mediation and horizon.
Intentionality refers to the way in which consciousness is always consciousness
of
something, that is, it is directed towards phenomena in the world. Consciousness
itself mediates between ourselves and the objects (and subjects) towards
which our consciousness is directed (the noema); the process or mode of
our experiencing the noema is referred to as the noiesis (Sobchack, 1992,
p.34). Our consciousness is directed toward the world external to ourselves,
the Lifeworld, which provides "the inexhaustible horizons of our conscious
experience" (Sobchack, 1992., p.35). This intentionality or directedness
is a critical component of technology-mediated perception, such as viewing
a film or navigating an electronic text, for the technology mediates noiesis.
The workings of intentionality within the film experience has been excluded
by dominant film theory. In the discussion below, intersubjectivity, the
fundamental intelligibility of the film experience, is achieved between
the filmmaker and the spectator through a shared assumption that the film
refers to the world as intended and as perceived, by the filmmaker through
the camera, as expressed through the film and as perceived through the
projector (or digital video through the computer).
Perception can be understood à la Merleau-Ponty as a "primordial
structure of encounter and engagement of the lived body in and with the
world" (Sobchack, 1992, p.68). It is consciousness' means of access to
the world and provides a "prereflective organizational encounter with the
world" (Sobchack, 1992, p.68.). Central to perception is the notion of
Gestalt, perception as a configuration, "as both that which is against
figuration and serves as its ground, and as that which is with figure and
stands out against a ground" (Sobchack, 1992, p.70)3
A Gestalist understanding of perception allows us to comprehend the interpretive,
semiotic dimensions of perception. Perception thus mediates between consciousness
and world, between intentionality and world. It is enabled through the
body, through the integrated workings of all of the senses (synaesthesia)
(Sobchack, 1992) and through the cultural resources through with we perceive.
Embodiment
is fundamental to any understanding of perception or consciousness. It
is the enabling function of the body that is neglected in many cognitive
and literary theories of reading, spectatorship and consumption. As we
shall discuss below, the body is central to Sobchack's understanding of
the film experience as a form of communication. By defining communication
as the embodied site of the commutation between perception and expression, Sobchack
defines
the film as itself a body (intended in a literal, not metaphorical sense)
whose perception and expression are mediated through the camera and the
projector/computer.
Mediation can be understood in the terms used by Ricoeur to explicate
narrative mediation (discussed below) and in those of Don Ihde (1990) who
addresses at length the technological mediation of visual perception through
technofacts such as the telescope, the microscope and the camera. Ihde
(1990, p.25), upon whose notations Sobchack relies, notes that a phenomenological
account of perception is relativistic in the sense that it "always takes
as its primitive the relationality of the human experience to the field
of experience." Ihde symbolically represents this relationality as
I---relation---World
This relationship is frequently enabled, augmented, reduced or otherwise
transformed -- i.e., mediated--by technology. For example, continuing our
reliance on Ihde's notation,
I -- (technology-world)
represents my perception of the world via an instrument such as a gasoline
gauge on a car's control panel. In this situation, I am unable to directly
observe the intended phenomenon (the gasoline). In contrast, the following
symbols refer to a mediated relationship such as wearing eyeglasses, where
my visual perception of the world is enabled by eyeglasses which become
transparent in the noetic relationship:
(I-technology) -- World (Idhe, 1990., p.86).
In these symbiotic relationships between perceiver and technology, perception
as a mode of embodied engagement with the world is enabled, transformed,
reduced or augmented through the mediation of technology.
Horizon refers to the perceptual field against which phenomena are distinguished. It is a visual and spatial metaphor that refers to the broader context -- visual, interpretive, imaginary (depending on the modality of consciousness) -- within which phenomena appear and to which expression refers. One's attention and intending towards can move away from or outward from a focal location to encompass more of the context. In another sense, the horizon can be understood as framing perception and perceived phenomena. In hermeneutic phenomenology, intersubjectivity, mutual understanding and suasion are accomplished through the "fusion of horizons." Communication, in Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology, entails the intersection of the horizon of the text/video and that of the reader/spectator/navigator.
In addition to a reliance on these fundamental concepts, phenomenological
approaches share a commitment to maintaining the integrity of perceived
and encountered phenomena. As Christensen (1993, p.760) explains, "any
'external' or 'outer' thing is, qua object of thing-perception, epistemologically
independent of consciousness in the sense that it need not be as it is
perceived or believed to be." This claim of the integrity of an object
independent of its perception is central to the film theories we will present
below. It can be understood not only as a qualified ontological commitment,
but as a moral stance regarding the integrity and independence of the other,
an acknowledgement that even though perception is a relationship and the
intended object or person cannot be known or understood independently of
that relationship, it still has a integrity and existence beyond that relationship.
This assumption precludes the reduction of intended and perceived phenomena
from linguistic or conceptual constructs of individual or collective perceivers.
Phenomenological approaches acknowledge multiple modes of perception, which are not considered independent of the perceived phenomena, that is, the intended objects play an active role in shaping and limiting the horizons of perception. Sweeney (1994, p.33) points out that, "[o]ne does not perceive freedom in the same phenomenological sense that one sees the white horse." These approaches provide a more complex view of the act of viewing or reading than many theories derived from literary studies, perhaps because phenomenology has concerned itself with synaesthetic sensory, embodied and enworlded experience as well as with issues of textual interpretation. Particularly for human scientists attempting to understand and document human-technology interactions or person's interactions with different kinds of "texts" in situated, real-world engagements, a phenomenological framework furnishes conceptual tools that integrate multiple forms of perceiving, knowing and otherwise being in the Lifeworld. "The phenomenological method...is a way of looking at the same time at both subject and object in the cognitive act [or relationship] while maintaining the object of the act as existing independently" (Casabier, 1991, p.4). This independence and the dialectical nature of perception becomes especially important if we wish to use film or multi-media compositions for purposes of teaching, social action, the facilitation of communication or documentation, for they maintain the integrity of the Lifeworld which can be referenced and mutually oriented towards. The use of multi-media as a means of engagement with the world necessitates distinguishing among various types of relationships between perceivers and perceived phenomena as well as between the re-presentations and re-presented and between the reference and the referenced.
The primary mode of the filmic experience, in surrealist theory, is
discovery and uncovering -- to discover aspects of reality that are re-presented
through the film. Hence, surrealism shares many of the presuppositions
of phenomenology regarding reality and its representation and perception;
for example, surrealist theory presupposes the "intentionality" of perception
and expression in the act of re-presentation. Moreover, in surrealism,
this process of discovery is inordinately visual, entailing complex relationships
between the perceiving "eye" and the perceiving "I." The playful punning
of surrealist film theory (as well as semiotic film theory) with the eye
and I, with visual perception and subjectivity, resonates with phenomenological
embodied perception.
The technological and aesthetic novelty of early film as an emergent technology derived from the visual presentation of movement (Kracauer, 1960) and later the integration of this movement with sound. Like photography, film was commonly understood in realist terms as a means of accurately re-presenting an objective world. Surrealists, however, focused on and experimented with the complex ways in which this realism could be "simultaneously strengthened and subverted through editing to create...multi-layered realities" (Everett, 1998, p.142). These multi-layered realities, or topographies as Everett calls them, can be taken as analogous to the multiple layers and topographies of hypertext and virtuality in digitally created environments. Multiplicity and ambiguity, including multiple potential meanings, lack of narrative closure and perceived untaken paths, intentionally elicit an active response from the spectator. This active participation in the creation of the meaning of the film or video can effect the realization of freedom from the constraint of uni-linear determinative narrative structure. In this active participation of the spectator Kracauer identified the revelatory potential of film. Both early surrealist film and current post-modern multi-media compositions work to subvert singular totalizing systems of meaning.
Like the surrealists, Kracauer understood film as enabling re-presentation
of the nature of modern existence, which was "distracted" (see below).
His was a realist stance, advocating "a correspondence between the 'basic
properties, affinities and identities' of the film medium, and the underlying
properties of modernity" (Aitken, 1998, p.125); i.e., modern life was distracted
and film afforded representation or mimesis of that distraction. Moreover,
film could be redemptive, in that it enabled the transcendence of the distraction
and abstraction of modernity through "redirect[ing] the spectator's attention
to the 'texture of life' lost beneath the abstract discourses which regulate
experience" (Aitken, 1998, p.126). This "texture of life" was the Bergsonian
and Husserlian Lebenswelt, the everyday world of transience and ambiguity.
Kracauer's mimetic theory of the cinema emphasized film's potential for visual re-presentation, meaning creation and social catharsis, rather than narrative configuration and closure as the primary source of meaning and emotional satiation. Moreover, unlike many surrealists (especially dadaists) he emphasized the cinematic potential for documenting the world external to the individual, particularly nature. Kracauer criticized filmic representations that created coherence, singular meaning, linear narrative as ideological, as "covering reality" (p.130) rather than as revealing it. He advocated revelatory "episodic" film that featured ambivalence and indeterminacy, presenting minimally interpreted episodes of reality to spectators and allowing them to construct their own meanings. This process of consumption was seen as entailing a "rediscovery [which] takes the form of redeeming the world from abstraction through indeterminacy and the empirical" (p.132). Kracauer argued further that "the literal overwhelms the symbolic function in film" (p.136), and that the spectator, through associations initiated by the cinematic symbol (understood as an image of an object in association with other objects), explores the connections between the symbol and her own experiences (p.137). The spectator herself creates coherence and relevance. Through the discovery of the lebenswelt via the filmic experience, consciousness and experiences of the world could be transformed. As we shall see, similar claims are made for newly emerging representational technologies today. Hence, cinema contributes to a broader social-political agenda of enabling freedom from convention through the filmmaker's sharing responsibility for meaning construction with the spectator.
Sweeney (1994, p.30) notes that Casebier advocates "a mediated form of realism" in his efforts to understand cinematic representation and the film experience. Casebier's concern is to maintain the integrity of the film as it exists independently of its viewing, to avoid reducing the cinematic experience to the interpretive process of the spectator, and to thereby address how the film shapes, constrains or mediates the film experience. "For Casebier, an advantage of understanding film spectatorship in terms of Husserlian realist phenomenology is that it gives credence to viewers' natural beliefs that they are witnessing something that they did not construct" (Sweeney, 1994, p.30). Like Kracauer, Casebier utilizes metaphors of "discovery" and "recognition" rather than "construction" to characterize the spectator's engagement with the film as the uncovering of a phenomena that exists independently of the process of perceiving
.
Several concepts central to Husserlian transcendental phenomenology
provide the conceptual framework for understanding how the spectator perceives
the film: noema, noesis and hyletic data, perception, apperception. Hyle
or hyletic data are pre-given sense data such as color or sound. When intentional
experiences are directed towards hyletic data, they give meaning to such
data through the noetic moment, the process through which an intended object
(the noema) is apprehended. Again, the relationship between the perceiver
and the perceived is co-determinative, that is, the noema plays an active
role in the noetic process.
Casebier draws upon the notions of perception-apperception to further
elucidate the spectator's experience of the film. Apperception refers to
the way in which the perceiver can see through elements of an image or
attend to particular elements; for example, one can perceive the tone,
timbre, inflection, etc. of another's voice, or apperceive through those
phenomena the topical content of the talk (Casebier 1991, p.13). Or, one
can apperceive the color and line of an image as one perceives the depicted
object, for example, a horse. Sensa or hyletic data can be perceived or
apperceived, attended or disattended. How such perception occurs is shaped
by the relationships among the film, the spectator and the context of viewing.
Understanding these relationships entails understanding how the hyletic
data of the film shape, but do not determine, that experience. Casebier
acknowledges the role of shared cultural resources in perception and sense-making,
although he understands the spectator's reliance on those resources in
terms of intuition and transcendence.
The language of phenomenology as Casebier uses it enables us to identify the multiple levels or paths along which a film or video is experienced. He is particularly concerned to challenge what he refers to as epistemological idealism, to draw attention to the way in which the objects and features of the film shape the processes of perceiving and apperceiving and thereby present an epistemological realist approach to film. The realism of his approach consists in the perception and apperception of the represented objects, persons, events. In this mediated realist view, the spectator cannot construct any meaning for the film, but is constrained by features of the film -- the images, the filmic conventions, the narrative structure, the camera's frame, etc. Thus, the film itself, like the spectator's experience of it, is multi-layered, entailing multiple perceptions and apperceptions, as well as apprehension of the symbolic significance of the represented object. Casebier's contribution to a phenomenological film theory is his appreciation of how symbolic and narrative meanings are mediated by the experience of perception.
Sobchack's approach to the film experience is premised upon a phenomenological theory of communication and mediation. Like Casebier, she insists on the integrity of the film itself as well as the integrity of the objects that provide the perceptual terminus of the film. She conceives of the film as embodying the filmmaker's perception of the World and her expression of that perception. The embodied, enworlded spectator engages with both this perception and expression through the film experience which is mediated by the film body and the projector. It is worth quoting Sobchack (1992) at length on these complex relationships:
The film experience not only represents and reflects upon the prior direct perceptual experience of the filmmaker by means of the modes and structures of direct and reflective perceptual experience, but also presents the direct and reflective experience of a perceptual and expressive existence as the film. In its presence and activity of perception and expression, the film transcends the filmmaker to constitute and locate its own address, its own perceptual and expressive experience of being and becoming. As well, the film experience includes the perceptive and expressive viewer who must interpret and signify the film as experience, doing so through the very same structures and relations of perception and expression that inform the indirect representational address of the filmmaker and the direct presentational address of the film. (p.9)
That is, the film re-presents the perceptions of the filmmaker,
which in turn are perceived by the spectator via the film experience -
"[t]he film exists as the visible visual relation between an embodied eye
and a sensible world" (Sobchack, 1992, p.203). The filmmaker's experience
of the world is mediated by the camera; the spectator's perception of that
experience (of the filmmaker) is mediated by both the projector (or computer)
and the camera -- "...through the respective mediation of camera and projector
(mechanisms that intervene in acts of perception and expression, both duplicating
and reversing them), the filmmaker and spectator are brought into indirect
perceptual engagement with each other, and into direct engagement with
a world that is their mutual intentional object" (Sobchack, p.173). Drawing
upon Ihde's notation of technologically mediated perception, Sobchack represents
these relationships as:
(Filmmaker/I/Eye) perceiving -> perceived
where "perceived" is conceptualized as
(Filmmaker-camera) -> World
(Spectator-projector) -> World
That is, the mediated perceptions of the filmmaker and the spectator
converge, to varying degrees, on the terminus of the filmmaker's perception;
that terminus is in and of the World:
(Filmmaker-camera) -> World <- (Spectator-projector)
This is not, of course, a symmetrical relationship, for the filmmaker's intentions direct the attention and perceptions of the spectator, orienting the intersubjective experience toward the terminus or noema of the filmmaker's/camera's perception. The perceptions of the filmmaker and the spectator converge to varying degrees on the enworlded terminus of the camera's/filmmaker's perception. The intentional perception of the filmmaker is mediated, even transformed, by the camera, by the body of the film itself and by the projector/computer; however, the film can be understood as referring to the world, as providing the possibility of the convergence of the filmmaker's and spectator's horizons.
Sobchack describes this convergence in terms of partial "opacity"
or "transparency" (p.194). The perceptions of the filmmaker through the
camera and of the spectator through the projector do not converge completely
because of the hermeneutic distance, that is, the technological mediation
and temporal-spatial distance, between them. However, convergence and hence
potential intersubjectivity can be accomplished through the mutual orientation
towards the World and through, in the case of cinema and video, the spectator's
identification of the filmmaker's or film's "intentional path" or process
of intending (Sobchack, p.274). This mutual orientation can be accomplished
in part through cinematic techniques such a focus, close-ups, recurrence,
etc.
The communicative dimension of the film experience is premised upon
the achievement of some sort of intersubjective understanding -- accomplished
by both viewing subjects who intend towards the same perceived phenomena.
As Sobchack notes, "it is this mutual capacity for and possession of experience
through common structures of embodied existence, through similar modes
of being-in-the-world, that provide the intersubjective basis of objective
cinematic communication" (1992, p.5). Her metaphor of a "visual dialogue"
(p.173) conveys this sense of mutual access to experience that provides
the grounds for shared understanding among subjects.
The difference between these mediating intersubjective and intrasubjective
experiences when the film is made digital and the projector is replaced
by a computer is that the agency and intentionality of the spectator-navigator
intrudes into the expressed perception, that is, the world presented by
the film, potentially fragmenting it, ordering it, even immersing the navigator
in its varying depths. The navigator's engagement with the video is a different
mode of engagement than that of the spectator with the film. It becomes
the exploration or navigation of a topological space. The digital body
of the video does not express the filmmaker's perception through an unfolding
in time, but rather through a multi-dimensional unfolding in space and
through time. Multiple frames and juxtapositioning of frames rather a single
frame provides the screen onto which the video (the expression of the filmmaker's
perception) is projected and oriented. There is no isomorphism between
the temporal sequence of the viewing of the film and the sequencing within
the film's body.
The navigation of these spaces through computer-mediated environments
is a more embodied encounter than that of the film spectator. Aarseth (1997,
p.1) terms such extranoematic traversal of a text "ergodic." The spectator-navigator
explores still images, immersing herself into the video's features one-at-a-time
and in an order she selects. What is more, the traversal or navigation
of an ergodic text or space entails choices which open up paths but temporarily
close off others, offering multi-linear storylines. The spectator-navigator
must return to central, static spaces/images in order to pursue other paths,
so navigation can take the form of repeated returns.
Moreover, the meaning(s) of the video, often conflated or equated by the spectator-navigator with the filmmaker's intended meaning(s), derives from the structure or organization of the elements (scenes, characters, objects, acts) of the film. When the spectator-navigator can create that organization, the meaning of the interactive video is of a different order than that of a narratively structured continuous film. The filmmaker's and spectator-navigator's perception can converge on the enworlded phenomena intended in the original act of camera-mediated perception; however, the meaning can be variously configured by the spectator-navigator who enjoys not only the capacity to order the viewing process but also to disrupt it, inserting time for reflection, reassessment, and repetition.
Multiplicity of meanings and multilinear storylines are achieved through narrative configuration. The intending, expression and interpretation of the navigator-spectator is inexplicable without examining the interaction of narrative structurings of meaning and the mutually constitutive relationship between narrative and emotion in the interactive fiction experience. Drawing upon the phenomenological approaches discussed above and the narrative theory of Paul Ricoeur, we will explore the nature of this interactive video experience below.
By "prefiguration," Ricoeur refers to how worldly phenomena are pre-figured
with meaning, i.e., perception and meaning (or "judgment" in a hermeneutic
sense) are co-emergent -- phenomena cannot be perceived independently of
cultural, symbolic, linguistic resources because actions, persons and language
are already informed by those resources and perception occurs through those
resources: "If, in fact, human action can be narrated, it is because it
is always already articulated by signs, rules, and norms. It is always
already symbolically mediated" (1984, p.57). Thus the spectator of a film
or the reader of a text can be understood as "recognizing" these symbolic
features, including narrative. In the construction of El Avion, the filmmaker
did conceive of the episodes as loosely playing off five different
narrative themes. In "taking up" the episodes, the navigator-spectators
recognized and identified these themes and configured elements of the episodes
accordingly.
Configuring events, persons, actions and other story elements into coherent wholes provides the point of view from which story can be perceived as possessing a beginning, middle and end (1984, p.67), which is understood as unfolding through time. The narrative mediates among events, persons, images, episodes and time. It provides the organizing, temporal framework for understanding the meaning of the individual elements within the context of a broader interpretive framework; the narrative, simultaneously and dialectically, derives being and meaning from the individual events and persons it emplots.
Because the full meaning of narrative derives from a sense of closure and from the resolution of the conflicts and dilemmas that emerge through the temporal development of the plot, the conclusion of story plays a critical role in its comprehension. It provides a point of view from which the narrative can then be seen as whole. When such correlations can't be made, when spectators or users or readers cannot perceive the ending that provides closure, they can recognize within the story, they become confused or frustrated, unable to situate story elements into any organizing structure. They attempt to discover or uncover the meaning, such as the identity or intentions of a character. In the case of students' engagement with El Avion, they assume a single coherent plot "behind" the elements they explore, and their navigation of the video seems to be motivated by a desire to uncover that plot.
These traces, or the enworlded objects of intention, motivate the questions posed by spectators in regard to the various constitutive elements of the video, such as "who are they," "what are they doing," "why are they doing it." In traditional film, the answers to such questions derive from the narrative configuration of the film and are played out in a sequential fashion as the film unfolds. But surrealist films attempt to escape the imposition of narrative coherence and closure, privileging ambiguity, multivocality and polysemy. As Everett (1998, p.147) notes, it is the lack of closure that "makes it impossible to define what is real and what is not, and necessitates an essentially mobile and creative response." Likewise, in the interactive fiction video, the navigator-spectator creatively configures the video elements into a meaningful whole in the absence of a single unifying narrative structure.
Everett (1998, p.149) notes that "[s]urrealists exploit the unreal/reality
of film to create a world characterized by uncertainty in which the spectator
feels increasingly disoriented." Throughout their navigation of El Avion,
students express discomfort and anxiety as they attempt to make sense of,
that is, discover, the narrative coherence among the disjoint or fragmented
scenes and episodes. This discomfort derives, in part, from the absence
of expected or desired narrative closure and from a perceived inability
to uncover the narrative intentionality of filmmaker.
As discussed above, narrative constitutes a dialectical, mutually constitutive
relationship between elements of narrative and narrative configuration
itself. It is through narrative structure that characters can be identified,
develop character (goodness or badness) and their actions can be seen as
motivated or reasonable; narrative further imbues individual events with
significance through their contribution to a plot. In the absence of an
identifiable narrative, the students who navigated El Avion noted ambiguities
and contradictions in (1) the identity of the characters, (2) the relationships
(logical and temporal) among episodes, (3) the motivations of characters,
(4) the modality of experience represented by episodes, i.e., memory or
dream or reality, and (5) the significance of depicted objects.
Hence, engagement with the video assumes the character and aesthetic
of a mystery, or detective-like undertaking. In fact, students mentioned
that they felt like detectives (Mazur, 1993 ). The emotional-cognitive
dimension of the video experience oriented students' attention and navigation
as they attempted to uncover meanings, relationships, identities, etc.
The intrigue and game-like quality of the experience as well as the awareness
of undiscovered and untaken paths sustained interest in and engagement
with the video but also provoked frustration. In his discussion of interactive
hypertext games, Aarseth (1997, p.93) notes that the encountered disruptions
of potential narrative strands function as a sort of "anti-narrator," a
counter-narrative force, in the text. Ricoeur (1983, p.77) similarly refers
to such an antagonistic presence in the "holes, lacunae, zones of indetermination"
in Joyce's Ulysses, which "challenges the reader's capacity to configure
what the author seems to take malign delight in defiguring.
The spectator-navigators express a sense of confusion and sometimes
frustration because of their inability to make sense of an action or to
identify the relationship of a scene to other scenes. One student expressed
confusion regarding the dancing scene because of the absence of dialogue:
"Because it had no words. Because both of those scenes had no words. I
didn't know...I was really confused. I wasn't sure why..." (Mazur, 1993,
p.174). Other spectator-navigators simply qualify their interpretations
with the repeated use of terms and phrases such as "I guess" or "it seems
like" or "I'm not sure for what reason, though" (Mazur, 1993, p.125). Another
student exits a video segment, remarking "I don't know what this means,
that's why I got out of this" (Mazur, 1993, p.181).
We would like to posit that the film experience, and likewise the interactive video experience, are multi-textured, multi-dimensional experiences, which cannot be fully appreciated or understood without drawing upon multiple conceptual or theoretical frameworks . These frameworks need to be able to address the embodied, perceptual, interpretive and emotional dimensions of the film/video experience. The interactive video experience of El Avion provides an opportunity to explore the relevance of phenomenological film theories to emerging technologies. Casebier's transcendental phenomenology, Sobchack's existential phenomenology, Kracauer's phenomenologically influenced surrealism and Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology provide a diverse set of conceptual tools that can facilitate (mediate) our understanding of the mediations and noetic processes through which spectator-navigators engage with the ergodic video text - how students perceive and con-figure different elements that comprise the video segments, how technology mediates their engagement with the video and with the filmmaker's expression of a perceived world, and how the episodic structure of the video and the traversal of the video are emotionally experienced. Spectator-navigators actively attempt to access the depicted life and experience that the filmmaker perceives via the camera and then expresses, disjointly, via the video. They take for granted that such access is possible, and when it is impeded, they express confusion and frustration. They assume the filmmaker intends and the video is structured around a discoverable narrative that references the world. Mazur (1993, p.135) records one navigator-spectator as asking "Will you tell me the actual story when I'm done?"
The works of Kracauer, Casebier, Sobchack and Ricoeur provide insights into these processes of technological and narrative mediation through which the perceptions of the filmmaker and the spectator can converge on a World to which the camera and the film/video refer. From such a perspective, intended objects and persons, whether in the world or in the video, maintain an integrity independent from the perceiver and from the process of perception, although they cannot be perceived independently of that process. Maintaining this integrity is a commitment of both phenomenology and Kracauer's phenomenologically-informed surrealism. It provides a basis for recognizing, appreciating and understanding the active, constitutive roles that intended objects and mediating technologies play in the viewing, navigation, interpretation of and communication through ergodic "texts." Acknowledging this integrity and agency, that is, assuming the mediated realist stance of phenomenology, construes perception and communication as an opening up to phenomena/others that present themselves through the noetic process. It thereby renders possible the transformation of the perceiver through the perceptual experience, through a fusion of horizons or through the achievement of intersubjectivity. It provides for the possibility of the individual and social transformation desired by the surrealists.
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Geri Gay is director of the Human
Computer Interaction Group (HCI Group) and an Associate Professor of
Communication at Cornell University. The HCI Group is a research and development
group whose members design and research the use of computer-mediated learning
environments. Professor Gay's research interests focus on cognitive and
social issues for the design and use of interactive communication technologies.
Professor Gay has received funding for her research and design projects
from the National Science Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities,
the Mellon Foundation, Intel, Microsoft, IBM, Getty, and several private
donors. She teaches courses in interactive multimedia design and research,
computer-mediated communication, human-computer interaction, and the social
design of communication systems.
Address: Human-Computer Interaction Group, 209 Kennedy Hall,
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853. http://www.hci.cornell.edu
