_forms in formation

1
_forms in formation

• Computers and English
• Matt Barton

2
_database

• A computer database becomes a new metaphor that
  we use to conceptualize individual and collective
  cultural memory, a collection of documents or
  objects, and other phenomena and experiences.
  (214)

3
_new media design

• New media design can be reduced to only two
  principles
• Constructing the right interface to a multimedia
  database
• Provide access to information.
• Defining navigation through spatialized
  representations.
• Immerse user in imaginary universe.

4
Narratives and Databases

• What is the relationship between the database and
  another form that has traditionally dominated
  human culturethe narrative? (218)
• The database and narrative are natural enemies.
  (225)

5
_goin posty

• If after
• the death of God (Nietzsche)
• the end of grand Narratives of Enlightenment
  (Lyotard)
• and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee),
• the world appears to us as an endless and
  unstructured collection of images, texts, and
  other data records, it is only appropriate that
  we will be moved to model it as a database. (219)

6
_creating new media

• Creating a work in new media can be understood
  as the construction of an interface to a
  database.
• New media works, whether linear narratives or
  not, have databases under the hood.
• Although databases can support narratives, there
  is nothing about them that would foster them.
  (228)

7
_narratives of new media

• If the user simply accesses different elements,
  one after another, in a usually random order,
  there is no reason to assume that these elements
  will form a narrative at all. (228)

8
_navigable space

• Instead of narration and description, we may be
  better off thinking about games in terms of
  narrative actions and exploration. (247)
• Movement through space allows the player to
  progress through the narrative, but it is also
  valuable in itself. (247)

9
_space the final frontier

• Spatial constructions in new media are
  fundamentally different in one respect. For the
  first time, space becomes a media type.
• Just like audio, video, stills, text, now space
  can be instantly transmitted, stored, retrieved,
  compressedand interacted with.

10
_3D space myst and doom
11
Haptic and Optic

• There are two ways of understanding space
• Haptic isolates the object in the field as a
  discrete entity. (touch, aggregate)
• Optic Unifies objects in a spatial continuum.
  (vision, systematic)

12
_space in cartoons

• The total anthropomorphism of the cartoon
  universe breaks distinctions both between
  subjects and objects and objects and space.
• The sprites of computer games can be thought of
  as reincarnated animation characters.

13
_final thoughts

• In this book, I have chosen to emphasize the
  continuities between the new media and the old,
  the interplay between historical repetition and
  innovation.
• I wanted to show how new media appropriate old
  forms and conventions of other media
• I wanted to create trajectories through the space
  of cultural history that would pass through new
  media, thus grounding it in what came before.