Being Within Story, Screen, and Museum Space
... just like Alice ...
Kylie Message
This study is about process; at the level of story-telling and exhibition content, and at the structural level of methodological and exhibition display. Narrative structure and form bring into being a certain view or perspective of a specific moment or fragment that becomes privileged as content that is then framed within the narrative structure which articulates its existence. However, the structural framework itself is methodological and itself expresses processes of dominant story-telling. This form-content relationship is evident in museological exhibitions and displays, and may be further examined through the emerging focus on new technologies within the museum space. New technologies allow the construction of new presentation methods and new modes of spectatorship within the museum context. This change at the fundamental level of production may motivate a more direct relationship between the viewer and story or object or exhibit, but whilst the technology is new, it is itself part of the spectacle. Unlike traditional museum display technologies which render invisible the ideology by which they provide the framework for certain dominant historical narratives, exhibitions which employ new technologies encourage spectators to gain an understanding that the mode of presentation itself contributes at an elemental level to the production of immersive experience. This structural outline also happens to be the condition for most story-telling narrative forms, including Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno and Alice stories.
Within the museum, spectators engage in the space of narrative via interaction with the hard, physical space of the immediately experiential environment. This linear trajectory suggests that interaction is based on the literalisation of the processes of engagement with a story that is read or told. This approach also encourages a sliding movement from discussion about readerly engagement with the two dimensional text, to discussion about spectatorial interaction with three dimensional exhibition and display environments. These distinct experiences are often separated from each other according to the materiality associated with them (book, electronic viewing screen, museum space), or by the terms used to describe the spectatorial relationship (engagement, immersion, interaction). However, such a division may assist in the process of looking at these materials and terms, without insisting upon differentiation between the spectatorial and readerly experience. The leap into occupying an immersive experience or environment that is made by the reader or spectator may be largely conceptual, but these modes of leaping engagement have a literal illustration that can be found by looking at the way that spectators move through the physical space of the museum, and relate to the displays and exhibits on show within these physical spaces.
The experience of museum going cannot be spoken of as analogous to that of the reader, spectator, or immersive experience. However, it is informed by each mode of spectatorship, movement, and perception, and thus demands a response in conceptual, imagined and real space and time from the experiencing individual. Spectatorial movement is physical and it responds to the architecture of the exhibit, but the immersion the spectator may experience is no less complete than the experience of a person immersed in a virtual reality world with gloves and goggles, and minimal physical movement. This discussion also makes literal the transition made by the reader of a book as s/he moves from its page ‘into’ the space shared by Alice. It is necessary to consider more closely the material experience of immersion and the relation of the spectator to the apparatus that facilitates this totalising experience in traditional terms before this spectatorial process can be mapped over the trajectory or paths created by the movement and pauses of the museum-goer.
Within the museum, the screen, monitor or viewing device are material objects which further facilitate narrative movement. In addition to being both facilitators and framing devices, these apparatuses also provide a distinct sphere. The qualities of this will manifest in, or impact on, the movement a reader or spectator makes through this spatial and temporal field. Just as the form and stylistic presentation of a book manifests the way a reader moves or engages, the form and functions of the display screen manifest a similar affectivity within the reader’s experience. As with all framing mechanisms, the screen works best in its role as facilitator if it is invisible. Spectatorial access is less traumatic if the suspension of disbelief occurs somewhere on the reader’s side of the screen. This contention is premised on the notion that textual space can only be affective - or immersive - if the reader engages fully in a corporeal sense. As such, it is believed that we only engage fully (our experience only becomes real) with Alice if we follow her down the rabbit hole, if we somehow move by ‘stepping’ into the contained box of the screen or computer terminal. But, as with the ‘leap’ that enables this ambivalent movement into what Walter Benjamin refers to as a childhood state, the space that is being leaped ‘over’ (or ‘through’) so that movement ‘into’ the story can occur, is absent from critical discussion. It seems that to speak this space would be to rupture its affectivity. As with the production of narrative, speaking brings into being that which it names. This liminal space of page or screen can only be effective if it remains invisible. To demystify it would make it further apparent, and perhaps more like a solid wall than a space that facilitates movement through seduction of the reader.
Jean-FranV ois Lyotard asserts that "the decline of narrative can be seen as an effect of the blossoming of techniques and technologies since the Second World War, which has shifted emphasis from the ends of action to its means." Analysis of the structural and episodic form of narrative can shift focus from the traditional concern with the contextually centralised ‘meaning of life’ or ‘the moral of the story.’ The moral or meaning is the end point mourned by Lyotard. A deconstructive ‘shifting’ of this religious centre has not caused its replacement by an equally religious discourse. Rather, the centre has been maneuvered in order to dispel belief in its privileged centrality. Here the realm of absence and presence is encountered. This issue echoes in regard to both discourses, and also for the spectator or reader. A negotiation of this binary code may allow recognition that ‘a way into’ the space of the screen is one that cannot occur through polarised positioning or stasis. It must ‘happen’ through slurred speech and slipped footsteps. In re- investigating the structure and forms elemental to narrative productions, it becomes apparent that the structural and strategic movement that occurs within narrative, reflects the reader’s movement through electronic space. Indeed, this movement reflects (and desires) the means by which action acts, rather than the teleological goal or meaning. Rhizomatic flows of engagement here predominate over claims for absolute identity and naming. Addressing Benjamin, Roland Barthes elucidates that "‘What takes place’ in a narrative is from the referential (reality) point of view literally nothing; ‘what happens’ is language alone, the adventure of language."
Andrew Cameron has suggested that "The 'interactivity is post modern' school of thought sees interactive representation as a liberation from the repressive authority of traditional narrative form." However, one cannot exist without the other. Like all good dualisms, the ‘meta’ can only be privileged if it is over the molecular; fragmented, stuttered and slurred. As in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it is only through identifying with Alice as a mode of movement, whereby she is not an agent but a facilitator, that the reader can become actant, and, as such, participate in the travels across the textual layerings presented by the narrative. If one searches for a teleological end point, or reads the last passage first to ‘see what happens,’ it is unlikely that participatory interaction will occur. As Carroll states in Sylvie and Bruno, there do exist loose rules, conditions, circumstances or ‘frameworks’ under which seeing fairies may become possible.
As a reader becomes increasingly immersed within the present experience of reading, interactivity is exacerbated. The recognition that this immersion is interactive is rupturous. To consider that one is interacting, is to break away from the experience, to un-immerse in order to theorise. This is also a paradox of the binary code, 0-1. If the computer is switched on, conditions for immersion are activated. A switched ‘off’ computer is an unlikely set of conditions for interaction. One may be reflected in its surface, but the state of the screen as flat and ungiving predominate. The dominant reading narrative present in this situation is to represent the screen as two dimensional and unaffecting. The reader’s control is absolute. They are not reading through interaction, but rehearsing meta-narrative ‘givens.’ Rather than remaining a constructive reader, the conscious realisation that one is interacting with a technology (rather than with the content represented), demands separation from the present moment in order to narrativise or explain. This causes a reinvestment in the regulative meta-narrative over the molecular or experiential, a scenario which is explained by the narrator in Sylvie and Bruno when he says "And so he had been, I felt no doubt: only, as the time had been put back to the beginning of the tête-à-tête, he referred to, the whole of it had passed into oblivion, if not onto nothingness! But I valued my own reputation for sanity too highly to venture on explaining to him what had happened."
Following the narrative paths presented, the reader or spectator weaves a mode of movement for their own trajectory within the fabric of the text or screen space. According to this movement, the spectator is immersed within (moves inside) the representation and becomes a participant. Yet, at the core of the interactive representation, narrative reinstates itself through ‘the subject narrativising the experience.’ Narrative structure survives the initially simulated experience, and then the simulation of this simulated experience. It, itself (rather than the machinic technology), becomes the facilitating office by which experience is spoken. It is through an existing relationship to narrative structure that a reader gains access to interactive spaces, and it is through this same familiarity that the reader is able to later tell (or ‘trans-late’) this experience. The multifaceted layerings and folds of narrative structure become a technique for producing significance out of a state of being that is fully present whilst immersed, and seemingly absent when past. This absence is largely explained due to the role of simulator that the screen as facilitator holds. Once separated from the past moment, belief in its actual ‘there-ness’ may fade. Its artificiality may be seen as predominating over its affective presence. This is a matter of interpretation, not narrativisation. Alternately, it is the interpretation of a narrativised experience. This is essentially a matter of individual response, like any other form of representation, interactivity is an illusion, and, as such, it is a question of paucity and becoming. Carroll articulates the affectivity of narrative movement through this passage of Sylvie and Bruno:
"And the secret of enjoying it," he continued, resuming his cheerful tone, "is intensity!" ...
"What I mean is intensity of thought - a concentrated attention. We lose half the pleasure we might have in Life, by not really attending.... Suppose A and B are reading the same second-rate circulating-library novel. A never troubles himself to master the relationships of the characters, on which perhaps all the interest of the story depends: he ‘skips’ over all the descriptions of scenery, and every passage that looks rather dull: he doesn’t half attend to the passages he does read: he goes on reading - merely from want of resolution to find another occupation - for hours after he ought to have put the book aside: and reaches the "FINIS" in a state of utter weariness and depression! B puts his whole soul into the thing - on the principle that "whatever is worth doing is worth doing well": he masters the genealogies: he calls up pictures before his "mind’s eye" as he reads about the scenery: best of all, he resolutely shuts the book at the end of some chapter, while his interest is yet at its keenest, and turns to other subjects; so that, when he next allows himself an hour at it, it is like a hungry man sitting down to dinner: and, when the book is finished, he returns to the work of his daily life like "a giant refreshed."
Interactivity offers the promise of a constructive readership role; or a writerly reader. A reader who constructs, through interactive readings, stories within stories, or worlds within words may or may not explode the dominant mediating force of the meta-narrative. But significantly, it will effect a microcosmic explosion of molecular narrative paths and movements within the simulating viewing apparatus (as facilitator). In this way, the passive states of reader and facilitator are shifted. The reader inverts the role of the machine, and constructs (by participating within) stories, writing with the screen which, traditionally has been represented as that which, much like a window or television set, allows for a certain regulated vision. The seeing machine becomes a writing machine, and the voyeur is moved to action. Through both corporeal and incorporeal motion, the reader identifies with Alice in her agency of signifiers of narrative. Through this, the narrative becomes more than a simple navigational device, and the reader becomes actant through identifying with, compelling the direction of, the narrative. Now, no less than in the past, museums are responsible for responding to the relationship between objects and stories and people that is offered by their own exhibitions. The difference now, however, is that museum exhibitions are, in a sense, putting on display the methodologies and mechanisms of display which previously have been made invisible. This is clearly facilitated by the association of process and technological (and social) progress, and the appropriation of new media technologies within the physical space of museum display further highlights the cognitive movement of the spectator into the space of the display itself, rather than simple engagement with subject matter.
References:
1. Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. by Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 323-328.
2. For a discussion on "trauma" as that which signals the accidental encounter with the real, and the further trauma that results from this, see discussion of tuche in Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. by Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), p. 55.
3. Instead of focusing on the site of the screen, popular analysis has turned to the effect of this screen on the viewer. Sherry Turkle states that "when we step through the screen into virtual communities, we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the looking glass." Identity must be protected at all cost, because dissemination of subjectivity would, in Turkle's opinion, cause the negative state of unsocialised psychosis. Just as Benjamin fears the disintegration of a unified being through the fragmentation of the process and practice of storytelling, Turkle promises the re-unification of individual identity through on-line interaction. Her book opens with "We come to see ourselves differently as we catch sight of our images in the mirror of the machine," thereby re-asserting the duality of body and machine. She perceives the screen as a frame whose function it is to let us see the material presented. Without discussion of the potential for a cyborg body, and content to subsume any sense of process or procedure, Turkle mythologises an image of a spectator somehow miraculously "stepping through" the computer space. For further discussion, see Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. (London: Phoenix, 1997), p. 9 & 179, Margaret Morse, "What do Cyborgs Eat? Oral Logic in an Information Society" in Culture on the Brink: Ideologies of Technology, ed. G. Bender and T. Druckrey (Seattle: Bay Press, 1994), pp. 157-89, Mary-Anne Caws, Reading Frames in Modern Fiction, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), p. 11, Allucquere Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996), Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
4. See Walter Benjamin, One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. by Edmund Jephcott (London: Verso Press, 1997), pp. 71-72.
5. And yet, how is readerly movement effected? The experience of reading as entering the space of the text is itself narrativised. Regardless that this may be, according to Derrida, "a beginning that is forever fictional," and regardless of Deleuze's dissertation that a reader enters the space of the text in a non-constant position that is always already in-between, there does appear to remain to be "in the beginning, what I am obliged to call 'the leap,' the scission one can get across only by leaping..." (Derrida quoting from Philippe Sollers' Numbers.) This "leap," suggested by Derrida, or the "sliding" suggested by Deleuze indicate the reader's movement into textual space. See Jacques Derrida, Dissemination, trans. by Barbara Johnson (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), p. 300, Gilles Deleuze, Essays: Critical and Clinical, trans. by Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1997), p. 21, M. Christine Boyer, Cybercities: Visual Perception in the Age of Electronic Communication (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1996), p. 138.
6. See George P. Landow, Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 2-3, Jean FranVois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1993),p. xxiii, N. Katherine Hayles, ed. Chaos and Order: Complex Dynamics in Literature and Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991), pp. 4-5.
7. Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" in Image, Music, Text, trans. by Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1984), p. 124.
8. Andrew Cameron, "Dissimulations: The Illusion of Interactivity" in Millennium Film Journal, no. 28 Interactivities edition, Spring 1995, pp. 33-47.
9. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, in The Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1996), pp. 15-125.
10. Lewis Carroll, Sylvie and Bruno, in The Complete Illustrated Lewis Carroll (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1996), p. 354.
11. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. by Richard Miller (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1996), pp. 10-11.