Coming Soon to a City Near You....
Looks like I'll officially be presenting at a couple of upcoming conferences. One is the
Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts annual conference in Chicago on November 10-13, where I'll be joining a panel with fellow 'Herder
palms, as well as should-be 'Herders
Lies and Fish and
Ed Chang. Our panel is called "Emergence & Convergence in New Media Narratives, or That's an Odd Place to Find a Story", and my humble contribution to it is a paper outlining current theories of transmediation, as well as some practical (and impractical) applications of these theories. The submitted abstract reads as follows:
This paper looks at multi-sited narrative networks, in which a narrative
sequence is distributed across varying media channels (film, web, music,
video games, print, live performance, etc.) that the user must negotiate
in order to extract pertinent information. These networks do not
constitute simple "retellings" -- stories told and retold down a chain, mimicking oral forms. Although these networks seem to take on two specific structures -- vertical (expansive) or horizontal (redundant)there is also a convergence of form that irretrievably alters each successive channel's content. In other words, the distribution of narrative across media engenders an engagement of the sequence that requires the user to process and account for not only the order and frequency with which she receives the constituent narrative parts, but the materiality of the presentational format itself. Examples will include the Matrix series, Neil Young's "Greendale," Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, and William Blake's Book of Urizen.
The other presentation, which I received word about today, will take place on March 2-5 at the
Society for Cinema and Media Studies' annual conference in Vancouver. I'll be on a panel culled from
this Penn CFP dealing with film-to-game adaptation. My contribution began as a measley post on this blog, and it will now be paired with papers dealing with, among other things, the numerous
recent adaptations of the
Lord of the Rings novels and films. Titled "Transmediation and the Ideal Narrative of
Batman Begins", mine, of course, is about The Batman:
In her recent article “Narrative and Digitality” (2005), Marie-Laure Ryan describes what she calls texts that think with their medium. These texts possess properties of interactivity/ reactivity, variability, multi-sensorality and networking capabilities. Unique to these sorts of texts is the “ability to create an original experience which cannot be duplicated by any other medium, an experience which makes the medium seem truly necessary” (516). Implicit within this statement is the notion that a thinking text is one that not only requires that a medium’s materiality be incorporated into the exposition of a narrative but that, crucially, this materiality is foregrounded as the key component of interaction.
Keeping this distinction in mind and drawing upon Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner’s work on congnition and conceptual blending, this paper intends to look at the interplay between the film and video game adaptations of Batman Begins as a function of what I call expansive spatial materialities, the modes through which a narrative is deployed within the space of a medium (such as a frame of a film or the mapping of a game level). In this specific case, the narrative of Batman Begins is altered by the variant spatialities of each particular medium. The game, for example, contains significant narrative departures from the film due to the presence of vastly expanded and interactive architectures such as Arkham Asylum, whose sheer size necessitates and alteration of the film’s content. Although neither channel needs to be experienced in combination with the other (as is required in works like The Matrix), a network still exists between the two sites that creates an ideal narrative site, in which a new, combinative narrative sequence is processed and blended by the user as a consequence of this spatial-material variance. Even though a single narrative altered by its diffusion through different media necessarily entails an engagement with a medium’s materiality, the ideal site exists entirely transmedially, unbound from its carrier. In other words, the presence of both film and game in Batman Begins works to isolate narrative from form, where neither site is an adaptation of the other but, rather, a thinking, material piece to the whole of the story.Anyone going to be attending either of these conferences? And please remind me-- how do I apply for travel grants again? ;-)
[Ugh. I can't believe I just used an emoticon in a post. I've crossed a line today, and there's no coming back...].
Posted by marcusrp at August 29, 2005 11:22 PM
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