Interactive Installation: Authorial control and narrativized design strategies

Candidate: Majid Bagheri
Type: Master of Arts (MA), School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Date: April 26, 2011
Senior Supervisor: Jim Bizzocchi
Thesis: Download Thesis Document

Abstract

In this thesis, I revisit the problem of interactive narrative and problematize some of its common underlying assumptions.  I argue that a shift away from understanding the problem as an opposition between immediacy and hypermediacy can point to directions often neglected. Interactive narrative films have often been conceived of as screen-based systems where the interactor experiences the branching work by clicking on hotspots in the video. A future direction of interactive cinema however might lie not in a text that changes but a body that moves. Unlike linear media in which authorship is commonly understood as the control over narrative content, structure, and timing, in interactive media it also extends to the interface and the interactive design. I present three projects that contextualize this understanding in the form of interactive narrative installation.