Dematerialisation and Narrative Transformation
With this next exploration, I hope my original interest in the dematerialisation of information and its influence on design, find a concrete application, addressing how design deals with the changing nature of narratives in the digital age.
My focus has shifted from the study of objects as central to materiality, and has started to evolve into the actual discourse that is intrinsic to the material. That is the discourse in which liminal spaces between materiality/immateriality exist and can potentially impact the construction of narratives, revisiting my the themes from “Positions through iterating”
The medium as a storyteller
This week, I will experiment with crafting a narrative that travels between material and immaterial mediums. This experiment is somehow inspired by the traditional parlour game “Consequences”. Starting with a basic plot and premise, each “player” gets to add a new entry to form the story. They also get the chance to use the medium as the the shaping actor of the story. The final plot will only becoming evident at the end of this collaborative process.
In this experiment I refrain from commencing with a predefined narrative and subsequently adapting it to various mediums. Instead, the medium itself assumes the role of author, acting as storyteller in its own right. This perspective places a significant emphasis on the agency of the medium in shaping narratives.
I ran 3 collaborative experiments with different people focusing on exploring narratives through 3 key main points: Fiction, personal memory, and collective memory. The result is a collection of media fabricated and mediated through both material and digital mediums.
Rationale
I love the idea of expanding on narrative, because it’s a universal language which is engrained in our understanding. We more or less understand our existence in the form of narrative. Narrative shapes beliefs, patterns and actions. Narrative is agent of identity. So having this as a bedrock of my investigation of material/dematerialisation is really interesting. It is a huge topic that I’ll try to narrow down by using simple and practical research methods in graphic design, to discover more about this relationship between narrative and dematerialisation.
Findings
- Thinking of a narrative as purely linear exercise has been useful as a starting point, but there’s so much more that can be explored around non-linearity.
- The idea of collective memory and collective narratives keeps coming back as a potential avenue.
- Refining the “game” to add more conditions could be an interesting avenue to move forward next week in order to explore more deeply the concept of using the “medium as a storyteller”.
Tutorial Feedback
- I was encouraged to carry on with my investigation focusing on the idea of the “medium as the storyteller”. Continuing with an emphasis on design led experimentation, exploring how the way I use the medium is what makes the statement.
- Consider the analytic approach of my research as something to be pursued and deepened, perhaps looking at ways in which I could refine the conditions of the experiments.
- Look at Queneau’s Exercises in Style as an parallel exploration looking at narrative transformations.
- Exploring the relation between medium, mediator, and message. Medium being the actual media used, mediator as the communication interface and the message, as the narrative itself.