Database Narrative

Kinder vs. Manovich debate

-Manovich: database is the opposite of narrative!

-Kinder: all stories, like language itself, derive from combinations of narrative possibilities!

Virtually all stories - like language itself - derive from combinations of narrative elements

-paradigm and syntagm

-selection and combination

“Database narrative refers to narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories,” Kinder explains, “particular data - characters, images, sounds, events - are selected from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then combined to generate specific tales.”

Where novelists are bound by numbered pages and filmmakers are constrained by sprocket holes and time code numbers, the digital artist is afforded a seeming infinitude of possibilities through the recombination of SNUs (“Smallest Narrative Units”)

The real questions then become: How and why do narrative conventions change? What drives new storytelling sensibilities? The usual answers? Television. Video games. The Internet. Programming languages.

But changes in technology are only part of the answer

The ways we read, watch and use media have been transformed at a fundamental level

expectations of interactivity and gratification, desire for liveness and responsiveness, as well as openness to complexity in temporal and spatial structures.

Witness the ease and pleasure with which contemporary movie audiences traverse the disruptive temporality of a Memento or Kill Bill, to say nothing of the spatial disruptions and reverberant visual structure of music videos by Chris Cunningham or Michel Gondry. By some estimations, it is the emergence of the database that has enabled this fascination with repetition and dislocation. Cultural theorist Lev Manovich claims that the logic of the computer has become the logic of culture at large, arguing that the database should be accorded the stature of a symbolic form on the order of cinema or the novel.

For Manovich, there is something more at stake in creating database art than narrative. “A particular question which interests me these days is how can computer databases be used to represent contemporary subjectivity? While a pre-modern person was a part of a collective, a modern subject came to be defined in opposition to the outside world, with the border between the psychological interior and social exterior clearly marked. Today this border has dissolved, and our selves once again have become `distributed': stored in external corporate, medical, government and surveillance databases, broadcast to the world via blogs and web cams, invaded by media images. How can new computer-based representational techniques, and in particular databases, be used to portray this new sense of identity?” The most interesting interactive database narratives push beyond the mere recombination of elements from a preexisting heap of possible SNUs. Indeed there is nothing specifically digital about this type of structure. So what characteristics uniquely define the interactive database narrative? Arguably, it is these three: randomness, metadata and dynamism.

RANDOMNESS

Among the most interesting practitioners of what is sometimes called “computational cinema,” Andrea Flamini www.flamini.com explores the possibilities of generative narratives using random sequences of image and sound which are set in motion by a user, but are not subsequently guided or controlled. Flamini has created an impressive body of work in recent years, ranging from multi-channel and site-specific installations to Net artworks easily downloaded by modem. The brilliance of Flamini's work is its ability to evoke a mood or a state of consciousness within which narrative elements seem to gain coherence while resisting conventional narrative logics of cause and effect.

METADATA

Metadata is invisible information (keywords, for example) that is attached to any data set. Metadata allows a database system to create combinations of story elements that are dictated by the logic of relational algorithms or a search engine designed to access and combine information in particular configurations. An example of a rigorously metadata-driven narrative may be found in Manovich's Soft Cinema project. The structure of Soft Cinema depends on what Manovich calls “algorithmic editing,” an automated system for combining elements according to prescribed rules based on the formal properties or content of video clips. The result is a pattern of images predicated on a system of rules that is not always immediately discernable, simulating what Manovich calls the contemporary state of “data-subjectivity” in which individuals are continually interpolated by layers of time, space and information.

DYNAMISM

Dynamism provides the antidote to the closed narrative system, allowing users to control not just the sequencing of designated SNUs, but to add or alter the basic narrative elements. A truly dynamic database must be expandable and reconfigurable, capable of “talking” to a narrative engine by means of metadata and a predefined organizational architecture. Dynamism is a crucial part of the Labyrinth team's investigation of interactive narrative, both at the level of individual agency and in creating systems that are mutable and expandable. “Embracing the interactive is important,” says Kinder, “but we don't want to just fetishize the interactivity. Agency doesn't necessarily make something wonderful.”

On a grander cultural scale, the open architecture database and the interactive narratives it engenders may be viewed in relation to the highly productive model of open source programming communities.