New Narrative

I contend that communications designers are in a unique position to analyze how stories are constructed from basic principles such as medium, authorship, pacing and presentation, and that we can thereby produce new methods of creating, presenting and preserving narratives. This dissertation categorizes the narrative into three major groupings, the personal narrative, the community narrative, and the disseminated narrative, and deconstructs their purposes. It then exhibits and catalogs the ways in which we perceive and use digital storytelling media, and proposes forms that narratives may take in the future.

The first part of my installation consists of six continuous-shot videos that record a day in my life; the left audio channel conveys sound captured during recording and the right is a narration of my thoughts. I question how personal narratives are seen through an audience’s eyes in contrast with the author’s by moving from the mental space to the public space using audio, video, and the oral tradition, and minimizing editing to mimic life.

The second piece in this installation remediates the digital community narrative into a tangible form, giving words permanence and physicality, and meditating on the transition of historical documentation from a singular to a crowdsourced mode of authorship. A computer collect messages from Occupy Wall Street’s Twitter community, visualizes them in real time with Processing, and feeds them to a receipt printer.

The third piece is a disseminated narrative dealing with hypertext and social media. Shakespeare’s Macbeth is played out through various platforms (WordPress, Facebook, etc.), and given structure through a digital visual timeline. Characters become digital presences, invoking settings through various media, and interacting through digital conversations. The remediation and resituation of a classical text considers how established works can be shared with new meaning, relevance and strength of voice.