Database Narrative, Data's Imparative

Ok...

My last post did a got me thinking a lot about the inherent structure of the DB narrative. We looked at two contrasting images of DB narrative. One, Soft Cinema, played out in very much the same style as a film. The user watched it play out. The act of watching it was personal experience only with regard to the overal presentation. Two separate audiences watching it would have different experiences, and the same audience watching it twice would have a different experience each time. That's about as personalized as it gets. The second, Tracing the Decay of Fiction, has a more personalized effect in that a user is actually inputting commands. These two works are obviously different; one could be shown on a projector in a theatre, and the other could be downloaded and "played" on a personal computer. It would seem, almost, as if they could be considered to be representative of two separate media. And yet they both are examples of the DB narrative.

The one thing that I thought was similar between these two works is the fact that they are apparently lacking in any substantial progression. There doesn't feel like any propulsion from the beginning to... anywhere, really. I believe that (at least) I personnaly feel that I've been conditioned to expecting a more linearized progression. There is some part of me that expects the "Once upon a time..." and the "... and they all lived happily everafter." to be in any dynamic work (by that meaning a work that is not static in the way a painting or a photo is). I do like the idea of changing things up. I like sometimes when music doesn't have a true cadence to draw everything up in a nice little ribbon. I like being left hanging. But I still acknowledge the fact that I am not accustomed to that.

It seems to me that DB narratives have somewhat of a difficulty in providing that sort of alpha and omega. Texas, for example, just seemed to jump into (and eventually out of) a narrative at any given point in the narrative's progression. I didn't really feel like I got anything (narratively speaking) out of it, though I really enjoyed it as a work in its own right. Likewise, while I enjoyed Tracing the Decay of Fiction quite a great deal, I felt like it was more of an interactive brochure, than a fully-fledged narrative.