The Digital Diorama: Reinventing Narrative for New Media
Rebecca Young · 2004
If all culture is becoming computer-mediated, what is the future of narrative? We have yet to see if new media narratives are a viable art-form. Yet if the narrative forms of cinema and literature do not evolve, they may be subsumed as bit-players within the dominant new media forms of the web page and the computer game. In his influential book, The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich argues that practically all new media forms, including web sites and computer games, can be understood as an interface to a database. The challenge, therefore, for the new media storyteller is to marry these opposing forms - database and narrative. In this presentation I will demonstrate an interface that supports the creation of multiple narratives from a story database. Death at Fuller's Bridge is an online interactive narrative that recounts the story of the Bogle-Chandler case, an unsolved double-murder from the 1960s. The interface for the project is based on Daguerre's diorama and consists of a series of scenes that change through time. It attempts to mirror the responsiveness of a human storyteller, enabling the viewer to shift forwards and backwards in time and space, shifting between the narrative threads of a number of eyewitness accounts and media reports of the events surrounding the murders.