In navigable 3D computer-supported and generated environments, the interaction between place and drama is mutually supportive. Traditionally, medieval European drama was spatially organised in its staging, sometimes playing different scenes in actual locations in a real village, with the audience following the drama from place to place; and sometimes staging scenes on pageant wagons, which moved through town, stopping in different places, where audiences gathered to construct the narrative piece by piece. Orally composed epics also use type-locations to stage scenes and configure their narratives. Such reconfigurable, recombinant, participative, locative composition and staging can be effectively transposed to the explorable navigable worlds of digital narrativity.
Published in Chapter:
Transposing, Transforming, and Transcending Tradition in Creative Digital Media
Phillip Andrew Prager (IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark), Maureen Thomas (University of Cambridge, UK), and Marianne Selsjord (Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Norway)
Copyright: © 2015
|Pages: 59
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-4666-8205-4.ch008
Abstract
How can digital media technologies, contemporary theories of creativity, and tradition combine to develop the aesthetics of computer-based art today and in the future? Through contextualised case-studies, this chapter investigates how games, information technologies, and traditional visual and storytelling arts combine to create rich, complex, and engaging moving-image based artworks with wide appeal. It examines how dramatist and interactive media artist Maureen Thomas and 3D media artist and conservator Marianne Selsjord deploy creative digital technologies to transpose, transform, and transcend pre-page arts and crafts for the digital era, making fresh work for new audiences. Researcher in digital aesthetics, creative cognition, and play behaviour Dr. Phillip Prager examines how such work is conducive to creative insight and worthwhile play, discussing its remediation of some of the aspirations and approaches of 20th-century avant-garde artists, revealing these as a potent source of conceptual riches for the digital media creators of today and tomorrow.