identity, digitised; fractured

“Now I existed solely thanks to the quantum paradox, my brain a collection of qubits in quantum superposition, encoding truths and memories, imagination and irrationality in opposing, contradictory states that existed and didn't exist, all at the same time.”
― Robin Wasserman, Crashed

(emphasis mine)

Finite-Films (2011)

Finite Films is a website that co-creates the narrative with the public. Though the films they make are fictional, I believe it is an example not only that co-creation can work, but of the processes used.

Summary

When Finite Films ‘writes’ a film, they don’t begin with an outline, they begin by asking the public for a list of constraints. Afterwards, they pick their favourite 21 constraints and then they are then divided up into scenes and plot devices and then they are voted on by the public (they choose 3) and then the top voted must be included in the film. Sometimes the constraints are scenes, sometimes plot devices, sometimes characters. The 7 most popular are used in the film.

 (screenshot)

But plot co-creation isn’t the only way that finite-films has expanded the process of filmmaking to include the public: not only do they log regular production diaries, but the public can vote on what aspect of the production is featured. They produce one short-film a month and one at least one production diary film a week. 

(screenshot)

It’s funded by crowdsource. They did an initial campaign on Indiegogo.com, a US crowdsource site and take donations.

(I hope to fill this in a bit more with information from an interview— what they determine successful viewership, their longer term plans.)

What’s important for my research

Useful model of co-authorship

Finite Films represents a successful example (on the basis that they’ve actually made some films and people participate in contributing constraints) of how to involve the audience in authorship.

Finite Films invites constraints but they limit the constraints voted on to ones they think are ‘do able.’ From their FAQ page : “we go through all the submissions each month and choose 21 finalists that are: (A) actually possible to make, (B) the most interesting, and (C) the most diverse.”

Authorship by process is the meaning of authorship in participatory social media.

According to Murray (1997) and Manovich (2002) authorship in the digital age is mostly about establishing processes. Finite Films establishes these processes in a way that doesn’t completely surrender the authorship of the film but does so in a way that includes the public— the same public that are stakeholders in the making of their films— and also provides stability for filmmakers— choosing from manageable constraints. 

They give the public a key and very specific set of instruction about how to interact. In that way, as is similar with webdoc.com's findings in the user testing, they give people a narrow and very specific way to express themselves.

Criticism

“Drive”

There is an element of this film work, the filmmakers participating in it, that works with instrinsic motivation: people participate in the making of the film (not the public that submit constraints but the filmmakers, as the actors, and crew get paid) because it’s something they love to do rather than get paid for. It is an open question as to how long these filmmakers will continue organising these films. They aren’t getting paid for it and one wonders whether their time will begin to conflict? 

How sustainable is crowd-funding, reliance on donations?

To my knowledge none of these short-films has been picked up by more mainstream media. We know from experience (of indie news orgs like the Global Post, like Not on the Wires (founded on the project The Berlin Project) need mainstream media to survive.

It’s an open question as to whether crowd funding is sustainable for filmmaking like this, whether they will require an effective buy-up from a major media network.

Bio-psych of storytelling

Updated on October 27, 2011 by annlytical

I'm making a list of cognitive and behavioural neuroscience studies of how we physiologically internalise story. I've not yet read these studies, I'm not sure I would understand them, but I have read books where the authors discuss them.

Click to read more ...

de Simone and Tzonis (2011)

From an interview with webdoc.com co-creators Olivier de Simone and Stelio Tzonis, 29 September 2011, London.

Main points

Webdoc is built around content, or it’s content centric. Tzonis and de Simone put it in perspective: social media is built for people to come together around content, this is built for content that people can come together around.  Their best example is like a rich media virtual flyer that you can control of. Other people with similar flyers can post their flyers in response to yours on an ever expanding scroll face.

Media and interactive features:

• rich media expression through youtube, flickr, facebook and urls (example:hit URL, asks for a URL, using twitpic, it embeds not only the tweet, but the picture tweeted, works similarly for instagr.am)
• Apps for

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idoc mission statement, Zurdos.tv

This is a mission statement from a Spanish idoc company Zurdos.tv. I like it; what do you think?

(This is also a test embed from webdoc.com, the curation service you're not yet using but should be.)

of geeks and interfaces_2

Born Digital

26 Sept 2011

Progress has been made on the interface design. Born Digital, a digital creative agency in Newcastle hosted a workshop for me to firmly conceptualise the interface— what I need in it, what it has to do.

I contacted Born Digital first at Thinking Digital 2011 in May when they replied to a tweet I sent asking if anyone was interested in talking about an interactive digital storytelling interface. As it turned out they were only able to attend one day of the conference and we didn’t meet then, but we exchanged emails. I met with members of the team (Simon and Ellie) whilst they were in Berlin over the summer; we discussed the ideas I had about the interface. They then suggested that we do the formal workshop.

The workshop was held at their offices and present were Alison and Simon from Born Digital as well as app developers from Gospelware. In the afternoon, the business development manager from Newcastle University Steve Erdal dropped by to speak with me about possibly co-funding the venture.

When I met Ellie in Berlin she asked that before the workshop I make a list of everything I needed the platform to do and then translate that list into a MSCW exercise. The previous blog post I wrote about what I wanted in the interface is here and you can read the MSCW exercise I made for the workshop here.


Below I will discuss points of friction or points that are still a question, as well as unexpected revelations from the Born Digital workshop.

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Friedlander (2008)

Friedlander, L. (2008) “Authorship and Authority”. In Digital Storytelling and Mediatised Stories. Ed Lundby, K. (2008). Peter Lang: Oxford. Pp. 177-193.

Friedlander offers a digital storytelling perspective on rethinking authorship for digital stories. He gives a modernist and post-modernist view of authorship in the arts and provides three ways in which digital authorship is different from analogue authorship — thus the criteria by which to define digital authorship within digital collaborative, co-authored situations. He describes the reader-author relationship in analogue narrative as one of “active receptivity” but in digital narrative the participant instead “aggressively intervenes” in the text.

Main points:

The “author-text-reader triad” is dispersed; the actors in a digital narrative are (as Friedlander sees it) “designer-writers, programmers, users, and the computer itself”.

Friedlander defines the actors in a digital narrative as those who create the parameters of interactive processes (much as Murray (1997) similarly defines them), those that participate in it, and the inanimate (seemingly) system that makes the narrative digital. He writes: “the story emerges from the encounter… a pulsating electronic field replaces the stable text of the printed book”.

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Lundby (2008) in ed. Lundby (2008)

Lundby, K. (2008). “Introduction”. In Digital Storytelling, Mediatised Stories. Ed. Knut Lundby. Peter Lang: Oxford. Pp. 1-14.

This book summarises the most current thinking in the (academic) field of ‘Digital Storytelling.’ Many of the practitioners in it take guidance from the method established by Lambert et al at the Center for Digital Storytelling.  Lundby’s introduction contains useful definitions and operating language used in the field, especially his discussion of mediatisation versus mediation.

But before I get started, ‘Digital Storytelling’ is defined as such:

“Small-scale as a media form”; they are “short” and made with “off the shelf equipment”, where professional technique isn’t expected; the stories themselves are made by the narrator and focus on “the narrator’s own, personal life and experiences.”

“Digital Storytelling is a bottom-up activity. It is a ‘user-generated’ media practice. Digital Storytelling is performed by amateurs and not by media professionals. So-called ‘ordinary people’ develop the necessary competences to tell their own stories with new digital tools.”

Where a distinction is made between “ ‘lay productions’ on sites like YouTube or MySpace” where Digital Storytelling projects are usually organised externally by an institution (for example, museum, media organisations, community centers).

The field is the practice of facilitation.

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