Creating and Viewing the Elastic Charles -- A Hypermedia Journal In: Hypertext: State of the ART, papers presented at the Hypertext II Conference, York, England, July 1989, Chapter 5, pp. 43-51. R. McAlesse and C. Green, Eds, Intellect, 1990. 1989-07-00 00:00:00
Brondmo HP; Davenport G

We describe a collaborative effort involving approximately 15 people creating material and tools for the "Elastic Charles", a hypermedia journal. The tools are used to create an additional structural layer upon video, sound and text material which has already been edited and is in a "final" format. This structural layer - hyperlayer -is used to link related portions of the journal's "stones" together to create the hypermedia environment. Our paradigm for linking in temporal media is presented.

Interactive Transformational Environments: Wheel of Life Contextual Media: Multimedia and Interpretation, Chapter 1, pp. 1 - 25. 1995-00-00 00:00:00
Davenport G; Friedlander L.

What kinds of experiences can we create when we free interactive technology from the restricted space of the computer box and transfer it to the public realm? Last fall the authors, and a group of twenty students at the MIT Media Lab explored this possibility. The result was The Wheel of Life, an interactive installation which drew its techniques from the worlds of theater, architectural design, cinema, and interactive computing.

The Wheel consisted of four discrete areas, each one inspired by one of the elements: water, earth, air, and fire. Visitors encountered this environment in pairs: one 3 the explorer 3 moved through the space, while the other 3 the guide 3 sat at a computer outside of the installation. Together they had to discover how to navigate through a world that responded mysteriously to their actions; the explorerês task was to decipher the rules and narratives governing each area, while the guide sought to help the explorer by using the computer to manipulate the images, lights, and sounds in the area.

Using interactive technology to create complex narrative spaces not only poses formidable technical challenges, but also suggests some of the ways people in the future will share their environment with machines and raises fascinating issues in the psychology of both collaborative invention and collaborative experience. This paper describes both the installation and the iterative process necessary to bring it into being.

Improvisational Media Fabrics: Take One In: Future Cinema: the Cinematic Imaginary After Film, ed. Jeffery Shaw, Peter Weibel, ZKM, Karlsruhe and MIT Press, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 272-279. 2003-00-00 00:00:00
Davenport G

Cinema-making is an activity of intelligent guessing, an expressive exploration of constructed meaning. Storytellers transform real-life observations into narratives through acts of selective inclusion, synthetic emphasis, time distortion, and metaphoric encapsulation; their tales are shaped within the empowering and framing constraints of their chosen medium. In art, the acto of seeing and expressing outer and inner worlds becomes a shareable learning experience that is simultaneously culture-driven, culture-forming and culture-reflective...

When Place Becomes Character: a critical framing of place for mobile and situated narratives in Martin Reiser (ed), The Mobile Audience: Art and New Technologies of the screen, BFI, 2005. 2005-00-00 00:00:00
Davenport G

Travel through place is an immersive experience. The confluence of geography, history, and culture encountered within a place reflects and discloses the journey of civilization. Cities -- positioned as the matrix of accumulated and transformative civilization -- have fascinated and inspired storytellers from Homer to Stendhal to Dickens and beyond. More than any other novel, James Joyce's Ulysses invites us to participate with its characters in an almost real-time navigation through a genuine urban space. Joyce's Ulysses is a picaresque tale: as an audience, we follow the protagonist's journeys through a sensory surround of particular urban impressions; and, as the narrator in a moment turns our attention to the thoughts of a woman waiting, we understand that we have been seduced by the narrative potential of a place where the sensory surround, culture, rituals, and daydreams that it supports are more important than overt action...

Putting the i in iDTV in Interactive Television Authoring and Production: Content Drives Technology, Technology drives Content. Manuel Jose Damsio, Editor, (Universidade Lusofona, itap, 2003) pp. 143-154 2002-04-17 00:00:00
Davenport G

"The structure of expression is shaped at the intersection of technology and culture"

Today I have been invited to talk to you about "interactive" television. What is "interactive" television? Is it culturally driven? Is it technology push? In order for you as content creators to shape dreams and programs for an "interactive" delivery channel, you must discover ways to model story content that drive active engagement by the audience in ways that take advantage of appropriate and available technology.

What is iDTV? In the commercial and policy vernacular of today's broadcast media dialog, Digital Television often references the current allocation of digital spectrum for high-definition broadcast television. For the purposes of this course and this lecture, I prefer to focus on interaction and its implication for content creation and media consumers, rather than restricting the discussion to the future of Digital Television broadcast. I will first discuss the elements that will define iDTV. I will then discuss navigational paradigms as they have emerged over the past 20 years, with particular consideration to three early examples of the interactive medium. Finally, I will present some newer works that suggests the future of iDTV will not be in the living room but will be in delivering television to mobile/portable devices equipped with sound and image capability.

Interfacing the Narrative Experience Interfacing the Narrative Experience, in Blythe, M. et. al. (eds.), Funology: From Usability to Enjoyment, Chapter 21, Kluwer. 2003-00-00 00:00:00
Falk J

I have a research interest in interfaces to games that are played, not on computers, but in the physical environment and that ultimately transform the world into a game board for computer games. Of specific interest to this agenda are activities that are narrative and social in their nature, not only in the interaction between people, but also in people’s interaction with the physical world. Having spent time role-playing in online environments, in awe of their mechanisms for story generation and interactive game worlds, I still have to argue their failure to provide convincing and truly interactive environments for narrative experiences. Put differently, the unmistakable division between character and player, and between character environment and player environment in online role-playing, characteristically fail to induce a desirable level of suspension of disbelief. In contrast, live role-playing games offer particularly relevant examples of games where the physical world is adapted as a mature interface to an engaging and creative immersion in an interactive, social, and narrative context. They support social and collective exercises in emergent narrative creation where every participant, is part of the design effort. These narratives take place in a magical and imaginary domain in the cross-section between physical reality and fantastic fiction offering the kind of immersion that most interactive narratives promise as a technical goal, but have yet to deliver, where there is no physical division between player, character, and narrative. Some might argue that this level of immersion is the holy grail of interactive fiction and indeed entertainment, where the narrative thread, or content if you will, is embedded in physical locations and in objects around us, creating a tangible, ubiquitous, and even context-sensitive interface for the participants or players to unleash at.

Salvaged Objects: Things We Think With in Sherry Turkle ed. "Evocative Objects" (forthcoming) 2004-00-00 00:00:00
Davenport G

I stare at the first photograph that I have pulled out of a small cardboard box labeled “Glorianna to make copies.” It is a picture of my father in his youth by a lake with a dog. I never knew my father had a dog. Three years ago, I promised my siblings that I would digitize a large collection of memorabilia—images and videos. For this, I recently added a scanner to my image processing setup at our cranberry farm. My promise still unfulfilled, guilt is balanced with the anticipation of new discoveries. As I continue to muse, the image of my father is transformed into bits...