Digital Content

Module 5 Reading + Discussion outlines

D. Fox Harrell - Phantasmal Media
Original paper - 2009 / book 2013

How does Harrell describe “Phantasmal Media”?
What are some ways that Harrell believes Phantasmal Ideas are constructed and formed?

Potential for Computing Technologies and complex narratives to create meaning:

“Yet, humble computing can still intervene beautifully when its ability to structure, change, and respond to information and input is orchestrated with sensitive consideration of the slippery process of human interpretation and experience.”

“…Similarly, Samuel R. Delany’s interweaving of 1980s anxieties of HIV/AIDS with a swords and sorcery world in “Tale of Plagues and Carnivals” is influential as contemporary social concerns drive the development of an experimental narrative form.”

on Kurasowa’s Rashomon -

The conflicts between the different points of view are used to create an emergent statement about the human condition and the absence of truth

Key Computing Aspects for phantasmal media:

• Interactions / interactive possibility

• Dynamic Generation

• Simulation

• Complexity

• Non-linearity

• Responsiveness
  

PHANTASMAL MEDIA - DEFINITIONS + DESCRIPTIONS

• Meaning-making systems - based on process + interaction v.s. linearity

• Mental work of interpretation crucial

“…the focus with phantasmal media is a type of work that often concentrates (primarily through interactive and generative multimedia) on creating narrative and poetic mental imagery to express artistic and critical statements about the world.”

Meanings as building blocks

• Responsive

• Dynamic

• Meaning is achieved through interactive / multi-sensory (high participation) process

“…building blocks of meaning such as concepts, the structures of events, the ways that people and things exhibit agency in the real and story worlds..”

Starting with complex foundations

• Computational media technologies / digital media technologies makes this MORE possible

“…allow higher level digital media arts authorship where the author specifies a range of improvisational interactions to be meaningfully completed by a user rather than designing every interaction explicitly.” {Decentralized Authorship / Decentralized Meaning-Making}

3 Methods for producing Phantasmal Media Objects / Systems / Entanglements

• Subjective Computing

• Cultural Computing

• Critical Computing

{ Review the specific examples described in this reading for the Final Exam}

Hopeful Outcomes

“Phantasmal media can ultimately realize fantastic blends of ideas, rich metaphors, social hierarchies, and cultural identities and many other exemplars of the diverse power of imaginative cognition. In particular, ideal forms may explore how social illusions are often constructed in discourse both cognitively and culturally.”

“Ideal forms of phantasmal media can support social empowerment using gaming and related technologies such as interactive narratives, collaborative digital worlds, interactive and generative video, and, most importantly, new forms unanticipated by any of the above. Empowering the disempowered is not merely a matter of technological support. The end hope here is that these ideas can contribute to imaginative visions, meaningful experiences, and expressive statements that lead to real world insight and action.”

Ian Bogost - Persuasive Games
Original Article 2008 / Book 2010

What potential does Bogost see in using video games as methods of learning / understanding?
How does Bogost describe Procedural Rhetoric?

possiblity spaces

Sees interactive / playable media as a Possiblity Space -

”Play activities are not rooted in one social practice, but in many social and material practices…In more traditional media like poetry, the possibility space refers to the expressive opportunities afforded by rules of composition, form, or genre.” - - - - similar to systems described by Harrell.

This ability to execute computationally a series of rules fundamentally separates computers from other media.

Procedural Rhetoric
learning through processes, meanings made of systems and interactions

Procedural rhetoric is a subdomain of procedural authorship; its arguments are made not through the construction of words or images, but through the authorship of rules of behavior, the construction of dynamic models. In computation, those rules are authored in code, through the practice of programming.

Rather, video games make argument with processes.

“Video games make arguments about how social or cultural systems work in the world—or how they could work, or don’t work. Video games like Spore and Take Back Illinois make arguments about abstract, conceptual systems the way mechanical models make them about material ones. When we play video games, we can interpret these arguments and consider their place in our lives.

In this way, playing video games is a kind of literacy. Not the literacy that helps us read books or write term papers, but the kind of literacy that helps us make or critique the systems we live in.”

{Look at examples of “America’s Army: Operations” in this reading for the final exam.}