The Dramatic Experience

The story forms the basis of virtually every feature film. While Hollywood spends less and less time thinking about the development of narrative structures and concentrates on spectacular effects and compelling visuals, in the interactive media the story is transformed and re-discovered. How does the audience get an active role while experiencing a dramatic story on the Internet, in a video game or an online community? How does the balance shift between author and audience and is it possible to turn the audience into co-author? Ayelet Sela Ayelet Sela is writer, director and producer of the online drama series Homicide: Second Shift, one of the first series especially developed for the Internet. Homicide: Second Shift is an interactive drama in eposides in which the audience gets a real role in the story - namely that of detective. With the aid of short film fragments, sound recordings and fragments of text that incorporate all kinds of clues, the murder can be solved. Writing such a murder story is very different from thinking up a similar episode of a TV series. Sela uses her experience writing online stories to provide an insight into the possibilities of interactive drama. (http://www.nbc.com/homicide) Alex Mayhew Multi-media artist Alex Mayhew is linked to Peter Gabriel's Real World, where he developed the prize-winning CD-ROM Ceremony of Innocence. It is based on the popular Griffin and Sabine trilogy by writer Nick Bantock and tells the mysterious story of a young English artist and his sphinx-like muse, who communicate with each other through letters and postcards. The plot unfolds in the correspondence, that is not easy to decipher.Mayhew gives a demonstration of Ceremony of Innocence and also shows a trial version of his latest project, the CD-ROM Dreamer. This latter is described by Mayhew as `a cross between interactive fiction and a game, that is somewhere between Alice in Wonderland, Tomb Raider and Mission: Impossible.' Dreamer will also appear as virtual world on the Internet. Erik Loyer Erik Loyer is creative director of the leading digital design agency Razorfish - that created, amongst others, web sites for NASA - and an innovative designer of CD-ROMs. His latest project is the web site The Lair of the Marrow Monkey, an 'interactive exploration of the attraction of digital abstractions'. The site is about the experiences of Orion17, a minimalist composer who is obsessed by finding patterns and logic in reality. His urge to understand and control leads inevitably to frustrations, even though he seems at first to achieve his end. For The Lair of the Marrow Monkey, Erik Loyer won the New Media Invision Silver Award for the best personal web site. Loyer will demonstrate and explain how dynamic interfaces, emanating from video games, can be used in the development of online drama. (http://www.thegrid.net/orion17) Olia Lialina Russian Net-artist, critic and curator Olia Lialina is founder of the first real Net-art gallery: art.teleportacia gallery, where art can be seen and bought online. She is interested in developing interactive stories for the Internet and has made some interesting online works. Lialina will talk about the importance of the Internet for renewing the arts. (http://www.design.ru/olialia/olia.html)