Hi everyone!
I am proposing the creation of an animated video essay followed by an online lecture about the possibilities of narrative in Virtual Reality.
During the past four years my academic research has been focused on the question of narrative in moving images. How can narrative be affected by the way moving images are shown? Does watching a movie in the theatre provide the same narrative experience as watching a video in a gallery? How does the presence of the spectator interfere with the narrative? This questions shaped my masters thesis and will continue to be the basis for my PhD program.
One of the narrative concepts I developed is particularly important for the way we comprehend narrative in a virtual reality experience. I call it Plant Narrative. This methodology to look at narrative is inspired by the writings of Michael Marder about the intelligence of plants, where he chooses to interpret the concept of intelligence or, in this case, what allows us to extract meaning from a temporal experience, as something related to attention as opposed to memory, like we have the tendency to assume when we describe the intelligence of humans. There seems to be a parallel that can be drawn between the plant interacting with the world with its alternative intelligence and the player of a virtual reality experience. Both are fixed points in a system, reacting to stimuli as it appears.
It is this concept that I want to show in this video essay. Instead of just publishing a paper on the subject, making a video essay will make the research more accessible to everyone outside of the academic world and help further the research on this exciting new space.
This video essay will be shared online and will be used as the basis for discussion on the online lecture I’ll be giving on the subject. This lecture, which will be published online as well, is a crucial part of this proposal as it seeks to bring the voices of the community into a continuous dialogue on the importance narrative in VR.
The budget for this proposal is as follows:
- video essay creation - 600$
- lecture (this includes payment for the lecturer as well as technical expenses such as hosting) - 200$
- 10 bounties of 20$ for attendees - 200$
Total: 1000$
UPDATE Due to scheduling issues the lecture will postponed to the end of june.