Digimag Journal 78: Overworlds and New Narratives - Out Now

DIGIMAG 78 / SPRING 2018
OVERWORLDS AND NEW NARRATIVES
http://digicult.it/digimag-journal


Contributions by: Alessandra Ioalè, Andy Campbell, Paolo Cirio, Daniele Giampà, Reham Hosny, Annette Hunnekens, Vanessa Santos, Dominika Sobolewska.

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Nowadays digital writing has become an important topic within the humanities field so that a closer attention to issues like aesthetic autonomy, theoretic models and practices, especially within the media arts and culture context is demanded.

At the base of so-called digital literature are not only the possibilities offered today by the use of computers and other software/multimedia tools, but also different approaches to the literary object, in terms of structure and practice, from both the creative and the receptive point of view, which interlink – but not coincide - with the increased importance of media technologies.

Digital writing is part of a much broader discourse, which underlies the different ways in which technologies and networks are irreversibly influencing narrative methods. Specifically, storytelling is getting more immersive and participative, in the sense that audience is engaged in a more interactive way and the environment is evolving into a more complex transmedia scenario. Recent are the experiments on Google Chrome by Aaron Koblin and Chris Milk for the Google Arts & Culture, opening up new investigation approaches on a collective, interactive, real-time narrative applied to gaming, to video-clips and films on network platforms. Other examples are the multimedia storytelling experiments by Blast Theory, a unique mix of play, performance, filmmaking, where the spatial and temporal boundaries between real and virtual become narrative elements, reshaped by technology.

Additionally, virtual and augmented reality technologies are enhancing the narrative space and perhaps radically changing the boundaries between storytelling and communication, as well as the ones between the architectural construction of new worlds and the use of new image recording technologies. Drones, robots, laser scanning techniques, 360 ° video systems, binaural sound systems allow nowadays the saturation of the audience’s sensory environment. Therefore, our perceptual field is increasingly overwhelmed, with unimaginable consequences not only from in terms of entertainment experience, but also from a marketing, geo-location and viral communication point of view.

Arts and in particular media art is urged then to question itself about new possible aesthetical and emotional consequences, as well as about its impact on the social, political and cultural environment.

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Curated, designed and published by
Marco Mancuso and Silvia Bertolotti

Digital publishing developer
Loretta Borrelli