Henry Jenkins:

Transmedia Hollywood 2

Excerpt:

We hope to break down the project of developing transmedia content into four basic design challenges:

• What does it mean to structure a franchise around the exploration of a world rather than a narrative? How are these worlds moving from the film and television screen into other media, such as comics, games, and location based entertainment?
• What does it mean to design a character that will play well across a range of different media platforms? How might transmedia content re-center familiar stories around compelling secondary characters, adding depth to our understanding of the depicted events and relationships?
• What does it mean to develop a sequence of events across a range of different media? How do we make sure that the spectator understands the relationship between events when they are piecing together information from different platforms and trying to make sense of a mythology that may span multiple epochs?
• What does it take to motivate consumers to invest deeply enough into a transmedia franchise that they are eager to track down new installments and create buzz around a new property? How is transmedia linked to a push towards interactivity and participatory culture?

As with the first event, Transmedia, Hollywood: Visual Culture & Design will bring together comic book writers, game designers, “imagineers,” filmmakers, television show runners, and other media professionals in a conversation with leading academic thinkers on these topics.

Stroome provides a powerful tool for artists, citizen journalists, community projects or home video. With more and more home-made music videos, such as this and this, and independent film productions emerging, its no mystery as to why: technology and software is incredibly easy to use and access. With this in mind, I intend to post my on-going video experiments and collaborations.

(Mock Syllabus)

FILM 3901 – Transmedia Storytelling & Hegemony

Course Description:

The recent surge in transmedia marketing and storytelling will become ubiquitous to the entertainment industry. The economic aspects are important in this renewed mode of reception, also known as adaptation of narrative, and so looking at three main groups of spectatorship will be explored from the traditional-passive to a more participatory role. An important distinction between transmedia-marketing or ‘tie-ins’ and transmedia storytelling will be demonstrated and give us a better understanding of progressive versus indulgent narratives. The technologies permitting these new levels of engagement will be examined and help explain the growing push towards participatory receivership and ultimately a more engaged and critical culture.

Learning Goals:

-To understand the differences between open and closed transmedia storytelling

-To distinguish the varying levels of engagement with transmedia storytelling

-To examine the roles that studios, filmmakers, and fans play in the creation, consumption and collaboration of these new media

-To underscore the rewards of an engaged culture in the loom of Hegemonic strategies and binary opposition propaganda.

Course Outline:

Week 1: Introduction: The Interactive Digital Frontier

Screening:

eXistenZ (Cronenberg, 1999)

Reading:

Grusin, Richard. “DVDs, Videogames, and the Cinema of Interactions.” Multimedia Histories: From the Magic Lantern to the Internet. Eds. James Lyons and John Plunkett. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2007. 209-221.

Week 2: A brief history of ‘tie-ins’ and Transmedia Storytelling

Clips:

The Singing Fool (Bacon, 1928)

Ferdinand the Bull (Disney, 1938)

Dance, Girl Dance (Arzner, 1940)

2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrik, 1968)

Star Wars IV: A New Hope (Lucas, 1977)

Reading:

Bukatman, Scott. “Zooming Out: The End of Off-Screen Space.” The New American Cinema. Ed. John Lewis. Durhan & London: Duke University Press, 1998. 241-272.

Week 3: Distinction: open and closed transmedia storytelling?

Clips:

The Matrix Reloaded (Wachowski, 2003)

Enter The Matrix (EON Digital Entertainment, 2003)

Dead Space: Downfall (Patton, 2008) animated

Dead Space (EA Games, 2008) and web-comic: http://deadspace.ea.com/

Readings:

Henry Jenkins’ Blog : Confessions of an Aca-Fan – the Bordwell 3-part

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/09/the_aesthetics_of_transmedia_i.html (part 1, 2 and 3)

Week 4: Audience Types and Receivership

Screening:

Momento (Nolan, 2000)

Reading:

James Peterson, “Is a Cognitive Approach to the Avant-Garde Cinema Perverse?” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996) pp. 108-129.

Week 5: Blurred Boundaries: Ideological Subversion

Screening:

District 9 (Blomkamp, 2009)

Clips:

Lost (Abrams, 2003-2009)

Reading:

Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in Braudy & Cohen pp. 812-819.(available excerpt at Google-books)

Week 6: The Middle Road I : Reading between the lines

Screening:

The Watchmen (Snyder, 2008)

Readings:

Stuart Moulthrop, “Watchmen Meets The Aristocrats” (1-19)

http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.908/19.1moulthrop.txt

Note: Obtain a copy of the graphic-novel The Watchmen

Watching the Detectives: An Internet Companion for Readers of Watchmen

http://iat.ubalt.edu/moulthrop/hypertexts/wm/

Week 7: The Middle Road II : Deconstructing Repetitive Binaries & Hegemonic-Normalizing

Screening:

V (2009) (episode #4, 40mins)

Clips:

Blade Runner (Scott, 1979)

Final Fantasy (Sakaguchi, 2004)

Reading:

Giuliana Bruno, “Ramble city: Postmodernism and Blade Runner,” in Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction, ed. Annette Kuhn. (London: Verso, 1990) 183-195.

Week 8: Participatory Culture I : Understanding the medium’s message

Screening:

9 (Acker, 2009) (1 hour)

Clip:

Land of The Dead (Romero, 2007)

Reading:

Federman, M. (2004, July 23). What is the Meaning of the Medium is the Message? Retrieved November 24^th, 2009 from http://individual.utoronto.ca/markfederman/article_mediumisthemessage.htm .

Week 9: Participatory Culture II : Hypersociability and democratic narrative

Web Clips:

Star Wars: The Old Republic (MMORPG, 2010) realtime-online

website: http://www.swtor.com/ Holocron video Journals

Readings:

Henry Jenkins’ Blog: “Geeking Out for Democracy”

http://henryjenkins.org/2009/05/geeking_out_for_democracy_part.html (part 1 and 2)

James Paul Gee, “Learning and Games” in Katie Salens (ed.) The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games and Learning (Cambridge: MIT Press/MacArthur Foundation, 2008), pp. 21-40.

Week 10: Rewards of Engagement and Collaboration: Social Change

Clips:

V for Vendetta (McTeigue, 2005)

Pirate Radio (Curtis, 2009)

The Animatrix (several directors, Wachowski, 2003)

Readings:

Eric Klopfer, “Augmented Learning,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan, July 7 2008

http://henryjenkins.org/2008/07/an_interview_with_eric_klopfer.html (part 1 and 2)

http://futuresofentertainment.org/2009/11/transmedia_for_social_change/

In chapter 3 of “The Rise of Cultural Bodies”, Metal and flesh: the evolution of man : technology takes over, by Ollivier Dyens, the idea of the body as a living mesh is explored, that when transformed — naturally or artificially — can no longer exist as it did before. It becomes a new being “creating in life’s outer-limits, their own body, their own system, their own territory, harvesting, as a consequence, both their liberation and their imprisonment.” (p.63) Only with a marriage of the cultural and the organic can these transformations be understood. Some good examples are used from Kafka‘s The Metamorphosis and H. G. Wells‘ The Island of Dr. Moreau, to illustrate the transformative power of biology “grinding” against culture.

As the Deleuze-Guattari book Mille Plateaux indicates a “non-linear mutant and ‘cancerous’ transformation caused by the grinding.” (p.57, Dyens) They point to the formation of ‘plastic bodies’ born from the unsure binary: biology/culture.

Our bodies are “like eggs immersed in soft fluid representations whose organs are both everywhere and nowhere … without limits, borders, evolution … lifeforms turned into signs … that have become alive — plastic bodies.” (p.57, Dyens) Clones are an example of this plastic body as explored in the Joss Whedon tv series Dollhouse (2009). The idea that technology is changing us and causing us to be unable to reconcile our dual nature — human/animal, human/machine or skin/culture — resolves to find answers, as Dyens puts it, in the transformation process itself. A moving target with a porous quality to it, that can on the one hand escape social repressiveness and, on the other, become a social pariah. Kafka’s work frames the situation well, herein the power of patriarchal domination can assert itself and push us into the defeated beatnik position, however we can also be that moving target and use the same tools of production to keep transforming. “Only the coupling between culture and the organic can respond … the framework of a new evolution” (p.62, Dyens). Our body imprisons us while our culture liberates us. The threat, as visited in Dollhouse, comes from Patriarchal conformity and mind erasures. Culture is memory, which reveals to us the history of manipulation, and yet also points the way to reconciliation of our transgressions. Also, culture helps us remember, with narrative, so we don’t get caught in Patriarchy’s repetitive normalizing. The dollhouse itself, in Dollhouse, serves as an anchor, for newly ‘brain-wiped’ people, to something familiar yet void of substance or culture. Their resting area acts like a transparent grave or ghost tomb which reinforces the idea that without a memory, they are only plastic people — like bodies without organs, without culture. However, the mind-erasures don’t clear all atavistic memory since it occurs at a structural level.

Our psyche may have been transformed, by technology, into “soft fluid representations…turned into ‘living’ signs”, but reconciliation can take place. Our structural building blocks do imprison us, just like the technological mediums impose a framework of interaction, however we choose the content or rather our level of engagement with that content — depending on our ability to deconstruct our ‘imprisonment’, like the ‘Echo’ character in Dollhouse. We become “non-linear mutants” that either, proactively face the “‘cancerous transformation caused by the grinding” of our biology with our culture, or reactively engage and are more susceptible to patriarchal-normative manipulation. We ‘harvest’ our own ‘liberation’ and reconciliation with our  ‘imprisonment’. Failure to arrive at a reconciliation allows the ‘cancer’ to grow and dwarf, or even kill, our sense of culture.

They do however have the aid of a cyborg, sent from the future, to help them run. The mother-son relationship has a cyborg intermediary than can provide as much, to the young John, as the real mother. This threat of replacement is felt as a ‘breached boundary’ in Jamie Smith-Windsor’s article, as she underscores the impossibility of ‘being’ outside of technologie’s invisible grip. She brings up an important issue about privilege and, as Jaques Derrida calls the ‘logocentric moment’, how “where one technology of knowing is priviliged over another, and infinite other histories of being are forgotten.” (p.282) This point clarifies how “identity is bound to the logocentric privileging of the dominant discourse”, which is impregnated with a panoptical-technological-gaze, and makes it impossible for difference or divergence.

Returning to the introductory paragraph, after getting through her arguments, had me asking myself if her challenge of ‘rebelling against myself or the technologies of myself to discover new ways of being’, held much weight. I would not go so far as becoming a ‘country-bumpkin’ or menonite but how different would my life be without technology? Or maybe less frequency or less access during the week? Would it chase me down like a Terminator and try to stop me from stopping? Or more-likely that other people with their ‘panoptical gaze’ would be surrogates for the Terminator and my friends and family would look down at me in my underprivileged existence and question me. This kind of experiment might be a good point to start off with, in my post Film-4002 blogging.

Metropolis (1927)

The organic/machine binary is another dualism that is being broken down, as seen at Kevin Warwick’s website. Collapsing binaries is a key point for Haraway’s Cyborg manifesto and another such example she posits, dealing with evolution, explains that “teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse” (p. 30). She explains the collapse of the animal/human binary, as explored in Darwin’s The Origin of Species and how one species turns into another, which can facilitate viewing the collapse of patriarchal-dominance in the wake of a more feminine-marginalized presence. The current war in the Middle East is a good example of how the ‘total-control’ mindset of the military is losing to a marginalized-fragmented group of passionate people. Without placing any value judgments here, it is easy to see how binary relationships can be exhausted and broken. Scientists can now make visible the invisible, with the use of fractals, and see order in chaos and vise-versa. Just as Haraway’s cyborg theory allows us to consider duality as a ‘spiral dance’. (I think my ipod is set on shuffle.)

http://www.vimeo.com/5204772

Hotchkiss explores “the transformation of human experience: on the one hand, they seem attracted to the capabilities of new communications technologies but, on the other, evince suspicion of the corporate interests being served by the promulgation of those new technologies.” (p. 18) The naive positivist, of technological advance, fall prey to manipulation too easily and yet I still believe that grass-roots approach of communication technologies wins — over the narratively starved,  apathetic, spectacle junkie. Interesting how Hotchkiss uses the 1995 Cronenberg interview, with Salmon Rushdie, to parallel video game design creation with religious doctrine creation as a fictional endeavor. Notions of divine inspiration are put into doubt and the “divine word becomes a human construction”, which works to destabilize any interpretations, for that matter, surrounding the real and the virtual as “life itself is a hybrid of the real and the representational” (p. 29). Technophobes and tech-addicts both are shackled to their ideologies just as any religious sects or secular mindsets defend theirs. However, the corporate agenda preys on all divisive environments and sells to both sides. The ultimate distraction is one that lives inside or wholly surrounds the subject and impregnates its ideology into the host, just as the films discussed above make it difficult to see the line — the actual cable connection and the dividing line: real/representational.

The scarring that Jason Sperb explores in his “Scarring the New Flesh: Time Passing in the Simulacrum of Videodrome” (2006), describes a merging or suture of image and flesh. When this new being is created, it’s birth occurs when the represented image merges with its reference, it becomes a self-reflexive loop. The death of the old being is absorbed into the experience of the new and “he comes to embody this process directly, as he’s transformed into a human video machine”, not unlike Vertov’s Kinok. And not unlike internet users are merged to their content — as the following presentation from Socialnomics demonstrates that social media networking is the most sutured form of internet engagement.

“A scar is not the sign of a past wound,” Gilles Deleuze writes in Difference & Repetition (1994), “but of the present fact of having been wounded.” (Sperb, p.5) If the focus shifts from the scar itself — a permanent visual reminder — to the knowledge gained from the scarring experience, that when allowed to fully spread its wings, can begin to accept a new virtual flesh and its digital suture. Hopefully the best example, social media networking, becomes what the user/consumer chooses to focus on rather than a sado-masochistic fixation on the image of him/herself and other fetishized variations of the body — such as porn.

The immersive aspects of digital technology such as video game interfaces and interactive art installations have common ground with traditional cinema as Brenda Laurel explores in her book “Computers as Theatre”. She underscores the performance aspects of both media-technologies, however the more engaging variety allows for the ‘actor’ to, at once, also be the viewer. This shift in proximity to the content being consumed is the sort of experience that is becoming more and more ubiquitous to the entertainment industry. The rise in revenues from online gaming, (MMO-RPGs) such as WoW or the upcoming SWTOR, has grown to surpass the film industry in revenues and budgetary funding. Many of the successful franchises, such as The Matrix or Dead Space, employ cross-platform or transmedia releases of their narratives to flesh out more storyline and engage audiences beyond the screen. The use of transmedia storytelling allows for the narrative to become a collaborative effort where the online performances help steer the outcome. A democratic element emerges at this level wherein a group or alliance of players can team-up and effect changes in the narrative. Henry Jenkins visits this idea and its educational uses in one of his blog posts: “Geeking out for Democracy“. Now if students could perform as well in the classroom as they do with their virtual avatars that would be an interesting level of participation.

Gibson’s prose is detailed and reads like a stream of consciousness not unlike James Joyce or Virginia Woolfe’s use of it. However, the content’s crass quality still manages to entertain and explore notions of enlightenment through excess. The nerve damage that ensues from these excesses, digital or other, is what motivates narrative. The trade-off  that takes place is one that has always been on the line: experiential or virtual. Cyberspace acts as a vast world of limitless possibilities both educational and indulgent.

These two extremes are important to survey as they underline aspects of control and intoxicating excess. As Micheal Heim and others have elucidated that technology gives with one hand and takes with the other. As in Greek tragedies, explored in Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy“, we are presented with the problem of allowing Dionysian excess to run its course in order for Apollonian control to return and vice-versa, on and on. The example of music, and our surrender to it, submerges our individuality into a greater experience and allows us to transcend the grip of time — for a period. The problem arises when this exchange is hindered, or completely censored, and our experience is one sided. The Neuromancer, or neural-magician, that Gibson explores then, points the way to healing the divide. As in Johnny Mnemonic (1995), the technological excess creates anxiety, pain and almost death but leads to discovery of  a cure. Gibson both warns and informs us of the trade-off: no pain, no gain. Theorizing and analysis will grant us only so much.

Screamers (1995) shows us a protagonist that is well acquainted with technology and the people in his care. However,  most of the narrative hinges on his ability to interact with machines and consoles, in order to return to earth with valuable information. Of which, he must report about the unbridled evolution of the machines and their destructive agenda, yet not without his personal experience of cyborg empathy. The outpost he is stationed at serves as the edge of the frontier: an unforgiving cold landscape where deadly cyborgs pose as children with potentially lethal teddy-bears. (Spoiler Alert!) The stow away teddy-bear acts as a reminder of the painful discoveries that anchor themselves, both physically and emotionally, to the knowledge and experiences found at the edge of the frontier. Like Joe, the protagonist, we are called to be thorough in understanding the technological devices and their role. An understanding that can only be gained by engaging the medium, the anxieties and the notion that any sort of reward only reveals another challenge.