🌸 Digital Garden

More thoughts

Creating an interactive story based on Kirkgate Market was both an engaging and intellectually stimulating experience for me. By adopting the form of “rule-based uncanny narratives”, we attempted to disrupt players’ expectations and evoke feelings of curiosity and uncertainty. I was surprised by how effectively unusual rules could transform a familiar space into something emotionally and conceptually complex. Through this process, I began to understand interactive storytelling not simply as a collection of choices, but as a carefully designed system in which structure, rules, and player agency work together to generate meaning. As players navigated the rules and consequences, they became active participants in shaping the narrative, which deepened my understanding of cybertext and ergodic literature in practice. Integrating themes of morality, ethics, and human nature also made me reflect on the expressive potential of interactive narratives. This project showed me that Twine can function not only as a technical platform, but as a medium for exploring human experience and critical questions in a more immersive and participatory way.

Reading references (Jordan, 2019)

• Creativity is a situated and embodied act, in which, through the (co-)creation of new knowledge, perceptions and understanding of the world are changed.
• A creative artefact may incorporate all sorts of innovatory techniques and approaches; yet, as Bolt notes, fundamentally, ‘it is not the job of the artwork to articulate these, no matter how articulate that artwork may be. Rather, the exegesis provides a vehicle through which the work of art can find a discursive form’ (2010, 33). The critical exegesis, then, is central to praxis-informed research, providing an alternative form by which new and emergent knowledge can be brought to bear on existing theories and ideas (Bolt 2011, 156).
• For Bolt, the work of art is therefore this embodied process of change, rather than simply the representational artefact itself: ‘it is through this dynamic and productive relation that art emerges as a revealing. The work of art is this movement’ (188, my italics).
• Yet what I’ve argued in this chapter is that we have entered a new cultural paradigm, one I’ve termed metamodernism. Associated with metamodernism is the creative modality of the map/rhizome/string-figure. Within this new modality, then, the notion of emotional and ethical ‘affect’ is given renewed legitimacy, empowering situated and embodied-based concepts such as Bolt’s materialising practice and Heidegger’s ‘worlding’. Within metamodernism, creative practice is freed from postmodern ‘incredulity or irony’ and instead grounded in new found understandings of ‘faith, conviction, immersion and emotional connection’ (Konstantinou 2017, 93). In this new modality, artistic practice is no longer simply representational but rather tactical or instrumental, ‘designed to do something to us’ (Konstantinou 2017, 94). Metamodernism therefore legitimates the ontological position where artistic affect and technical craft are materially intertwined. As such, it is here, in the analysis of such affective intervention and wider materialising practices, that any (practice-based) research needs to focus.
• In the reconfiguration of map/rhizome/string-figure, storytelling, whether digital or non-digital, operates within an enhanced ontological landscape.
• Postdigital storytelling is much wider, embracing both formal and informal modes and forms, such as social media and open web-based platforms; it embraces digital biography and non-fiction as much as fiction, prose and poetry. It is code, data, narrative and performance.