Canadian rock band Arcade Fire has pioneered the
collaborative relationship between musicians and digital interactive media with
their hypertext experiences, experiments in the combination of music and visuals using an internet platform. Their
collaboration with Google Chrome created the interactive experience “TheWilderness Downtown” (TWD) described by website Mashable as utilizing “hyper
text story telling of old. ” Using Scott McCloud’s analysis of the structures
and techniques of a medium truly of old (with a three thousand year history), specifically
those presented in his textbook “Understanding Comics, The Invisible Art”, this
essay will translate Scott McCloud’s methodologies of comic book analysis over
to digital media and use them to dissect TWD.
This essay will translate:
the structures and techniques
mentioned by McCloud, with relation to Comics -
presented time,
panels
sequential art
into, with relation to Interactive Digital Media -
rhythmic editing,
browser windows
narratively linear
visuals
This will enable a more comprehensive understanding of what traditional techniques are being modernized in The Wilderness Downtown’s
digital construction. Before going directly into
analysis of TWD it is important to know how TWD came into being and to what
purpose, as well as the background of Scott McCloud and his research. This will
provide the context of this essay’s understanding of the mediums of graphic and
digital literature. Examples will be excerpted
from the experience of TWD, providing specific insights into how it creates an
affective digital experience for its audience.
The Wilderness Downtown was created through the
collaboration of experts in various entertainment mediums, which adds to its
multidisciplinary elements. Established music video creator and interactive
video artist Chris Milk directed the video; he has worked with notable
musicians Kanye West, Green Day, Johnny Cash, Gnarls Barkley, The ChemicalBrothers, John Mellencamp, Courtney Love, and Modest Mouse. The creation
also involved Google Creative
Lab and Arcade Fire, as well as supported by production companies Radical Media
and B-Reel. By taking traditional liner story telling
and adapting it to the medium of digital media, TWD is both inherently familiar
and refreshingly new.
Google Chrome produced and provided funding for the
experiment “The Wilderness Downtown” and Google Creative Lab lead by Aaron Koblin coded
the project in HTML5; an Internet coding language developed “in attempts to solve issues found in previous iterations of HTML and
addresses the needs of Web Applications, an area previously not adequately
covered by HTML." This experiment was a commercial endeavor to promote
Google Chrome’s browser capabilities and incorporate Google Maps. Koblin
describes the motivation behind the project’s creation as “to make something data driven and customisable, but at the same time incredibly
personal to each individual user” (TheFWA).
Scott McCloud, whose work is the other component of this essay, is a scholar who with the help of an
avatar based on himself enters the world of “sequential art” (also known as
comic books, graphic novels, ect.), producing illustrated textbooks analyzing
graphic novels. He points out how the graphic novel’s form is unique as a
medium and champions the graphic novel’s struggle to be acknowledged as an art
form worthy of academic research and inclusion in formal education. In search of recognition the culturally dominant mediums
painting, music, theater, film and literature have received; comic books and
digital media are vying for a position in academia alongside them. Their
newness and commonality can attribute to some of the reasoning behind scholars
to pass them by. But McCloud sets out to rectify this in the case of comic
books, as this essay would hope to add to the scholarly body of research on
digital literature.
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Scott McCloud begins his textbook “Understanding Comics,
The Invisible Art” by attempting to define comics and in his efforts parallel
similar struggles to define digital media. He suggests that we need to separate
content from form, stating “the artform “the medium” (. . . is the message,
this essay references to link the digital media article “The Medium is theMessage” to Scott McCloud’s essay) known as comics is a vessel which can hold
any number of ideas and images” (6). Attempts to define digital
literature have also been recently been made by scholars. An example of this is
from UCLA course - Digital Literature: Multimedia Narrative, Poetics, Aesthetics, where a wiki glossary of terms has been complied by students of the course, so that it can be accessed by
digital literature scholars and used to more precisely communicate on digital media.
McCloud brings up the same limitations of audience
interaction with comic books and other traditional mediums of entertainment
that inspired Koblin to work on TWD, “The idea that the reader might choose a
direction is still considered exotic. This may, in part, be the influence of
other media like film and television where viewer choice has not generally been
feasible” (105). The concept that reader could chose the pattern with which to
read the story is played with interactive digital media arrangement of it’s
media and the route at which the interactee choses to navigate it. This is also
experimented with in some graphic novel’s arrangement of their panels and text
that lend themselves to be read in different patterns, such as horizontally or
vertically.
McCloud ultimately comes to define comics as “juxtaposed
pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey
information and or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer. . .
sequential art” (99). He also brings up that the difference between animation
and comics as sequential art is that animation does not have special
juxtapositions as comics do. This essay using the same line of reason as
McCloud, claims that The Wilderness Downtown is considered digital literature
rather than simply a music video due to its juxtaposed elements and the
audience’s process of meaning finding. The claim being made is that these
mediums offer a more subjective, personalized experience due to their
juxtapositions.
We will begin the study of these juxtapositions by taking
a look at visually presented temporal progression and how that is accomplished.
The Wilderness Downtown uses rhythm of editing, the configuration of browser
windows timed to the pace of Arcade Fire’s song “We Used to Wait”. Comics use
the size of their illustrated panels and the spaces between them to convey a
sense of the progression of time. It is explained that the eye takes a certain
amount of time to “read” a sequence of illustrations, which is altered based on
the elements it is reading. The varied progression of reading/interpretation
caused by how the creator chooses to arrange their visuals changes the
experience of the piece for its audience.
The format of The Wilderness Downtown and comic books
utilize space and juxtaposition between their respective browser windows and
panels in a manner that leaves more room for interpretation and inference on
behalf of the audience. Rather than the progression of frames in traditional
film, which leaves only milliseconds for the mind to connect images into
movement and nothing left for the imagination, digital media and graphic novels
allow more of a gap for the audience to flex their creativity within. This is a
major factor in contributing to these mediums effectiveness in creating a
personalized experience.
An example from McCloud, is shown as one large photograph
encapsulating many events between characters taking place at the same time.
That same photograph is then broken into separate panels and now conveys a
different sense of the progression of time. Speed can be increased or decreased
by the space between each illustration. In one large picture there is still the
progression of the eye from left to right, this is another sort of reading of
the image, nun the less the image is still understood as one moment. As extended
panels extend perceived time in comics, extended edits extend perceived time in
video. WDT also plays with the progression of time when it takes one large
browser window and breaks it down into multiple browser windows revealed in
differing intervals in rhythm to the song.
The study of the visual inference is more relevant when a step back is
taken from these most basic compositional elements and we continue onto the
next level of construction where the design of the medium’s structures physical
design can be considered. “Panel shapes vary
considerably though, and while differences of shape don’t affect the specific
“meanings” of those panels vis-à-vis time, they can affect the reading
experience” (99). Moving into McCloud’s description of a specific
element of comic books “panels” (previously paralleled conceptually with the
frames of a film) are used to show a single frozen moment in time. Examination of this next level will link the panels of a comic to The
Wilderness Downtown’s configuration of its browser windows.
In comics “between these frozen moments – between the panels – our minds
fill in the intervening movements creating the illusion of time and motion,” it
is a medium where the story relies less on inference than the novel but more
than the film. Frames in film trick the mind into
interpreting a progression of static images as a single moment in time with
movement, on this phenomenon Thomas Edison said that 46 frames per second was the minimum need by the visual
cortex to perceive continuous movement and that “anything less will strain the
eye"(Frame Rate). Panel’s offer a more subjective experience due to their
static nature, TWD is somewhere in the middle of the two where it presents
panels of visuals that are composed of frames creating motion.
Through inference The Wilderness Downtown uses the juxtaposition of its
browser windows to link scenes of your neighborhood (accessed through GoogleMaps when you provide the zip code of the neighborhood you grew up into the
website) with an unidentified running character. This conveys a manifestation
of a world inside the audience member’s mind where the multiple visuals being
show on the screen are taking place in the same spatial dimension. McCloud
offers, “The composition of the picture is joined by
the composition of change, the composition of drama—and the composition of
memory” (115). This is an example of a new way of
implementing the Kuleshov effect, a concept documented by the study of audience
members who were shown the same person with the same facial expression and then
different images after, where in each pairing of photographs the audience
claimed the character was making a different expression based on the second
image.
This brings us to the inferred linear narrative progression of the
visuals. Meaning finding on behalf of the audience creates the idea that there
is a narrative to the images being juxtaposed together. As the interactee progresses through their experience in
TWD everything is taking place in the present, the reveal of new visual information
McCloud explains “in Comics as in Film “Real Life” is always now”(95). One explanation he offers to this method of meaning-finding is that “Comic readers are conditioned by other media and the
“real time” of everyday life to expect a very linear progression” (106). For example the running character goes down streets with no geographical
markers or distinguishable assets, offering no rational link between themselves
and the images of your neighborhood and still it is interpreted this way.
There a timeless quality to the images of the running man who is not
recognizably anchored to a time or place, this is similar to borderless panels,
which McCloud explains, “bleed” into their proceeding panels. “When the content
of a silent panel offers no clues as to its duration it can also produce a
sense of timelessness. Because of its unresolved nature such a panel may linger
in the reader’s mind. And its presence may be felt in the panels which follow
it” (102). There are no logical links to comprehend why we make
correlations between the juxtapositions of these scenes, yet by understanding
the methods of the minds meaning-finding we are able to understand how this
video is effective for the audience.
The running character that offers no sense of limit bleeds the scenes of
your neighborhood into its plane of reality and blends you with them. This theme of audience identification, which begins with
the running character, ends with the interactee being prompted to “Write a letter
to your younger self” at the end of the experience, ending the nostalgia
inducing Google Maps romp through your past. The experience has brought us through to it's completion and we now can add to the for other's by providing our letter to other interactee's to read. The process began with inference, was structured through browser panels and was solidified by satisfying the innately desired linear narrative progression. We have been moved into the song as a creator/participant and left with the experience bleeding into the memories of our past, the ultimate possibility of interactive digital media.
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