Rephrasing Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (organiser and coach of the Mediamatic workshops), freedom was not taken for irresponsibility: more or less all projects were developed conceptually and represented very different types of possible interactive thinking.
Athens
Neither participants, neither quite a big collective of workshop lecturers, trainers nor assistants didn’t have to suffer from Athenian heat: both lectures and hands on Korsakow trainings were held in chilly premises of Goethe Institute Athens. Five days of individual work (assisted by 8 lab trainers and assistants and supplemented by lectures and common discussions) ended with a presentation of selected works in Goethe institute and in Synch festival event at Benaki museum Athens.
Lectures
Although all the participants of the workshop were supposed to bring already prepared footage for the their own project and more or less developed concepts, the lectures, which formed important and quite significant part of the whole lab, probably made some ideas and perceptions of narrative to be reconsidered from different angle and complemented by theories of story-telling, notions of author-text-user interactivity, importance of context and target audience.
Free form lectures given by Frank Alsema, creative director and producer of crossmedia and interactive television projects, included theoretical issues (followed by numerous examples of interactive projects, mostly crossmedia games, interactive TV advertisements, etc.) on interactive aesthetics, engagement of user and her/his relation to material proposed by the author, etc., whereas Florian Thalhofer and the guest of the Lab Malcolm Le Grice shared their own practical experience in developing interactive projects.
Thalhofer, who is the original builder of Korsakow-System, presented his interactive documentaries, constructed using Korsakow tool, which were here of service for basic comprehension about possibilities of the System (since Korsakow was the workshop tool for Interactive Film Lab).
Show-kind presentation of two simultaneous screens by Le Grice, experimental filmmaker and film theorist, gave impulse to reflect interactivity (this time – interactivity between different texts) of itself: examples of film and expanded cinema projects were on the same time accompanied by digital experiments with colour, sound, movement etc. (and vice versa).
Interactive
Lectures and presentations raised questions (discussed or passed over) what actually interactivity is all about and what it is meant for. Do we use that (the term and/or practical means) to entertain user (as in computer games or in interactive television) or to proclaim the absolute freedom of reader (since the author is dead)? And do we understand interactiveness only as watch-and-click action (thus – in audiovisual case – opposing TV and computer to traditional cinema experience) or as rather mental interplay between the material represented in one or another way by the author to the reader and our willingness to arrange it into one or another text(s)?
And how much interactive projects are about narratives combined within and how much – about interactivity as such?
Synchronizing Korsakow
Since participants of the workshop came from different background (filmmaking, visual communication, journalism, architecture, music etc.), pilot projects, executed during five days, represented a different conceptual and constructional approach to the possibilities of used software (Korsakow system) as well as to the perception what for interactivity can be used: the scale of the works extended from interactive form of documentary/feature film to the projects where the key point was not about choosing different reading trajectories but rather about combining sound or/and image between synchronized screens (e.g. Poulos Panagiotis’ project tended to explore interplay between verbal and non-verbal sound (noise) using for good the poem of Konstandinos Karyotakis -March, Mournful and Vertical-; whereas Marieta Grammatikaki in her work Pendulum used Korsakow for constructing audiovisual music screens).
Thoughts
The practical part of the workshop resulted inter alia with the idea about necessity to search for different interactive ways of constructing/presenting documentaries, movies and interdisciplinary art projects (Korsakow system being one, but not the single way), as well as with some randomly given tips how the latter software could be improved.
by: Lina Michelkevice
