A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths.
?Professor Reynolds Price (Duke University)
The above quote constitutes the entire text of Theresa Duncan?s last blog entry, posted hours before her death on 10 July 2007.? Certainly, as a writer of fiction, she understood the connection between storytelling and cultural cohesion.? The stories that we tell about ourselves, the stories that we tell about others, and the stories we tell of ourselves as a people define us both individually and collectively.
Duncan and Jeremy Blake plied their talents at the cutting-edge of artistic expression.? Blake?s artwork incorporated the technology of digital imagery; paintings, of a sort, that relied more on pixels than pigment.? Although versed in such traditional methods of storytelling as screenwriting, Duncan really made her mark, like Blake, in digital media.? The first was the CD-Rom; passe now, but state-of-the-art fifteen years ago.? The second, of course, was blogging, a cyberactivity that also seems passe (with the exception of all of your pages, obviously).
It?s one thing to use new media as a platform for telling traditional narratives: you know, those that have beginnings, middles, and ends (or in jargon, expositions, developments, climaxes and denouements).? It?s another to find an altogether new way of storytelling, one that melds the actual with the fictional, that takes place over a number of different platforms, and numerous venues.? The story need not be linear, as is the tendency with traditional narrative.? Nor do the characters have to be entirely fictional.? The story could also utilize a number of different media, from chatrooms to meatspace word-of-mouth.? Moreover, you wouldn?t necessarily need a storyteller, per se.? The story could evolve to reflect the input of readers, who in a sense become unwitting characters in the drama, and unwitting authors of it as well.?
The result is still fiction.? But it?s a hyperrealistic fiction.? Like urban legends and hoaxes, it seems like it should be true in its entirety: a story where fact cannot exist without fantasy, and vice-versa. ??? ??? ??? ???
The concept didn?t exactly originate in cyberspace.? A number of twentieth-century writers toyed with it beforehand.? Thomas Pynchon, for example, created a scenario of the real unreality in his 1965 novel Crying Lot 49.? The protagonist, a (stereo)typical 1960s housewife, finds clues that seem to indicate the existence of an underground postal service (Tristero).? It?s mailboxes look like trash cans, but with the letters W.A.S.T.E. (We Await Silent Tristero?s Empire), and a distinctive horn logo, which she begins to see everywhere in different, sometimes conflicting, contexts.? Our heroine finds this out when serving as co-executor of the estate of a wealthy ex-boyfriend, a trickster character who did such things as mimicking the voices of others when speaking to her on the telephone. While she finds evidence this delivery company exists, she can never really ascertain that it does. Yet, during the course of the story, she becomes a detective, of sorts, gathering information, tracking down leads, and learning a little about a lot of things.? Her quest to find Tristero becomes a mystery without solution (as far as the reader knows?Pynchon stopped the novel before the grand reveal).
Here, Pynchon is laying out a possible fiction within a real fiction.? The events of Crying Lot 49 never occurred in real-life, obviously.? So it's fiction.? But within the framework of the novel, we cannot know if the story the heroine uncovers is a hidden reality, or a work of artifice.? For all the reader knows, the ex-boyfriend could have simply set the whole thing up?maybe as revenge, maybe as a gift.? Maybe, with his millions, he could have recruited a whole army of people to drop hints along the way--kinda like street theater.? Of course, she could be seeing a whole lot of meaning where none exists.? And even she acknowledges the possibility that she might just be as bat shit crazy as her MK-ULTRA-connected ex-Nazi shrink, Dr. Hilarius.
Another example that strikes a little closer to home would be the Paul-Is-Dead rumor.? In this instance, we have the possible death of an esteemed public figure, who claims to be alive.? Like Pynchon?s antagonist in Crying Lot 49, those who think that McCartney died in 1966 search for clues, track down leads, and examine evidence in order to unravel a mystery hidden amid a reality that, for them, seems like an alternate reality.
In 2008, the moderators of the Nothing Is Real board, an online forum discussing the PID rumor, announced that one of its participants, someone going under the handle of Apollo C. Vermouth, was in fact the recently deceased CEO of Apple Corp., Neil Aspinall.? Vermouth claimed that the PID rumor was an in-joke that the Beatles began in 1964 amongst themselves and their support staff/ They eventually extended this gag to their fans as a present, or as he put it, ?a spot of fun.?? He likened it to a novel, where everyone has read all the chapters except the last.?
So, if Vermouth and Aspinall were one and the same, this meant that the John, J. Paul, George and Richard were playing a game, of sorts, with the material (i.e., the clues and story trajectory) coming from their fans and from their friends.
Back in the ?60s, tracking a meme to see how long or fast it might circulate would be rather difficult.? Widespread dissemination of the story would ideally take place in mainstream venues, which were relatively few back then.? But the Internet has made it possible for such narratives to be dispersed along a wider range of venues, or websites, to much larger audiences instantaneously.
The phenomenon of alternative reality games (ARGs) continues this tradition with technological flair.? Roughly defined, they are interactive narratives where the audience also serves as author and character, guided by an individual or group (known as ?puppetmasters,? or ?PMs?) towards certain plot points, or discoveries.?
Some ARGs have served as marketing tools for movies, or other products.? For example:
Figure 1.? Cisco?s The Threshold
In The Threshold, players signed up, played a game, and hoped to win comps for the Super Bowl.? So in this instance, participants knew that they were engaging in an interactive fiction.? Moreover, the PMs openly acknowledged the recreational purposes of the story/game.
In the land of ARG, that?s not typically the case.? The aesthetic often incorporates a surfeit of legitimate factual information, seasoned with fantasy.? Thus it?s hard to tell if the source we stumble onto?the rabbit hole?is trying to kid us or not.? And when you begin to ask people who seem to know something about the mystery, who act as guides, they will insist, sometimes angrily, that neither they, nor you, are involved in a game.?*
So it?s with this in mind that one conspiracy researcher, who had been following through on something called Serpo, an alleged UFO conspiracy with ARG characteristics, took a peek at Wit of the Staircase and noticed....
....that it too looked like an ARG.? Blake and Duncan?? They seemed to be fictional characters, a postmodern Romeo & Juliet played by actors, with the real-life Cownie and the Church of Scientology sharing the role of villain..?
Why did he say this?? Because just like in the Paul-Is-Dead hoax, the clues were there.
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*One often sees the letters?TINAG? (?This Is Not A Game?) in the execution of ARGs, for example.
Many identify Joseph Matheny, a writer living in southern California, as one of the pioneers of online ARGs. One of his most memorable works, Ong?s Hat featured a conspiracy story involving inter-dimensional travel.? Of course, Matheny doesn?t seem to characterize his works as ARGs.
Source: http://xdell.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-trouble-with-witty-flights-storys.html
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