A presentation I made at The Graduate Center, CUNY, New York in April 2015.

1. MARIA ENGBERG, PHD
ASS. PROFESSOR
DEPARTMENT OF MEDIA TECHNOLOGY & PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT
MALMÖ UNIVERSITY (SWE)
RESEARCH AFFILIATE
AUGMENTED ENVIRONMENTS LAB
GEORGIA TECH (US)
I LOVE YOUR WORK:
SERIALITY, PROCEDURALITY & NARRATIVE

2. Dear Photograph > www.dearphotograph.com > Taylor Jones

3. cowbird.com

6. Penelope Umbrico > Sunset Portraits self-portraits with the sun taken from Flickr> 2011

7. ALGORITHMS
+
DATA STRUCTURES
=
PROGRAMS
Eivind Senneset > Algorithms Research Group at UiB
Niklaus Wirth, 1975

8. CONTENT
+
PROCEDURE
=
NARRATIVE

9. Jonathan Harris > The Whale Hunt > 2007

10. Jonathan Harris > The Whale Hunt > 2007

11. “To write procedurally, one authors code that
enforces rules to generate some kind of
representation, rather than authoring the
representation itself.”
Persuasive Games Ian Bogost (2007) p.4

12. “After the novel, and subsequently cinema
privileged narrative as the key form of cultural
expression of the modern age, the computer age
introduces its correlate—database. Many new media
objects do not tell stories; they don't have beginning
or end; in fact, they don't have any development,
thematically, formally or otherwise which would
organize their elements into a sequence. Instead,
they are collections of individual items, where every
item has the same significance as any other.”
“Database as Symbolic Form” Lev Manovich 1998On Broadway - http://www.on-broadway.nyc/

13. “No database can function without a user interface,
and in the case of cultural materials the interface is
an especially crucial element of these kinds of
digital instruments. Interface embeds, implicitly
and explicitly, many kinds of hierarchical and
narrativized organizations. Indeed, the database—
any database—represents an initial critical analysis
of the content materials, and while its structure is
not narrativized, it is severely constrained and
organized”
Jerome McGann “Database, Interface, and
Archival Fever.” 2007

14. “Interfaces are not simply objects or boundary
points. They are autonomous zones of activity.
Interfaces are not things, but rather processes…”
Alexander Galloway The Interface Effect 2012

15. Mark Lafia and Fang-Yu “Frank” Lin > The Battle of Algiers > 2006

16. On Broadway - http://www.on-broadway.nyc/

17. Manovich, Douglass > TimeLine > 2009

18. “visual strategy of the YouTube interface, however
simple and limited, encourages the user to construe
her visit in terms of an open-ended, exploratory
mission. In the movement from clip to clip, the
gridded, mosaic view of the frame becomes a
navigational system, representing the layout of new
terrain the user can enter with each click or tap,
continually returning to the mosaic-map after each
foray.”
Stephen Monteiro, “Mapping Moving-Image Culture: Topographical
Interface and YouTube.” 2014

19. Jonathan Harris > I Love Your Work > 2013

24. Jonathan Harris > Today > 2010

25. Harris & Kamvar We Feel Fine 2005

33. “…code has felt like the most appropriate
medium to express the times in which we live. It
communicates the speed, complexity, and
interconnectedness of everything around us, but
it also expresses the beautiful patterns that can
emerge from that chaos.”
Jonathan Harris > interview in The Great Discontent > July 2014.

34. “Is narrativity a matter of kind or of degree?
Are texts either narrative or not-narrative,
with no intermediate or partial options? Or
is narrativity a matter of degree: more or less
narrative; perhaps a scale ranging from, say,
nonnarrative to minimally narrative to fully
narrative?”
“ Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry”
Brian McHale (2001), 165

35. “poorly, distractedly, with much irrelevance
and indeterminacy … [so] as to evoke
narrative coherence while at the same time
withholding commitment to it and
undermining confidence in it; in short,
having one’s cake and eating it too.”
“ Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry”
Brian McHale (2001), 165

36. “the notion of weak narrativity…finesses the
question of whether narrativity is more aptly
characterized as a matter of degree or one of kind,
for here difference in degree (relatively less
narrativity) entails a difference in kind (weak
narrativity as distinct from figural, proliferating,
braided, dilute, anti-, etc.)—quantity becomes
quality, and vice versa”
“ Weak Narrativity: The Case of Avant-Garde Narrative Poetry”
Brian McHale (2001), 165

40. thank you.