This course is about how to tell stories with your projects. Like a classic linear story, we’ll start at the beginning with the question of how good stories are told. We’ll learn about classical storytelling techniques and conventions from a variety of cultures, genres, and media. Next, we’ll explore what various tech and media can and can’t do in the context of story. We’ll end the semester throwing linearity out the window to create narrative work that engages with the tropes and conventions of non-linear storytelling. Chaos may ensue, as the defining feature of non-linear storytelling is that the author cedes some control of the narrative to the audience. There is no creative writing involved. Students will not be asked to invent new stories for this course—non-writers are welcome! The work of the class will involve reading, reading responses, active class discussion, and group work/play with projects riffing on assigned existing stories and narratives. For example, we might ask students to use a specific canonical story, poem, myth, parable, or film plot as a narrative jumping off point for assignments. The course is co-taught by Kio Stark, a researcher/writer of both fiction and nonfiction and Mia Rovegno, a theater writer/director who focuses on site-specific and immersive work. The semester is divided into three units. Unit 1: Narrative structures. In this unit, we dig into what it means to tell a story. Some of our major themes include: • What are the most commonly used story structures in media such as the novel, graphic novel, film, TV, and theater—and what expectations do they set up for the audience? • What are the techniques, tropes, and conventions of both western and nonwestern storytelling traditions? • What are some approaches that are in dialogue with or rebel against these traditions? • How do we understand and manipulate the audience’s narrative expectations? • What makes a story ‘work’ / how do we define a good or successful story? Unit 2: Using tech to tell a story. In this unit, we will do something that in other contexts is a terrible idea—we will start with the technology. We’ll explore briefly what counts as technology in our conversation, and then play with what specific technologies make possible, complicate, and make impossible when it comes to exploring narrative work. • What can and can’t we do with sensors, motion, projection, AR/VR, paper, film, light, voice etc in the context of the storytelling knowledge we’ve gained in Unit 1? • What unique storytelling conventions might be available to us as makers? • What kinds of objects, interfaces, situations, and places can be experienced as narrative? Unit 3: Non-linear storytelling. In this unit, we will play with situations in which the creators do not have total control over how the narrative is experienced and in what order it unfolds. • How do we use the viewer’s relationship/familiarity with conventions of linear storytelling to engage them in a non-linear narrative? • What are the storytelling conventions we see used in media beyond the page, big screen, and stage, where non-linearity is a common feature? For example, AR/VR, video games, social media, site specific performance, and museum design. • How do we make a story that works in more than one direction? • How do we play with the audience’s expectations? • How can we experiment with the temporal to establish duration and clear beginnings and endings for audience entry and exit? • How can we creatively engage both facility and innovation in a user journey? • How can we explore engagement of the audience’s “role” when the work demands a virtual, immersive or interactive experience? • How can we prime audiences for fluency in our storytelling modalities, without depending on cumbersome directions, real time interceptions or demonstrations of technology? In other words: how do we hide the man behind the curtain?!

Interactive Telecommunications (Graduate)
4 credits – 15 Weeks

Sections (Spring 2024)

ITPG-GT 2076-000 (14778)
01/22/2024 – 05/06/2024 Mon
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM (Evening)
at Brooklyn Campus
Instructed by Stark, Kio · Rovegno, Mia