I have kept stumbling over this in the last week via BBC news and various blogs. Its a AI research group out of NCSU called Liquid Narrative.
They are researching various aspects of AI and user interface as they pertain to narative. One of their aims is to create spaces that don’t require human intervention to create narative.
While this is interesting it brings up my loathing of the overuse of the word “narative”. I know that it’s been wrenched from its happy and normal life describing litterature. Its been drafted into the posst modern arsenal of missappropriated words, so that now its used to describe people’s relationship with art and just about any media or mediated relationship. Life is now just an extended narative. I think the usage of the word and concept is bent beyond recognition.
I have this concept of an “experience space” that I’ve been thinking through that should replace narative and it’s thinly stretched applications. It should break us out of the introspective, counting angles philosophies of post-modernism, while keeping a subjective view of media consumption.
