Section II: "Future Fiction Storytelling Machines"
She then discusses how the emerging technologies are changing the form and function of traditional storytelling. New technology has made it possible possible to create stories with “multiple points of entry,” “many pathways breaking the philosophical line,” and “knowledge domain visualizations [that give] us new ways to communicate argument as well as structure, both the politics and the poetry of sculpting with data.” Initially Fisher began working with hypertext. She sees this emerging form of narratives in hypermedia as a continuation of earlier forms of artworks, such as “storyquilting and femmage.”
As the field develops, she grew interested in exploring the affordances of Augmented Reality to create spatial narratives. Augmented Reality narratives are “guided by the premise that we live in a culture with the unprecedented capacity to bring together the physical and the virtual, to transform out relationships to objects and landscapes though the addition of computer-generated information, to create interactive narratives and spatialized storyworlds . . ..” One of the most important claims that Fisher is making here is the potential of AR stories in embodying the materiality of born-digital fiction.
Next, she discusses a number of technologies that shaped the history of “screen-based electronic literature.” Some English PhD students have created “Storyspace” for the spatial organization of the texts. This technology has “guardfields, sticky pathways, collaborative potential and identical reading and writing environment.” With the advent of new storytelling technologies, the stories become “bigger,” specially the narratives written by connecting a large number of stories via hypertexts. In addition, the same stories, presented in different clusters can give different experience of re-reading, which is not possible in print-based texts. However, this vast potential of digital storytelling led to a number of critical questions related to the literary qualities of the texts produced and the skills, expectations, and experience of the audience. Fisher questions: “What it meant to engage a text with no last page of final frame, how to create narrative tension, how appreciating the structure of the work might signal the end of reading it . . ..” These concerns drove her to come up with new ways of creating stories that can give the audience an immersive experience.
Another important milestone was the handheld GPS-enabled device where the “interface of the story is [anyone] moving through the world holding [their] GPS-enabled device.” She names these stories as “locative media stories” or “the mobile media-narratives.” She makes an interesting observation at this point. With the growth of big-funded DH projects that mostly worked with archives and history, the storytelling becomes marginalized and the center shifted to recreation of older stories, rather than creating “new stories for new screens.”
Fisher compares AR narratives with VR narratives and claims that AR narratives have greater potential than VR narratives. She says that AR narratives has the potential to “make us catch our breath the way some virtual reality environments do;” however, AR narratives embodies “the ways in which the real-world matters in these works” because “physical world is co-constitutive of the meaning” of these narratives. However, the word limit of AR narratives is an important concern for Fisher, because the audience may not be interested to held their mobile device and “stand still in a spot” to read a long narrative. Therefore, most of the earlier experiments were shorter.
Then, Fisher gives some example of AR narratives she and her students have created in AR Lab. One of the earliest works is Andromeda, an AR poem about “stars, loss, and women named Isabel.” This is created using a software named Snapdragon built in York University’s AR Lab. Another important AR experiment is Circle, an AR “tabletop theatre piece that tells the story of four generations of women through a series of small connected stores.” The next piece that she and her students have made is a “web-based flash-AR” that provides a “story architecture” and allows people to re-use the code and “make their own web-based AR for free and with no coding skills.” The prototype built for this project is a poem titled Requiem. Then, she creates another interactive AR narrative titled 200 Castles. This is a “spatialized series of small stories set in both the domestic spaces of a castle and in the spaces of memory.” One of her recent works is created in Unity game engine, is titled Everyone at this party is Dead/Cardamom of the Dead. This work incorporates “30 small narrative worlds.” As the audience navigates the stories, they will gradually discover the “three longer narratives of the dead woven through the work, via both the content and the linking structure.” AR makes it possible for the audience to engage with this work for “about four minutes,” while the filmic representation would have required “four-hours run-time.” The showcasing of such AR narratives in exhibition teaches us “to treat works on screen as conceptual art . . . rather than narratives.”
Fisher envisions a future for spatial storytelling in AR, when she can overcome the earlier constraints of time and length. She hopes to create AR narratives that will continue for several days or weeks or even months. She also wanted to create AR screen with high “density of texts.”
Fisher's essay makes me wonder: How do Fisher and her team make these AR narratives accessible to a wider range of audience? How do they ensure that the general audience will be capable of grappling with these emerging forms of technologically-enhanced location narratives?