Week 5 - Telling a Tale

I tend to side against A. Kiedi Varga's statement that "the image is not a second way of telling the tale, but a way of evoking [that is, recalling it from memory] it." Using images in conjunction with words makes this statement true, as it acts as a compliment to the narrative taking place. However, I don't see this as a fact that spans across all media forms.

In "Narratives Across Media" (Ryan, 139) the authors describes how the ballet Sleeping Beauty has an established story, so a spectator of it recognizes the plot purely from his memory. It is then claimed that this same experience then spans across other mediums, including illustration and painting. The argument is that the stories are (in a way) being recreated by the images, as opposed to being told by the images.

The problem with this argument is that action, narration, and thus storytelling can in fact be told through a static image. A sense of movement and action can be created in a painting, as well as the creation of implied change in space and time. For example, imagine a painting of a man in movement over a hill, with a background of a house in a distance. How would experiencing this visually be different from a text stating "a man leaving his house, crossed over a hill". They both accomplish the action of telling a story, not evoking one.

One things required by the stories being told by static images is a prior knowledge of the medium. A person viewing a painting must understand how to read visual queues to be able to imply action. A person viewing a photograph has to have an understanding of how to interpret light, so as to follow the emphasis of direction. This takes us to a medium with no established prior knowledge, storytelling on the web.

Most frequently digital storytelling involves taking an established media (i.e video, photographs, illustration), combining it with other text and media, and then delivering it on a medium that is quite foreign to the media's origins. This can destroy the effectiveness of a lot of the media that can normally tell a story on its own. The most obvious example of this is with a painting. When a painting and placed in a confined and flat surface (of say a laptop screen), all sense of space and texture is lost. When these visual queues are lost, the image merely becomes a compliment to the accompanying text.

The structure of the web interface, if anything, calls for a new media of it's own. One that isn't tangled in pre-existing (especially organic) medias, but rather one that is specifically manufacture for a digital experience.