Woyzeck

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Interactivity

It is important to state that in this AR installation of Woyzeck, the audience member will be the only live element of the performance. Audience members will be free to move about the storyworld and will build narrative by encountering scenes located spatially. In this way, the audience member can choose the order in which to view the scenes or repeat them and thus construct unique experiences. This brings up questions Lev Manovich wrestles with in his piece, Database as a Symbolic Form. Manovich points out that, "As a cultural form, database represents the world as a list of items and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events)" (5).

In Woyzeck, the audience is presented with a series or database of episodes that are not ordered. It is for the audience member to perform the creative task of ordering. Composer Stephen Sondheim has pointed out that, "Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos" (3). But beyond art making, the act of creating order out of random events is an essentially human one, an act of sense-making that we do every day. Making narrative from events is a way of life. Michael Chaouli brings up a very important cautionary point in How Interactive Can Fiction Be? that the blanket use of this sort of interactivity may nevertheless result in meaningless experiences. Chaouli notes, "I have thus far failed to find a coherent account of interactivity [...] What is instead communicated in nearly every instance is what a good thing interactivity is. It is a moral category packaged as a technical feature, applicable to an improbably large number of actions" (604). Chaouli is right to note that interactivity can't possibly always be a good idea. Surely we wouldn't want every experience in life to be interactive. Nor would audience members enjoy an experience in which every element is completely undecided. Meaningful experiences can be created with the thoughtful inclusion of interactive elements within supporting structures. Jacquelyn F. Morie discusses these supporting structures in her paper, Coercive Narratives, Motivation and Role Playing in Virtual Worlds. Moire writes: All VEs [virtual environments] are environments of experience, they give you real control and choices. Coercive elements can help direct these choices to provide the best possible, and most predictable to the author, experience for the user. All coercive elements should flow effortlessly in the story, the experience or the world view. What we want to do is constrain in context the user's action through the environment. (4) The development of coercive elements used to "constrain in context" audience members' choices can be traced to long before the creation of digital worlds to the amusement or theme park. In Designing Disney's Theme Parks: The Architecture of Reassurance, Karal Ann Marling explains Walt Disney's understanding of coercive elements as follows: Walt wanted strong vertical elements to articulate each section of the park. He used the term 'wienie,' borrowed from the silent-era comedy, to describe tall visual markers that promised to reward the visitor who walked toward them. Wienies were tasty visual treats for pedestrians [...] Walt's theory was that if the promised goody were good enough, if what was going to be there was clear enough from the environmental cues embedded in the design, then Disneyland's guests would go anywhere and relish the trip. (66)