Spherecam

Global recording technology works beyond the perspectival framing constraints of traditional lenses and, as such, constitutes an expanded model of representation that is truer to the way we actually apprehend the world. Contrary to the enlargement of the screen (e.g. CinemaScope), this camera’s enlargement of the image space achieves semantic extension of the narrative space. By creating such extensions of the image space, the navigable environment allows the interactive viewer to assume the role of both camera operator and editor, operations that are pre-determined in conventional cinema. Reformulating the role of narrative in new media and interactive cinema promises a significant extension of their cultural and commercial benefits by exploring the relation between cultural drivers of digital information and their dependent technologies. The reformulation involves three types of narrative: polychronic – digitally generated social spaces in which both viewers and fictional entities are allotted an autonomous voice; transcriptive – in which viewers can dramatise freely available multi-modal forms of digital information into idiosyncratic narratives that are eventful and cinematic in character; co-evolutionary – modelled on the emergent narrative interaction between the behaviour of virtual actors or avatars and real viewers. In a virtual environment, viewers join with the author to influence the pattern of the narrative that emerges. Narrative reformulation involves the resolution of fundamental problems in theoretical modelling, software design, adaptive computing, visualisation techniques and interface research, building on the predictions advanced in the systemic narrative theory of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres and Manuel De Landa.