Art and Other Anxieties: Steerable Stories

In this children’s story, Salmon Rushdie aptly portents a world in which narrative is no longer defined by the single, perfectly articulated linear strand but rather by a rich web of interconnected strands of story that float together in a “tapestry of breathtaking complexity.” For the past 25 years, many researchers, artists and designers have worked to realize a dream of creating complex narrative experiences using the computational tools and input devices. While resulting work -as seen through realized artifacts such as web-based documents, electronic games and place-based installations – has shown promise, no narrative language has yet emerged which can be used for a wide variety of content and which can communicate emotionally with any audience, anywhere in the world. Making narrative artifacts at this moment in history -in the midst of rapid shifts of technology -is exciting but daunting. In this first Sutra publication, it is appropriate to examine trends that seem to be moving us ever forward in our quest for a new narrative medium and to ask whether this new medium can foster narratives that are "more personal and complex, as if in conversation with the audience."