iDrama or hiDrama??

[thom@indiana.edu]

I thought about attempting to respond to what Walt said a day ago but I 
actually didn't understand what he said but I did 'feel' that he didn't like 
what I said.

That's ok.

I can't remember when or even why I signed up for this list but it was 
probably  because of the 'i' before drama. I assumed the 'i' stood for 
interactive and that interested me.

I've saved some discussion of the past few months when it was interesting. I 
never responded to anything until Brandon started talking about 'art 
generating' stuff to give him the eye candy for something or other than he 
might create in the future. This stuff didn't need to be coherent or have a 
theme, it just seemed to be there to amuse people until they got into the meat 
of what ever it was that he might produce which I assumed was either story or 
meta-story.

I objected to the idea that any art can be automatically generated in any field 
from writing to visual art to music. History pretty much shows that art does 
not appear randomly, that machines never produce it and that humans are always 
in the mix. This particularly holds true if you are looking at any art from a 
historical perspective. Art defined by Picasso, Shakespeare, Otis Redding, Nam 
Jun Paik, Laura Mixon etc ... Artists.

I think the goal of any art has to always be ART in caps otherwise we are 
lowering the bar too low for it to even be considered art in lowerCaps.

Totally personal point of view on my part. I embrace no objectivity.

Regarding the 'i' in iDrama I see no reason to even consider lowering this to 
merely procedural programming of any sort to generate automatic iDrama. I'm not 
concerned with a business model even marginally related to a mass audience. 
Phillip Glass the musician made his living for years as a non-union plumber so 
he could do his art free of constraints. Many artists have made their living in 
other fields so they could do their art; insurance seems to have been a popular 
one for some reason.

Interactivity is completely related to communication and it is what any 2 human 
beings does naturally once they are within 5 feet of each other even if they 
don't know each other: "Hi," snear, nod. <em> This is my definition of 
interactivity <em> With this definition of interactivity the iDrama box is much 
larger than the envelop most of the discussion on the iDrama lists occupies at 
the moment. The issue isn't modeling emotion or meta-story development, the 
issue is the story you personally want to tell, something which drives your bus 
and rings your bell the same way all art has been created through out history. 
That comes first and then the 'how' is dealt with. 

Far more interesting and very definitely related is all the work going on in 
the 'alternative reality gaming' groups where people are very much telling 
interactive stories which are so far outside the box that there is no box so 
the story unfolds on all the screens we own from tv to film to cell to 
computer, to fax, phone, chat and even into the real world with real human 
beings.

The args seem to me to be the real model for iDrama & iStory. 

This list has a collection of talent. What happens if rather than endless 
deconstruction of why we can't make a living the way we want to or why we can't 
model this emotion or meta that story this collection of talent decided to 
create an interactive story/drama just for the hell of it and see where it 
takes them. 

Thank could be fun.

--Thom