Making the connection: Lev Manovich's Texas and the challenges of interactive new media narrative

摘要

This article proposes the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative as a tool for telling dramatically compelling interactive new media stories. In doing so it validates the crucial elements of cinematic storytelling in the digital medium, which due to its fragmentary, variable and re-combinatory nature, affords the opportunity for audience interaction. In particular it focuses on the theory and practice of the prominent new media theorist, Lev Manovich, as a means of investigating and creating a practical poetics. The key element of the Poetics of Mosaic Narrative is the expansion of the previously forgotten and undeveloped Russian formalist concept of cinematurgy. This concept, as originally proposed but not elaborated by Kazansky, encompasses the notion of the creation of cinematic new media narrative as a mosaic—integrally driven by the narrative systems of plot, as well as the cinematic systems of visual style created by the techniques of cinema—montage, cinematography and mise-en-scene.