An Analysis of Interactive Multimedia/Hypertext Project "The Seven Broken Seals" Based on Derridean Theory

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

"The Seven Broken Seals" is an interactive multimedia project which explores technology, narrative, memory and time. This project incorporates innovative approaches to the use of the spatial qualities and interactive behaviours of hypertext by combining a wide spectrum of genres ranging from poetry, to documentary photography, sound, film, visual imagery and written text.
"The Seven Broken Seals" deals with how memory (the author's) can be considered as a form of hypertext. It is also concerned with the way in which any experience of narrative is effected by the structure of representation through interactive technology.
This project constructs a densely woven fabric which is constantly on the move and interacting with the viewer. The work uses a heptagon-shaped web structure, which not only creates multiple sequences in 'audience path reading', but also situates the work within a framework of inter-determinacy. The reader or interactive viewer of the work is offered a variety of choices and pathways that sormetimes double back and repeat, simulating memory functions.
"The Seven Broken Seals" explores how the use of interactive multimedia can provoke or increase and amplify interactivity and multiplicity of readings. The intrinsic structure of the work comprises of multiple pathways and portals intended to encourage the participation of the audience to follow or choose various directions which flow through and across the surface of the work. Delayed reactions, repetition, and looping imitate the way in which the memory functions under certain conditions, as well as make for devices found in postmodern narrative structures.
"The Seven Broken Seals" involves a number of research areas, namely hypertext, narrativity, autobiography and interactivity, which are brought together in this original form. This thesis focuses on a discussion of hypertext or hyper-textuality within "The Seven Broken Seals" in relation to the two aspects: interactivity and multiplicity.
The poetic adaptation of Freud's Mystic Writing Pad is the departure of the discussion. Freud used this pad to explain how human memory works in the dynamics of writing a text onto the surface of a wax slab. In the process of this writing of texts on the wax slab, a text can make an impression; however, it is constantly erased and replaced by another text.
By clicking a hyper-text (link), the text disappears. The surface (or the computer screen) is momentarily clear, but is subsequently replaced by another text. Nonetheless, the traces of the previous text may remain with the audience interacting with following texts. The process requires an audiences' active participation to define a personal path. In choosing a path by clicking hyper-texts (links), an audience will depend upon the interaction or the interactive relation between sensory texts and their senses. These processes involve psychical (emotional or intellectual) and physical (tactile or kinaesthetic) interactions.
Like an imaginative onion which reveals nothing but identical skins even when it is completely peeled, "The Seven Broken Seals" has a homogeneous characteristic within its structure. At the beginning of the peel-off, it seems there is something in the centre (a kernel) for it appears to have a source or seed. However, what is left at the completion of the peel-off is nothing but further homogenous skins-skins with almost identical structures. Since the skins have been peeled and scattered, it is difficult to reassemble them in any order, or to distinguish the beginning, the body and the end. This structural design generates the possibility to anticipate a reading of the work. The homogeneous structure would not fail to lead an audience to somewhere while presenting a sense of curiosity in the process of peeling, stemming from its non-linear structure.
When an audience takes a journey through an interactive multimedia work, the audience can move between one text and another in order to experience the work. Through an involvement in this movement process, the audience (or the audience-participant) will interact with different texts. If every text is identical, the movement can be meaningless. The dynamics of text relation create movements in which one text is constantly superimposed with (or replaced by) another. The process of replacement requires supplementary texts since one text does not complete an entire communication process. Differance is a term that signifies the necessity of difference between texts, and that of supplement. It describes the constant movement throughout a text creating traces and erasing them in a process of replacement by supplementing with other texts.
Derrida eludes to "picto-ideo-phonography", as a way of conceptualising texts which can overcome logocentrism in semiotic practice. Picto-ideo-phonography is not based on the dialect of the signifier-the signified, but a principle of signature. In order for common nouns to become a signature, they have to be distinguishable as well as identifiable. A signature is meaningful when it is distinguishable from other signatures (countersignatures), and is identifiable for the signer (the referent). A signature should be different from others in order to be authentic and to identify the signer (the referent).
Then, these Derridean notions are agglutinated with other theoretical perspectives. Derrida's idea of picto-ideo-phonography is grafted with Barthes' concept of "the non-coded message"^1 in discussing the system of denoting and connoting messages of "The Seven Broken Seals". Furthermore, Derrida's notion of differance is agglutinated with Bergson's concept of "the space covered and movement"^2 in order to elucidate the effects of movement that are produced by the interactive multimedia texts, "The Seven Broken Seals".
When an audience moves from one text to another by using his/her cursor, the movement changes what is on the computer screen as well as the existence of him/herself: they become a participant and empowered to act, as opposed to a passive audience. Bergson had to wait for the sugar to be dissolved without stirring it with a spoon, because then, it will change the qualitative of the sugared water, including the glass. What the audience changes is not only what is on the computer screen, but also the qualitative nature of the whole; thus, the action of the participant transforms the nature of the texts from "the space covered (the set or the immobile sections of movement)" to "movement-texts(mobile sections of duration)".
This discussion on movement-texts suggests that patterns can exist through a trajectory of movement from one text to another. In other words, the relational movements between texts and the participants work in patterns of behaviours, performed through the dynamics of the participant's breaching and his/her act of leaving (in the trajectory of moving from one text to another). This patterning can be also understood as a process of 'cut and paste,' since the participant has to cut (from one text and move) to another text in order to see what awaits, by pasting other texts. Subsequently, the impression of the previous text has been cut and absorbed by his/her memory; simultaneously pasted as traces in the clipboard of memory.
In this context, the nature of collage can be understood as hyper-collage. As the prefix, hyper, suggests, hyper-collage is over-collage. It is an expression for something superfluous. It is similar to something, but not exactly the same. In this sense, hyper-collage is quasi-collage. But, the significance of hyper-collage lies in the fact that it is a metaphoric term, which explains the nature of interactive multimedia texts; weaving sliders-texts that can slide in order to weave the whole body of work.
If the dynamic of cut and paste movement occurs in sequential texts, it becomes a process of hyper-montage construction. Hyper-montage must be built by participants because the process of building the sequential texts needs to be performed by participants' mouseclicks. Unlike filmic montage, hyper-montage can possess any frame speed-a still picture of hyper-montage can exist as a single frame or it can contain a number of sequential pictures at different frame speeds. In fact, this somewhat superficial capacity of frame speed entails important characteristics of hyper-montage; the frame speed of hyper-montage can be designed to be controlled by the audience. In other words, hyper-montage can be programmed to wait for the mouse-click of a participant and the person can leave the montage scene at any time according to his/her will. In this regard, it provides a
Kaleidoscopic set of possibilities.
One of the most important aspects of hyper-collage and hyper-montage is the fact that the dynamics of these patterns essentially require audience participation. The participant, who slides and weaves to interact, does not play a simple or passive role of the conventional audience but becomes part of the texts, the work, and the scene, the work cannot exist and move without the indispensable driving participation of the audience.
Thus, the intention of "The Seven Broken Seals" is to examine the characteristic of interactive multimedia texts, which obscures the relationship between the audience, the art work and the artist. The traditional distinction between the three is blurred, as the role of an audience becomes that of a participant in this artistic process. Subsequently, this raises a question about the fundamental communication ground on which interactive multimedia art work is based. "Is the conventional relationship between the artist (the sender), the art work (the texts) and the audience (the receiver) still intact, even when the role of the audience is that of a participant and the work requires the participant's involvement in order to perform?"

목차 (Table of Contents)

• Abstract = i
• Acknowledgment = vi
• Table of Contents = vii
• Table of Illustrations = ix
• Introduction = 1
• Part I: The Point of Departure
• Overview = 9
• Section One: History = 10
• Section Two: Mystory = 14
• Section Three: The Seven Broken Seals = 20
• Part II: The Seven Broken Seals
• Section One: The Mystic Writing Pad and the Onion Skins = 32
• Section Two: Text and Textuality = 48
• Section Three: Picto-ideo-phonography as Weaving Sliders = 69
• Section Four: Patternism = 90
• Part III: Three Forms of Presentation
• Overview = 113
• Section One: The Internet Publication = 114
• Section Two: The CD-Rom Publication = 122
• Section Three: The Exhibition = 124
• Conclusion = 140
• Appendix
• 1. Mystory = 149
• 2. The Crash = 175
• 3. Documentation of The Kawang Joo Uprising = 181
• 4. Notes for Freud's Mystic Writing Pad = 185
• Bibliography = 187