Role of the Spectator as a Narrative Device

When the audience reads a book or watches a movie, the events are read from the perspective of an omniscient spectator (see Professor Nick Browne's The Spectator in the Text). In interactive media the viewer is a participant.
The game mentioned below plays with this role for narrative effect.

The Stanley Parable (meta Aesthetic game)

Post Structuralism Spreads to Math

Structuralism has trouble with subjectivity

Philosopher Alain Badiou argues that mathematics is a purely human construct, analogous to fiction.

Quotes (from memory)
math is "a fiction of intelligible consistency" (I found this in Ashton, 270)
"mathematics is a rigorous aesthetic" (I am having trouble finding this quote, bit I think it is in Briefings on Existence)

Fictionalism
Mathematical realists believe that math is objective, existing outside human knowledge. But the belief that mathematics beyond what humans will or could ever discover is a faith (counter to science).


Ashton, Paul, Adam Bartlett, and Justin Clemens. The Praxis of Alain Badiou. Melbourne: Re.press, 2006. Internet resource.
Badiou, Alain, and Norman Madarasz. Briefings on Existence: A Short Treatise on Transitory Ontology. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006. Print.

Platomism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonism

Strokes

I have started adding strokes to the curves

It is incredibly time consuming to get all the foliage to bloom properly and sill have the letters readable. I tried a few methods over the summer, and though the node editor was a bit quicker for copying and pasting several vines onto curves, they still need individual manipulation to make the letters clear.

Regretfully, I don't see any way to do all the letters by the deadline. So I am just going to slap together a drop cap, and leave the letters as normal text for the review.

It does not look nearly as good as the full test, but there is no way I can complete all of it by the middle of July.

It was my favorite part, but I think it will save me about a month

Reformatting for the Drop Cap and Foliage

I have made maps for all the text in Word, and now I am aligning the curves with the new letters. The process is very time consuming, but the foliage text is one of my favorite aesthetic pieces.

The lettering is organized in Microsoft Word

Then I adjust the curves to rest on the page.

The curves have to be very close to the page, or the foliage growing out of the curves will be floating above the paper.

I have all the curves for the first page on the paper

Reflection/Conclusion

I find a better understanding of narrative communication through Speech Act Theory, but it is possible that others might not find it as useful.
I have unfolded one aspect of a narrative device that already existed in my work.
There is certainly a fractal order to perspectives on communicative analysis through narrative, this might be a post structuralist dilemma. There are many truths, quantization leads to an infinite series of discrete forms. But I have a way to talk about the work, and I feel comfortable and confident with the ability to talk and think about commonalities between different communicative forms, where initially I was overwhelmed. The comfort could be from a sense of ownership, discovering and mastering my own perspective; or it could be a virtue of the linguistic formula.

Indirect Citation

I keep getting this wrong.

Citing indirect sources

Sometimes you may have to use an indirect source. An indirect source is a source cited in another source. For such indirect quotations, use "qtd. in" to indicate the source you actually consulted. For example:

Ravitch argues that high schools are pressured to act as "social service centers, and they don't do that well" (qtd. in Weisman 259).

Hand-Made Aesthetic

I am looking for resources to cite and explain the difference between the experience of a hand held book and watching an animation. I have a sense that the hand drawn animation is closer to a book because the technique leaves artifacts that make the process transparent (i. e. people know how stop motion works, so visualizing the hand of the artist makes the product more indexical, like a hand made book).
Quotes I have and references:
 "Mary Ann Doane approaches the problem of sound from a psychoanalytic point of view and investigates the relation of sounds to the unified body reconstituted by the technology and practices of cinema. These technologies, which increasingly succeed in concealing the work of Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus, reduce the distance between the object and its representation, and this reduction of distance, and the attendant loss of “aura” first noticed by Walter Benjamin (see Section VII), is particularly evident in the case of the reproduction of sound. Doane believes that a proper understanding of the relation between sound and image is crucial to explaining the pleasure of the spectator in mainstream cinema. She analyzes such techniques as voice off, voice-over during a flashback, and the interior monologue and contrasts them with the disembodied voice-over commentary of the documentary. Its radical otherness with respect to the diegesis endows the voice-over with a certain authority. In the history of the documentary this voice has been for the most part male, and its guarantee of knowledge lies in its irreducibility to the spatio-temporal limits of the body on screen. The voice-over commentary speaks more or less directly to the spectator."

(Braudy 244)

"Cinema is the art of the index; it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint." (Manovich 2)

 live-action films, i.e. they largely consist of unmodified photographic recordings of real events which took place in real physical space. Today, in the age of computer simulation and digital compositing, invoking this characteristic becomes crucial in defining the specificity of 20th-century cinema (2)

they relied on lens-based recordings of reality. 2

Cinema emerged out of the same impulse that engendered naturalism 2

Cinema is the art of the index 2

What he does Paragraph:

"This argument will be developed—in three stages. I will first follow a historical trajectory from 19th-century techniques for creating moving images to 20th-century cinema and animation. Next I will arrive at a definition of digital cinema by abstracting the common features and interface metaphors of a variety of computer software and hardware that are currently replacing traditional film technology. Seen together, these features and metaphors suggest a distinct logic of a digital moving image. This logic subordinates the photographic and the cinematic to the painterly and the graphic, destroying cinema’s identity as a media art. Finally, I will examine different production contexts that already use digital moving images—Hollywood films, music videos, CD-ROM games and artworks—in order to see if and how this logic has begun to manifest itself. " 3 

 CGI -meaning of these changes 

n. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting. 3

rather than the art of audio-visual narrative, or the art of a projected image, or the art of collective spectatorship, etc. 4

Not about indexicality, but surprisingly related to my thesis:
"Consider the CD-ROM Johnny Mnemonic (Sony Imagesoft, 1995). Produced to complement the fiction film of the same title, marketed not as a “game” but as an “interactive movie,” and featuring full-screen video throughout, it comes closer to cinematic realism than the previous CD-ROMs—yet it is still quite distinct from it. With all action shot against a green screen and then composited with graphic backgrounds, its visual style exists within a space between cinema and collage."  (14)

Works Cited:

Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

Manovich from Denson, Shane, and Julia Leyda. Post-cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. , 2016. Internet resource. <http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/POST-CINEMA_Theorizing-21st-Century-Film-PDF-13mb-Shane-Denson-Julia-Leyda-eds.pdf>