January 10th, day three

The morning lecture with Chris Hales went around the concept of narrative. What is a narrative? What kinds of narration exist? Definitions were pointed out by authors such as Edward Branigan and Seymour Chatman: for one it is "a global interpretation of changing data measured through sets of relationships", for the other it is "a text-type rather than a genre; it must have a narrator even if that narrator is non-human".

Also the issue of narration and video games was approached with the insight of ludologists Gonzalo Frasca and Jesper Juul. For ludologists a video game is not considered to be a narrative, although they do have plots, characters and other elements of narrative. Games are seen through the fundamental aspect of gameplay and not as a storytelling medium.

Different aspects and kinds of narration were identified: plots, stories, discourse, heap, episode, unfocused/focused chain, simple narrative, diegetic narrative, parametric narrative, mimesis.

As a conclusion we can maybe understand narrative as data organized into a special pattern by our perceptive ability to represent and explain experience.

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Later on Jouko-Thomas gave his presentation explaining his way of developing theatre plays. His big inspiration comes from Carlo Goldoni and Commedia dell'arte. He believes in a democratic process in which author and actors participate in the playwriting by sharing their views and emotions.

The process starts with the author and actors sharing their views about the general feel and aim of the play. Then, before anything is written, they go on an improvisation period where they explore more specific character details, story line, outcomes, emotions.

After they reach an agreement the author can start the actual writing of the play. So the difference is that when the play is staged, there was already interaction with the actors, and not a mere interpretation of the author's own intentions; it reflect also the actors interpretations. This kind of process leads to an unfinished play, open for new interpretations if needed.

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After lunch Jukka Ylitalo explained some of his background as an actor and showed some of his artistic experimental work with human body-computer interaction. He also showed some videos of other artists' work that relate to our theme: Golan Levin, La Fura dels Baus and Cirque du Soleil, among others.