Narrative and Multiple State Environments

Donna Leishman creates narrative digital art by layering images in Flash, and creating an interface without obvious visual or auditory cues as to the location or meaning of the hotspots and layers. She explains:

"Firstly, instead of being complexly non-linear (in the cybertextual sense), the project is a layered structure, which uses branching offshoots [23]. This structural layering works in "building up" compositions that can be regarded as a MSE. The different layers show the interrelationships between the narrative objects. This linking works in an unconventional manner -- layering as a storytelling technique is little used within digital media; it requires participants to make associations between objects using a spatial rather than time based metaphor, such as typically practiced by Owenns or Thomson & Craighead [15]. This sense of difference is compounded further when the depiction of the world and its inhabitants is a mix of the believable, impossible, familiar and bizarre (My aesthetic ). The total effect is that the work communicates to the participant in an unfamiliar, disturbing but imaginative manner."

Her dissertation project asked viewers to explore one of her works, Deviant, and to discuss their experiences. She describes the goal of the project as an effort to subvert emerging narrative conventions for hypertext and hypermedia. One question that she raises -- whether pointing and clicking destroys the storytelling experience -- bothers me as well. That's one reason that I'm really interested to see whether we can create the kind of intuitive narrative experience that we're striving for.

Leishman's work is further explored in this collection from the Iowa Review Web.