More recent excursions into synthetic identity
and interactive narrative may be more elaborate but not necessarily more aesthetically
sophisticated than the elegant simplicity of Courchesne’s
Portrait Number One. One notable recent
instance is the interactive narrative installation 5 'til 12, 2006, created
by the media art duo Knifeandfork (Sue Huang and Brian House) and exhibited
at the
The visitor is invited to watch four characters, on four monitors incorporated into pedestals spatially distributed in the gallery. The four characters recount the tragic, fictional, circumstances of a murder on the exhibition's opening night. The experience is unique for each visitor, as each story is generated by computer algorithms that select narrative particles somewhat similar to the ‘lexemes’ that Barthes used to break Balzac’s ‘Sarrasine’ into components. But the computer does not simply pull out random variations of lexemes, the selection is guided by the rules of the game-theoretical strategy referred to as the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’.
Like Breitz’s Becoming, 5 'til 12 is based on cinematic narrative, specifically
Akira Kurasawa’s film Rashoman,
1950. Broadly speaking Rashoman
is in the genre of the courtroom drama but the tale is not set in a courtroom
but in the poetically dramatic setting of Kyoto's crumbling Rashomon gate,
where people involved in a recent crime—the rape of a woman and the
murder of a man possibly by a bandit—seek shelter from a rain storm.
In each of the four versions the characters and particular details are consistent.
Yet there are also significant differences. The bandit pleads guilty to the
murder but denies the charge of rape, claiming consent. The woman’s
story confirms that the bandit attacked her, but suggests that she may have
murdered the dead man. The dead man's account, told via a medium, tells a
tale of rape and suicide. The last witness is the only one not directly involved
but he tells the least convincing story due to the fact that it seems to interweave
elements of the stories that have already been told. Brian House notes that
Rashomon is: ‘about the subjectivity
of the narratives and how objective truth is elusive ... really all of their
stories are valid in a certain way. We were fascinated by that’ (Knifeandfork
2006). House also notes that another aspect of Rashomon
that appealed to him and Sue Huang was that Kurasawa ‘uses the viewer
as a character. The viewer plays
the part of a magistrate who receives the testimony of the characters in the
story’ (Knifeandfork 2006). NEXT
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