Eran Hadas is a poet, software developer and new media artist from Tel-Aviv. He builds computer based poetry generators that utilize the internet for their input. He calls what he does “Augmented Poetry”, enabling humans to manipulate the material of language by employing automated algorithms.
Udi Ben-Arie is the head of production and a lecturer at the Digital Media Program, the Steve Tisch School of Film and Television, Tel-Aviv University, and a lecturer at the Screen-Based Department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem. His research and work centers on interactive storytelling and user experience design in digital media. Ben-Arie has directed and shot several interactive and documentary movies, he was nominated for the Oscar student foreign film award for his debut short film “Second Watch”.
Constraints
Narratologist Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan addresses the effect that the media may have on artworks. Rimmon-Kenan argues that the inherent properties of each medium have a dominant influence on the artwork’s form and design, thus the medium’s properties may open up possibilities and impose constraints.
In this playlist we searched for possibilities and constraints that digital media affords interactive digital documentaries. Constraints play two major roles in interactive storytelling. One role is a creator’s decision to limit themselves and the world they represent. In this case, the numerous options enabled by technology are constricted. The second role is dealing with constraints which are not devised by the creator, but are a characteristic of the creative medium. This approach challenges the assumption that a frameless digital storytelling work is infinite in comparison a traditional one.
The works below were based on constraints which creators have imposed on their work, either by limiting the footage or data they were planning to use, or by utilizing the affordances of medium-specific constraints to generate their own imaginative world of storytelling.
