Telling stories about stories

Increas­ingly, I’m con­vinced that no media is suc­cess­ful or even com­plete until it’s been trans­formed or extended. I know this is not super-controversial—it’s sort of the Cre­ative Com­mons party line—but it turns out things don’t trans­form them­selves! A lot of media gets CC-licensed and then just sits there.

I’m also influ­enced by Henry Jenk­ins’ notion that the most suc­cess­ful fic­tional worlds (Star Wars, Harry Pot­ter, and so on) are not so much straight nar­ra­tive sto­ries as they are “plat­forms” for peo­ple to build on. You need a cen­tral story to get peo­ple excited about the plat­form in the first place, but then you also need lots of hooks for them to extend it, both for­mally (movies, comics, video games) and infor­mally (fan-fiction, fan films, art). The cen­tral story is like the iPhone; the exten­sions are like the App Store! (And P.S., the platform-worlds aren’t all robots and wiz­ards. Ulysses is a plat­form, too.)

Okay so, I’m a long way away from build­ing a plat­form on that scale, but it’s fun to sort of “act it out,” even at this stage. Thus, when patron-guests arrived at the Annabel Scheme launch party, they were pre­sented with a piece of evi­dence from Scheme’s col­lec­tion. The evi­dence was all dated and tagged in ziploc bags; it was all very strange.

The mis­sion: come up with the story behind the evi­dence. There was a Nar­ra­tive Evi­dence Research Data­base col­lec­tion sta­tion set up, off to one side of the party, to cap­ture these sto­ries. Here’s a taste of what peo­ple recorded:

I have to say, it is unreal to see other peo­ple say­ing “banana box” and “Sebas­t­ian Dex­ter” and “Annabel” on cam­era. It really is the next level. Some­body reads the book, enjoys it, even tweets or blogs about it: awe­some. I mean, just really won­der­ful. But some­body acts it out? Sub­lime.

There’s more to come on this front—I’ve allo­cated $1000 from the book’s bud­get for a remix fund, and next week, I’m going to post a form where peo­ple will be able to sub­mit pitches. After that, the book’s patrons will all vote on their favorites, and those projects will get funded. Hey: things don’t trans­form themselves.

2 Responses

Mcburton says:
December 23, 2009 at 2:37 pm
Robin,
do you have some links/cites for the Jenk­ins work on fic­tion as plat­form? I have been explor­ing the notion of “sci­ence” (that is to say knowl­edge pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­b­u­tion) as a form of story telling. This seems to fit, the most suc­cess­ful sci­en­tific dis­cov­er­ies are plat­forms that oth­ers can build upon! Kinda of like Kuhn’s par­a­digm shift but more folksy.
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Saheli says:
December 23, 2009 at 2:53 pm
I think Jenk­ins would be my hol­i­day read­ing if I hadn’t already loaded up on texts about the raid on Harper’s Ferry in antic­i­pa­tion of the local Uni­ver­sity library closure/furlough.
The ambiance of the video is great–it totally cap­ture the party and yet com­pletely trans­forms it. My +1 guest later told me that the whole expe­ri­ence was very dream­like: the white walls, the art, the archi­tec­ture, the inex­plic­a­ble racks of clothes every­where, some peo­ple he knew, most peo­ple he didn’t, and peo­ple very earnestly talk­ing about some woman named Annabel Scheme and banana boxes while han­dling strange objects. Plus the awe­some GAFFTA music instal­la­tion in the front. It would be funny to have some­one guide-less walk into that expe­ri­ence and try to make sense of it.
Also ToastyKen is awe­somely creeped out by his evidence.
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