Unfinished Business – A Transmedia Project Ana Carolina von Hertwig
Filmmaker, photographer and new media artist.
cinejornal@gmail.com Abstract: Unfinished Business is an interactive webplatform based on a hybrid non-linear narrative available in www.unfinishedbusiness.com.br or https://anacarolinavonhertwig.com/hertwig-unfinished-business .
Unfinished Business is a web-based interactive narrative hybrid fiction and non-fiction. This project was defended in August 2013 as my final year undergraduate film thesis at the Federal University of Santa Catarina. In April and May 2014 it was shown as a transmedia project in an Art Gallerie and its concept involves both a projection and an exhibition of still photography. As a web-platform it permits online ‘wanderers’ to explore, relate and interact with three main areas and eighteen audiovisual segments throughout multi-layered screens. It can be presented as a small-structure installation, including both an online content exhibition through a computer and two pictures placed beside. The audience can associate and interact by their choices to explore a journey through both known and unknown states of mind. The result is a a dynamic self-analytical diary sharing impressions, points-of-view and thoughts using transmedia’s potential to promote new perspectives and provoke exchanges that engage people in a framework in which storyteling and art fuse to shed new light on contemporary issues. My objective is to motivate participation by juxtaposing complementary technologies to create compelling interactive storytelling-based experiences that advocate, mobilize, educate, entertain and engage people and resources. This project adapts and shares stories with a process-based aesthetic approach founded based on the psychological, sociological and environmental parameters that define the human condition. It constitutes an examination of how interactivity coupled with non-linearity can help effectively express immaterial sentiments, impressions and reflections distilled from my observations of contemporary environments gathered from my investigative wanderings. Concretely, the project is made up of films, still pictures, projections, texts, soundscapes as an immersive diary built on Klynt (a content edition tool for webplatforms). Beyond a hybrid narrative storytelling this project has an artistic exploration of diverse formats and media from 16mm and super 8 and multiple still photography formats and experimental techniques, to the latest digital photography and video, including digital audio designing. It also employs multiple craft experiments with traditional black and white chemical procedures and non-conventional developing processes, as well as scanning, digital treatment and animation techniques. My influences are the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges and the French philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. I challenge myself to transform simple apparently banal everyday events and situations into stories that could make people share this state of mind to the concept of a web-based interactive content platform, to provide a totally immersive online cinematographic experience. My investigation’s goal is: how such ordered irrationality is related to the development of non-linear storytelling for the Internet?
I believe interactive storytelling opens a door for more complex transmedia experiences that empower us emotionally, intellectually and physically contributing to the formulation of alternative understandings of life, looking for a new form of planetary exchange that unfolds new definitions of democracy and information gathering and sharing. Such an approach that firms a partnership between interactivity and art, Unfinished Business enhances my ongoing interest in both the technological and creative sides of contemporary storytelling. This experience embodies perspectives that motivate people to push back boundaries and go beyond what is known and comfortable. It is all about risk-taking. Therefore, the project fundamentally encourages the desire to comprehend contemporary urban life, to share experiences and interactions, engages practices of non-linear narrative structures, and proposes a reflection on flows (imagĂŠtique or about connections) and technologies (producing and sharing content on multiple platforms) as devices for artistic creation. Samples: Physical structure