Automatic Push Button Power
Syntactical And Aesthetic Answers To Information Access Problems In Hypermedia Navigation:A Montage Based Approach. - O.Hockenhull - January, 1994-
The notes that immediately follow are designed to designate areas and aspects of montage theory that are deserving of further examination regarding their pragmatic uses in creating a software package that would assist in the automation of an articulated interactive media experience. The central compositional variable of the film and video medium is the montage of the work. The project envisioned, the application of a montage based approach to navigation and editing, would bring to the digital interactive video realm an aesthetic level of formal, structural discernment and flexibility currently unavailable but presently technically feasible. The project: The Majestic Violence of Light is to be the creative application of the montage based theory approach to the question of Mediabase.
Conceptual Precis : Synopsis
Hypermedia confounds with a variable, plastic landscape and a shifting informational horizon. Possibilities in the structuration of interactive hypermedia presents producers and users with inherent information design complexities that demand the development of new interpretive languages and tools. The current standard in CD-ROM and other interactive media (including computer asssisted videodisks) rely upon ordering hierarchies that are more often than not text/menu/file based. These interfaces are predictable and inflexible. They do not actualize the intricacies available. 'Point and click', hot text, hypercard, etc. do not allow for an intimacy of interactivity. They give choices within branching confined contexts but do not give evidence of the sharing of memory nor do they allow for the complex application of aesthetic design. What is needed is the elegance of a conversation between the desires, intuitions, and remembrances of the operator and the material, mediated by the computer, imbedded in the intricacies of its own syntactical and meaningful potentialities - inclusive, necessarily, of the mesh between database and shared 'user' memory . There are certain and sure conceptual principles that must formalize the construction of new media tools and languages. Information theory, cybernetics, and montage theory are the distinct epistemological positions that allow for an evolving of an effective, ordered, thus learnable , hypermedia interface.

Dimensional levels of order, and the lucid evidence of genuine interactivity must be articulated in the accelerated complexity of the new media.

It is in a shared language between program and user that both the rigor and the imagination of authentic expressivity can become manifest. Norbert Weiner, one of the foremost mathematician-theorists of this century, relied on the principles of information theory to develop cybernetics (the science of maintaining order within a system). One of the principle tenets of information theory is that an isolated piece of data has no meaning. The creation of meaning is relational and situational. Like all great intellectual 'discoveries' this is obvious and profound in the same instant.

The science of cybernetics and of information also guides the formation of meaning and order in film and video construction. It is in the relationship (the montage ) between one shot and another shot, between one scene and another scene (a scene is normally composed of numerous shots) that allows a viewer to understand the meanings implied by the author.

"Among all the art forms that can teach us about communication, the most appropriate is filmmaking. It illustrates the transition from an engineering discipline to an art form." Heckel goes on to observe that movies did not achieve wide popular success until artists replaced engineers as the primary creators. Paul Heckel, The Elements of Friendly Software Design, 1982.

Through the course of the 100 years of cinema's history filmmakers and theorists have been thinking, experimenting, and writing about what the junctures between shots and sequences signify. There is presently a wealth of knowledge regarding the semiotics of film visual and audio editing that can be used to help define a relational data base for the digital domain of hypermedia.

A language of editing possibilities can be constructed. The results would be a multipurpose database in which to navigate within hypermedia. It would also have implications as an intelligent splicer tool for demonstrating edit choices in traditional (linear) video or film in a post production setting.

A descriptive model: synthetic cinema - a computer based approach to the construction of interactive cinema. A movie is parsed into component plot points, aesthetic junctures, and narrative moves that are reconstructed into various contiguous combinations as a function of user input, and the computer subsequently responds relative to various rhetoric rules that it has been assigned to follow.

User input is recollected by the computer as an aspect of user intention. Intention is defined in the context of constructive language skills applied by the user .

Conclusions:
Hypermedia presents a frustrating and incoherent complexity and overload of discrete elements that need to be structured in accessible, enjoyable, and meaningful form. Montage theory can be applied to create a relational data base for the purposes of navigation in hypermedia.

Interactivity is based on the creative mesh of shared language. Language is inherently ordered. Montage is the language of cinema/audiovisual media. The codes that mediate interactivity are variations on the theme of redundancy and novelty. These codes can be mixed, played upon, and combined to create personal codes. Thus develops the language and the specificity's of interactivity.

Meaning and imagination become the context for interaction.