Storytelling is entering a new era, the realm of interactivity. "But what is interactivity?" asks Todd Rundgren of his audience of storytellers. "Interactive is already defined in the dictionary, but we need a new subjective interpretation of the term." He proposed that true interactivity involves a concept he calls "recontextualization," or the ability to present information in different ways at different times under the control of the user via the guidance of the artist.
Rundgren is a musician and multimedia artist whose almost 30-year-long career is noted for his unique sucess at combining cutting edge music with commercial success. He first achieved fame by leading the late-1960s rock group Nazz, followed by a series of succesful albums recorded under his own name, and with his power-rock group Utopia. He is also noted as the producer of Meat Loaf's 1977 album Bat Out of Hell, a smash hit that allowed him to build his own $2 million video production facility.
In 1980 Rundgren created Time Heals, the first video to combine live action and computer graphics. Rundgren crossed over to the digital realm of music in the 1980s, and perhaps more than any leading rock musician has combined new media with his music. His current music release, The Individualist, is one of the first CD-E releases in the world, a format that combines straight CD-audio tracks with the ability to play back digital information when the disk is placed in a computer.
Rundgren said, in the simplest terms, interactivity can be expressed as the TV remote control. A person can be quite content to observe, in a linear sense, what's on TV until he or she gets board. Then the interactive search for something else interesting begins, followed by another period of linear vegetation in front of the tube. As a culture, we have been quite content with this level of participative entertainment.
At the other extreme is constant, high-energy interaction as presented in video games. "The Head (user) is in a constant state of interaction and, as an artist, you need to create an environment to support it," proclaims Rundgren. But what about true, interactive storytelling?
Rundgren is exploring - even defining - new ways of storytelling via CD "enhanced," or CD-E compact music disks. These disks play music, but also include a computer track for interactivity when played in computer systems equipped with CD-ROM drives. "The biggest challenge," Rundgren explains, "is moving away from linear entertainment toward recontextualization." Converting music from a linear to an interactive form required some new thinking. "The problem," according to Rundgren, "continues to be how much linear presentation do you want to give up to the user?"
"The process of telling a story is the process of elimination, of narrowing interpretation to the smallest set of possibilities," Rundgren emphasizes. "Yet with interactivity opening the possibility of changing the direction of a story, even changing the outcome, will the user end up being a collaborator with the storyteller?" Empowering an audience to get involved can causes a change in personality much as the way one's personality changes when getting into an automobile. While Interactivity allows an audience to project themselves into the audience participation, there are negative artifacts to interactivity, too," Rundgren proclaims.
Still, according to Rundgren, "starting somewhere, branching into different directions, and ending up in different conclusions is linear. It is dilusionary and promotes the illusion that multiple choice linearity is the way things actually are." The idea is to introduce recontextualization into the linear flow. "The concept is to make art that can be broken down and reassembled into other things," according to Rundgren. He contends that "linearity needs to be subverted for recontextualization to become successful." This will be the biggest challenge to the interactive storytellers in the future, how to effectively tell a story while giving the user the creative outlet of recontextualization. His advice to tomorrow's storytellers? "Remember, people don't all interact the same, and they don't interact constantly. You need to allow for this."
© 1996 Kaua'i Institute for Communications Media & American Film Institute