My research on was partly an attempt to capture the attention society. How does a filmmaker grab an audiences attention?

From immediacy...

To hypermediacy...

What I wanted was absorption but not Narcissism.

Politics not Hysteria The biggest example of “attention politics”

I decided to use the story of Echo and Narcissus to make a film “Remediating”* video art, computer games, and theatre. *Bolter & Grusin, 2000 Remediation: Understanding New Media MIT : Cambridge Massechusetts,15).

Echo and Narcissus addresses the question of how we can overcome Narcissism in a hyper-mediated age.

Allegory permits digital designers to pursue visual immediacy…and to deliver a message at the same time. If digital art is about repetition, cutting and pasting, and establishing visual analogies among objects, allegory establishes lines of analogy between the visual objects and the elements of a verbal message. This technique means that the image … does not have to abandon the logic of immediacy in order to tell its highly mediated story. Furthermore, the allegory itself guarantees the viewer a clear and seemingly authentic message and validates the viewing message (Bolter & Grusin, 138).

1.Use Echo and Narcissus as an allegory of political impotence in face of 2 nd Gulf War. Losing voice as a political act. 2.Place Echo and Narcissus in an environment where people have to pay attention or leave. 5 screen environment 3.Create an interaction point where audience “choose” to save Echo and Narcissus or leave them to die.

Aesthetics

A setting of virtual space which creates a holistic sense of a fictional world through the use of eyelines, synchronized sound and character interaction between screens

The creation of a geographic world through the use of landscape shots in montage on various screens.

The use of slow motion and speed effects to create dialogue interaction between characters in different environments on different screens The use of “screen savers” to stand in for characters’ when they are not directly interacting The use of associative and connotative editing on screens in order to create an emotional parallel or comment on the content of scenes through landscape or abstract shots. The use of montage as poetic and hypermediate elements.

Improvisation and Challenge

How to make 3 D installation? How to edit in 3D? How to afford screens and project them? How to make the sound work?

The embedding of choice both within the story, through the choice of screen to watch, and also through the interactive element and multiple endings. The production of different copies for different outputs: Installation, DVD, online version.

What does improvisation mean? Do you always have to find that there are things you cannot have been aware of? Lack of economic models for this kind of thing. Maybe trying to create “expanded” presence no longer viable, as digital media remediated entirely through the computer? Echo and Narcissus metaphor for this story of creativity and resistance. Getting something from nothing by making something artistic, is similar to Echo saving Narcissus and herself from death.