Interacting with pictures: film, narrative and interaction

The article develops the theme of depiction, highlighting the conflict between the rich variety of pictorial strategies historically exploited by film and the demands of interactivity in digital media. It revisits a theme of output one, the sense of direct access to content, and similarly treats depiction as an integrated concept across multiple media.
Research methods were to:
1. Analyse how mainstream film-making creates a sense of transparency and naturalness, highlighting the naivety of theories which overlook the pragmatic and artificial nature of editing.
2. Propose a distinction between informational and affective expressivity (themes of all Boyd Davis' outputs).
3. Re-argue the supremacy of authorial control in film as it offers or withholds what the viewer craves. This undermines the many naive proposals to enable the viewer to ‘climb into' the space of a film and interact there.
4. Consider the constraints on expressivity created by the needs of visual interactivity.
5. Show how, by engaging in the pragmatic exploration typical of early film, interactive media may (will) discover its own unforeseen forms of expressivity.
This work led to the research projects of MPhil student Cozic (completed) and PhD Sarakatsianos (continuing).

Related work:
1) book chapter 2002 with Jones, H. ‘Screen Space: Depiction and the Space of Interactive Media' in Jorge, JA; Correia, NM; Jones, H and Kamegai, MB (eds.) Multimedia 2001. Springer, Vienna, 165-176.
2) peer-reviewed paper ‘News from Now Where? – the digital spaces of television', in Proc. CHArt Nineteeth Annual Conference (Birkbeck College London, 6-7 November 2003), volume vi, 2003 ISSN 1473-2157. http://www.chart.ac.uk/chart2003/papers/boyd-davis.html.
3) peer-reviewed paper with Cozic, L., and Jones, DH. ‘Intuitive Interaction and Expressive Cinematography in Video Games' Eurographics Society: Theory and Practice of Computer Graphics 2004 University of Bournemouth, 8-10 June 2004, IEEE Computer Society Press conference proceedings. 135-142.