Sonata
From IntegratedMedia
Sonata, created by Grahame Weinbren, is an interactive narrative that is controllable by the viewer's touch. The installation was exhibited internationally between the years of 1991 and 1999. Containing classical narratives of passion and violence by Tolstoy, Freud, and the Apocrypha, Sonata requests viewers to create their own narratives through interaction, and thus their own interpretations.
By touching the screen at any moment throughout the piece the viewer will affect the way the narrative continues. This includes viewing the narrative from a different perspective, superimposing future footage, or allowing a split-screen effect to show two different characters simultaneously.
Contents |
Story
The main source for Sonata is Tolstoy's story “The Kreutzer Sonata” – a study of jealousy and distrust, which culminates in the eruption of the man’s murderous rage as his wife and her violinist “friend” practice Beethoven’s music behind close doors. The protagonist attributes an immorality to the sonata, and by extension to all music; the music motivates the story as forcefully as do the characters.
The piece incorporates several associated themes: – the haunting dream image of a shuttered window opening to reveal five white, bushytailed wolves on a tree, as described by a patient of Freud’s who is called the “Wolf Man.” The interactive strategy used in this section is kind of peeling away: at the viewer’s interruption, the current layer is removed, revealing its sources in the dreamer’s psyche. Gradually, as the viewer descends through layers of image and interpretation by touching the screen, we see the dream as a concentration of memories, thoughts, and desires. – The biblical theme of Judith and Holofernes, a tale that addresses some of the same issues as Tolstoy’s story, and a subject depicted by numerous artists, from the fifteenth century to the present. Many of their paintings and sculptures focus on the moment when Holofernes, the enemy general, is decapitated by the Hebrew heroine Judith. The works are often ambivalent in their depiction of the heroine. Judith saved her people, but she (a beautiful woman) killed Holofernes (a virile man) in a vile and bloody act.
Part of the power of these paintings is the very ambivalence in the interpretation of Judith’s character – is she angelic or bestial? This is also the fundamental question in Tolstoy’s story with regard to both the wife and her jealous husband. Tolstoy apparently sides with the husband, portraying the murder as inevitable and, in the final analysis, justified. While contemporary readers may see the husband as compatible, many still maintain a deep-seated belief that jealousy is inextricably connected with uncontrollable anger, that a “crime of passion” is ultimately unavoidable. Are reason and passion always in conflict? This deep and enduring issue is the central subject of this video work.
Perspective
In Sonata, the story is multiplied into different points of view. We see the protagonist, pardoned for the murder of his wife, narrating his story to a sympathetic listener on a train. This is the story form chosen by Tolstoy. By pointing at the screen at any time, the viewer moves from the first person account to a reconstruction of what he is describing: dramatic scenes from a deteriorating marriage. Now the main focus becomes the wife’s point of view. Finally, we see the husband, racked with jealousy, pacing in his room like an animal, tortured by the violin music seeping through the door. Pointing at the screen brings on the innocent performance of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata (performed here by violinist Peter Winograd accompanied by Marian Hahn). A rush of emotion in the music pushes the man past some limit, and bursts into the next room and stabs his wife to death.
A primary aim of this multivalent narrative is to examine the extremes of emotion. The interactive cinema allows us to approach classical issues like this one in new ways. Because it is possible to see alternate views of the same situations, one can be caught up in drama, but at the same time analytically removed from it. Further, the availability of a variety of ways of engaging in the same story highlights the differences between memory and reality, and can explore the selectivity of memory. What does the protagonist remember? What actually happened? Pointing at the screen enables the viewer to switch from one to another.
In Sonata, the story of Judith is presented visually through multiple portrayals, and in a visually through multiple portrayals, and in a narration based on the texts that have told and retold the story. As it unfolds, the viewer is able to move from one depiction to another and, at certain moments, to loop back to the Tolstoy story. Some of the paintings, replicated for the production, are in the background of scenes in Sonata – thus the viewer can make immediate visual connections between different storylines. The viewer navigates around the narrative using a unique interface. The four compass directions of the screen – up, down, left and right – each represent a different temporal direction.
Right and left moves us forward and backward in time respectively, down renders expansions of the present, and up, the introduction of material outside time. Thus, for example, touching the right side of the screen moves the narrative forward more quickly, in a range of paces from a detailed unfolding to a bare plot outline. The left side of the screen reverses the direction of time. However, when we go back through events, as in remembering or retelling them, the events are necessarily seen in a different light. Memory is not pure factual description – it always incorporates desire, explanation, justification; unlike computers, we remember what is important to us. So when the viewer activates “reverse time,” a new view of the events is revealed.
Pointing at the bottom of the screen allows an exploration of the current moment, in Maya Deren’s sense of “vertical” development. This includes: an alternative viewpoint of the current narrative situation; metaphoric or associative imagery; theoretical or historical parallels; scenes of production chaos, etc.
The top of the screen is reserved as “author’s area.” Here less-strictly linked material can be accessed, and since one of the major themes of Sonata is the multiple relationships of the author to his or her creation, the upper portion of the screen is the area for factual, historical, literary, or biographical sources for the on-screen fictions – it is the place to find footnotes and commentary (in the broadest sense). Tolstory’s writing is a particularly appropriate match for this kind of exploration, since he was constantly working and reworking his memories and the events in his life for the sake of his fiction. Added to this is the unique resource made available by the publication of Tolstory’s diaries, as well as those of this wife and children, all of which describe some of the events on which the fictions are based, though the versions are often quite different. Similarly, an interactive cinema can enable a portrayal of the same events from different points of view; those of the different participants, for example, or of an outside observer, or of a “neutral” “God’s eye.” Sonata is an investigation into this potential for multiple perspectives.
In its deliberate investigation of the possibilities of interactive drama, Sonata aspires to lay the foundation for a new cinema, a cinema in which the response of the viewer affects his/her experience, a cinema of moment-by-moment collaboration between viewer and filmmaker. It opens a new dimension for a moving image, aligning the shape of film with the shape of thought, creating a cinema that portrays the world we live in and act on, rather than a world fitted to prior cenventions.
Reviews
Martin Rieser
In Weinbren’s Sonata the viewer can only control aspects of the narration - moving from the murderer of Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata telling his story in the railway carriage to the events themselves, which can in turn be overlaid with the mouth of Tolstoy’s wife berating the author, references to Freud’s wolfman case, Judith and Holfernes etc.
In one sense Sonata is linear, with time's arrow pointing forward, but it never reads the same way twice.
Yvonne Spielman
In crossing analogue and digital media Grahame Weinbren constitutes an intermedia artwork with the interactive film Sonata (US, 1991-93) where the spectator influences the continuous narrative structure of a multi-dimensional film and is asked to experience the complexity of cinematic narrative in non-linear ways.
The narrative is presented in hypermedia form and the spectator changes perspective accordingly.
The installation of ' interactive cinema’ on the one hand demands the interaction of the spectator to access these hypermedia features of the presentation. On the other hand the work asserts the principles of fictional narration as developed in cinema.
Erkki Huhtamo
Sonata (1992) resembles other interactive computer installations, in that they allow only one person to interact at a time via a touchscreen, while others form an audience who observes the interaction from monitors incorporated into the installation.
While interacting with these pieces the user is drawn into a rapid-fire exchange with constantly changing modes of address. None is given absolute authority over the others, even though there seems to be some hierarchical structuring. In Sonata, the image of wolves sitting on the branches of a tree and staring at the user (from Freud’s case history of the Wolf Man) unexpectedly appears and seems to give some kind of interpretative frame, and Weinbren himself has referred to the Freudian dream narrative as a subtext for his compositions. The viewer is meant to be carried into a ’subjunctive’ state,’ keenly aware that there are, “behind”; or within each image, other images and image-sets that may not show on screen in the current performance of the piece.
There are long segments in Sonata during which the hand of the user functions as a kind of real-time film editor. While the Kreutzer Sonata, sequence is running, the user can reveal different views (e.g. camera-angles, framings) of the same scene by touching the upper side of the screen. Split-screen effects are activated by sliding one’s hand laterally across the screen, revealing another story or scene that looks as if it were taking place simultaneously. Here the user’s hand intrudes in a self-sufficient world (via an indirect mode of address) ’from the outside’. This situation seems to have a parallel in that large group of video games which are observed from an objective ’camera-position’ and are manipulated (using a joystick) by the player’s ’invisible hand'.
There is a difference, however in a video game the player is represented by an agent who is controlled by the user, whereas in Sonata the user is more genuinely outside. S/he affects the discursive frame (the ’montage’ on one layer or between layers) more than the outcome of the ’story’ within it. Mythological associations with ’God’s hand’ come easily to mind.
Sonata as an influence?
The Berline Talent Campus production On Time in some ways is representative of the ideals Grahame Weinbren establishes in Sonata. On Time is a story concerned through the knowledge of the possession of the future. Rather than the film's expression of interactivity through practice, it chooses instead to represent it through means of story. Incidentally Weinbren was the mentor of the project.
Sonata allows viewers interactivity; the ability to affect the imagery that they are viewing. At times this interactivity allows viewers glimpses into the future, therefore building a foundation on which to make a decision. Do they touch the screen now to allow this even to occur? Or do they wait?
This same attitude is evident in On Time, the obvious difference being that it is not for the viewers to decide, but rather for the characters. Still, it presents the same seduction of power. Arthur seeks this power when he purchases his own future (neatly packaged in a briefcase), and viewers (or 'interactors') of Sonata will also feel the same desire to glimpse and possess future knowledge. Frank says: "Every moment is a chance to get ahead." The audience is presented with this desire, and will respond to it faithfully.
Interactivity and Narration
In his article In The Ocean of Streams of Story, Grahame Weinbren discusses the importance of interactivity in cinema. Weinbren's belief is that "the traditional (Aristotelian) notion of narrative must be rethought" (Fiction, Cinema, and Cybernetics section) where interactivity will allow the rethinking of narration.
In attempting to develop an interactive narrative cinema, I realized early that it will not have the shape of narrative as we have understood it - the very idea of user impact opens to question the concepts of end and beginning, of crisis and conflict, of development itself. (Weinbren, 1995, Fiction, Cinema, and Cybernetics section).
Viewers will no longer be passive as interactivity provides the chance to become actively engaged with the work. Interactivity also casts aside the linear form of narration that involves the structuring A-B-A by instead allowing the viewer to structure the timing of parts A and B (Weinbren, 1995, The Liberation of the Filmstrip section). This theory is explored in Sonata.
In Sonata this structure is used as a bridge to an alternative point of view (for example of another fictional character, or of the author); as a jump to an earlier (or later) time in the story; as a glance at a different depiction of the narrative situation (e.g., a classical painting of the Judith and Holofernes theme rather than its continuing narration by a story-teller); or the momentary introduction of a parallel narrative line.
References
- Weinbren, G 1999. Grahame Weinbren - Sonata, CSW Centre For Contemporary Art in Warsaw, viewed 8 April 2008, <http://csw.art.pl/new/99/7e_weindl.html>.
- The Medien Kunst review - http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/sonata/
- Rieser, M. (1997). "Interactive Narratives: A Form of Fiction?" Convergence: The International Journal Of Research Into New Media Technologies, 3(1). 10-19.
- Spielmann, Y. (2000). "Visual Forms of Representation and Simulation: A Study of Chris Marker's Level 5" Convergence: The International Journal Of Research Into New Media. Technologies, 6(2) 18-40.
- Huhtamo, E. (1995). "Seeking Deeper Contact: Interactive Art as Metacommentary" Convergence: The International Journal Of Research Into New Media Technologies, 1(2). 81-104.
- Duckrey, T (1993). "Grahame Weinbren" Iterations: the new image, Cambridge, Massachussetts, MIT Press. 168-173
- Weinbren, G 1995. In The Ocean of Streams of Story, Millennium Film Journal, viewed 8 April 2008, <http://www.mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ28/GWOCEAN.HTML>.
