Communication Studies faculty member Matt Soar’s CINER-G project shakes up how traditional stories are understood
Matt Soar, an assistant professor of Communication Studies, suggests each person’s life story encompasses a web of ideas amassed from a selective recollection of personal experiences or interactions, such as conversing with others, observation, browsing the internet, reading, watching television and listening to the radio. “Life is not merely a single narrative arc with a beginning, middle and end. It’s encountering all kinds of stories and believing in a certain set of ideas based on these fragmented morsels of information,” Soar says.
Communication Studies Assistant Professor Matt Soar is principal investigator the Concordia Interactive Narrative Experimentation Research Group, or CINER-G. Group members include five Concordia researchers and creators from the humanities: Soar, Monika Kin Gagnon, Jason Lewis, Tim Schwab and Elena Razlogoval.
Recognizing this mishmash, Soar and his Concordia colleagues are exploring non-traditional structures for storytelling as part of a three-year project called Concordia Interactive Narrative Experimentation and Research Group, otherwise known as CINER-G (pronounced “synergy”).
“We’re studying and making time-based media—such as documentaries and experimental works—with a focus on the smallest narrative units, or SNUs, that can make sense as a story fragments on their own,” says Soar, CINER-G’s principal investigator. In some of these interactive productions, audience members can select each SNU order based on what they find most interesting in the stories as they surf through content.
Students and teachers participate as research-creators by making their own interactive documentaries and experimental films. “If we go through the process of repeatedly making work in this nonlinear way, we can have a more informed discussion about database narratives,” Soar says.
All narratives relate to the themes of memory, migration and media. Soar says that he is looking at a traditional documentary about the relationship between psychoanalysis and tango dancing in Buenos Aires to see how it turns out when he dissects it into SNUs.
To make this kind of filmmaking deconstruction available to everyone, CINER-G is collaborating with Berlin-based artist Florian Thalhofer to redevelop his Korsakow software, which allows those with no coding experience to organize the SNUs based on keyword associations. “It’ll be simple to use, especially with the support documentation we’re including,” Soar promises.
The upgraded, open-source Korsakow software’s applications will extend beyond artistic expression. For example, one architectural student has used it to prepare a portfolio of an urban redevelopment project. And an American hospital is interested in its feasibility as an interactive tool for helping autistic children. “All these unanticipated uses are very exciting,” Soar concludes.
To find out more about CINER-G, visit cinerg.ca.
Korsakow software can be downloaded from korsakow.com.
