THEORY

ABSTRACT

“Transmedia Storytelling and Transcendental Experience: Using Media Archaeology in Creative Practice to Explore Narrative and Space within the Virtual Screen” is a PhD by Published Work comprised of four video-based transmedia projects. As a collective body of work, they are orientated around conceptual approaches to multi-platform production that aim for an intended transcendental experience, an approach that centralises the spectator.

The study develops work undertaken by the author as an undergraduate in Psychology and Philosophy, later focusing at Masters level on subliminal imaging within digital media. The approach to production developed in this thesis is drawn from phenomenological understandings of audience experience in relation to content across iterations of the virtual screen, informed by psychology theories such as Gestalt and Jungian theories.

These transmedia productions engage with creative opportunities and issues around the proliferation and fragmentation of video content and audiences, across multi-platform media, as well as the distinct challenges involved in authoring online and offline iterations of the virtual screen. The contribution to knowledge consists in the development of alternative production-based methodologies for transmedia authoring through extending the use of existing technological applications. My production-based methodology is based on the modelling of an intended transcendental experience which is catalysed through novel and/or experimental combinations of already available media tools. This production methodology creates new knowledge by extending the function of phenomenological psychology mechanisms established within still and moving image production. This extension materialises through the application of concepts such as “figure and ground” from Gestalt psychology and the language of Jungian archetypes, which are used as a guiding principle to re-structuring transmedia authorship with the intention to generate a transcendental experience.

This model of production applies a media archaeological approach to the implementation of technological tools, implementing the “new” into the “old” and the “old” into the “new” in making choices regarding format and positioning of the virtual screen. The works submitted in support of the thesis have been produced by implementing this conceptual approach. These transmedia projects explore configurations of platforms positioned at an intersection of digital arts

practice and more mainstream narrative video, spanning documentary and fiction. Overall, they demonstrate diversity in the implementation of the conceptual approach of intended transcendental experience across a range of online and offline applications that include gallery installation, interactive web- based storytelling, cinema style presentation and printed outputs.

The submission comprises of four transmedia productions J9 (2010), Telenesia (2011), The Interactive Forest (2014) and A Polish Journey (2015), these are examined within their production and theoretical contexts before being analysed as implementations of an ‘intended transcendental experience’.

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