adventures in remediation- the making of echo
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Adventures in remediation: the making ofEchoCoral Houtman aa University of WalesVersion of record first published: 04 Jan 2012.
To cite this article: Coral Houtman (2011): Adventures in remediation: the making of Echo , DigitalCreativity, 22:4, 263-274
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Adventures inremediation: the making ofEchoCoral Houtman
University of Wales
Abstract
Echo is a twenty-minute interactive multi-screenresearch drama which addresses the question of howwe can overcome narcissism in a hypermediated age.This article outlines the search for the appropriateform for the final art work using the concept ofremediation to explore how the piece developed formulti-platform distribution and exhibition, as an onlinescreen media drama and as a work for galleryinstallation. In outlining the process of production, thearticle explores the poetics of multi-screen immersivegallery drama and split-screen drama, and discussesthe new and remediated possibilities for these forms.
Keywords: remediation, practice as research, multi-screen, split-screen, narrative
This article is about the making of a five-screen,semi-interactive film drama, Echo, made as aresearch project at the University of WalesNewport1 and designed for screening in an artgallery or other space. I will trace its journeyfrom concept to screen(s) by using DavidJ. Bolter’s and Richard Grusin’s (2000) conceptof remediation, citing examples of works in differ-ent media, such as Greek theatre, video art, televi-sion, computer games, even patchwork quilting, toshow how these forms are either conscious orunconscious structurings or remediations. I willalso show how its aim to be heterogenous andsynthesising—a gesamtkuntswerk of sound,image and narrative in current media technologiesand exhibition forms—is an essentialist fantasyand has been enabled and limited by the discoursesand conventions of film and TV drama. The ten-sions between unity expressed as Aristotelian nar-rative, with its strong attempt at identification andempathy and fragmentation, due not only to thefive screens but to a feminist aesthetic, arepresent in other multi-screen work such as MikeFiggis’s Timecode (2000), but in very differentways. In addition, wandering around an artgallery is very different from sitting in a darkspace communally watching a film, or comingacross an interactive game when surfing the web,and therefore, the final form of Echo might wellhave been determined by these differences.Finally, I will look at the technical and editinginnovations deployed in Echo and show how, tech-
Digital Creativity2011, Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 263–274
ISSN 1462-6268 # 2011 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2011.622285http://www.tandfonline.com
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nically and aesthetically, we achieved an appropri-ate film language for the piece.
No medium today, and certainly no singlemedia event, seems to do its cultural work inisolation from other social and economicforces. What is new about new media comesfrom the particular ways in which they refa-shion older media and the ways in whicholder media refashion themselves to answerthe challenges of new media (Bolter andGrusin 2000, p. 15).
Remediation is the term that Bolter and Grusingive to this refashioning. They argue from thepremise that all media, whether easel paintings,written words, photographs, etc., are mediated,i.e. no medium accesses reality directly.However, new media have no intrinsic formand therefore need to redeploy the language ofprevious media in different ways. The very orig-inal argument of the book ties this ‘will to form’to two particular approaches. Firstly, all mediaaim for immediacy—a claim that they are in cog-nitive and affective ways closer to human experi-ence than other media. However, this is achievedby a dialectic between approaches whichcreate transparency effects through realism ornarrative immediacy, and those which draw atten-tion to their mediation—hypermediated forms.However, hypermediacy also creates immediacybecause, by drawing attention to the mediatednature of the form, it creates the illusion ofagency on behalf of the spectator. One historicalexample given of transparency is the invention ofthe photograph which, through technical means,gave the illusion throughout the nineteenthcentury and even into the twentieth (forexample, through the criticism of Andre Bazin(1967–1971) and Siegfried Kracauer (1960))that visual reality was not mediated, or lessmediated than other forms. An example of hyper-mediacy is the way computer interfaces such asWindows remediate different kinds of ‘windowonto the world’ but allow the user to choose mul-tiple windows. Similarly, the move from classicalnineteenth-century realism in literature and art, tomodernist reflexivity and fragmentation marks a
similar dialectic in representation (Bolter andGrusin 2000, p. 38) New media works have arepertoire of approaches refashioned from pre-vious forms in order to find their own aestheticsof expression within this paradigm.
Bolter and Grusin are critics of works of artthat have already been created. As a creator,however, my experience of the making of Echowas very different; I started with nothing andbuilt up theme and story in a formalist way. Inthis case, this meant the choice of media and theform of dramaturgy appropriate to the telling ofthe legend of Echo and Narcissus, and the refa-shioning of the legend so that it became contem-porary and relevant, i.e. immediate, both as acomment on reality (transparency) and as acomment on form (hypermediacy). Why did Ichoose Echo and Narcissus in particular, orGreek legend in general? Perhaps it is truer tosay that the story chose me:
Allegory permits digital designers to pursuevisual immediacy . . . and to deliver amessage at the same time. If digital art isabout repetition, cutting and pasting, andestablishing visual analogies among objects,allegory establishes lines of analogy betweenthe visual objects and the elements of averbal message. This technique means thatthe image . . . does not have to abandon thelogic of immediacy in order to tell its highlymediated story. Furthermore, the allegoryitself guarantees the viewer a clear and see-mingly authentic message and validates theviewing message (Bolter and Grusin 2000,p. 138).
Echo and Narcissus was a familiar story which(some of) the audience could follow easily, evenalthough the conventions of the multimedia instal-lation might be unfamiliar to them, and it alsoenabled the use of allegory to comment reflexivelyon the piece, but also on the contemporary world.As Bolter and Grusin argue, any piece cannot beindependent of social and economic forces, andthis enabled Echo to become an allegory askingthe questions of how we can overcome narcissismin a hypermediated age.
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The story, as told by Ovid, is that Echo lovesNarcissus but is unable to express that lovebecause she does not have a voice of her own. Nar-cissus is unable to hear and respond to her callbecause he is trapped within self love and hisown image. Echo is all sound; only her ‘echo’remains after her death—and Narcissus is allimage; he falls in love with his own reflection,and this seemed to me a very good basis for con-structing an installation using sound and imagein a formally innovative way. My initial thoughtswere to create an installation using slow-motionand high-definition images with Narcissus at oneend of the video space, captured in his ownimage, looking into a pool, in slow motion, andexpressing love for himself, whilst Echo at theother end echoes his call of love and opens herarms towards him. The sound world would thenbe open for the spectators’ sounds also to beechoed. In this I was influenced by the installationsin Bill Viola’s Passions (National Gallery, 2003)where Viola remediated and repurposed Renais-sance European religious paintings as impercept-ibly moving pictures, and in particular had a full-sized screen where on one side a man wasdrenched with water and on the other consumedby fire, with accompanying soundtrack (TheCrossing, 1996). I wished to place Echo on oneside of the room and Narcissus on the other side,in hyper slow motion, and have an echo chambercapturing the spectators’ voices, thus utilisingViola’s expansions of time and space. However,although the idea of Echo and Narcissus asbarely moving and repeating images speaks tothe reflexivity of gallery video work, I decidedthat the metaphor wasn’t sufficiently redolent towork in this form, and also was repeating the ear-liest tropes of video installations, rather thandeveloping them. In particular, TV Buddha (NamJune Paik 1974) rehearsed the idea of repetitionand narcissism forty years ago. This is an explora-tion of narcissism where a CCTV camera is trainedupon a sculptured Buddha who is ‘watching’ hisown image on a television in front of him. Inaddition, I didn’t have access to the same technicalspecifications and would not have been able tofilm in the super high definition and slow motion
required. Echo needed more context and a story,and I decided to use the film craft skills ofmyself and my collaborators to create a narrativepiece. The piece needed more space for the narra-tion and became a five-screen installation, withscreens surrounding the audience on all sides,where for, I believe, the first time the fivescreens create a coherent imaginary space inwhich characters interact in a number of interest-ing ways. The installation images are still centralto the piece as they show the moment of deathfor the characters. They are now used at thepoint of choice for the audience where they aregiven a ‘choice’ whether to save Echo and Narcis-sus or not.
John Adams’ Hindsight (2005), based on theOrpheus legend, also uses multi-screens displayedaround a gallery, in this case to create the effects ofOrpheus looking back to see Eurydice which ismirrored by the audience looking back across thescreens. Echo needed a similar metaphor, and sowe developed the idea of Hera and Zeus—theGods who wreak havoc on the lives of thehumans (in this case nymphs)—sitting on MountOlympus (the top screen) and in charge of TVremote controls on which they can observe lifeon earth happening on the other four screens.Thus, there is not just a remediation of televisionbut also a direct quotation from it. This enabledus also to mix Echo’s story with that of theSecond Gulf War and the traumatic effects of9/11 because the Gods switch between watchingEcho and Narcissus and watching archivefootage. For me, watching the mediated coverageof the war and not being able to effect change, Iperceived George Bush Jr, Tony Blair andSaddam Hussain as performing a distorted andtraumatised patriarchal system to oppress the‘smaller’ people they rule. The theme of narcis-sism and impotence in the face of the Gods wasthus paralleled with my own impotence byshowing the Gods watching the Second GulfWar in action.
However, it was important to the theme thatnarcissism can be overcome however difficultthis may be, and here the format of the galleryspace and expanded cinema was very important,
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because it enables a communal response, a socialresponse to the abuses of institutional power(embodied by Zeus and Hera) which create thesymptoms of hysteria and narcissism in Echoand Narcissus. Judith Butler (1997) argues thatresistance lies within the psyche, particularly inthe ‘psychic turn’ which incorporates discoursesof power within the self as the super ego, butalso changes these discourses through the resist-ance of the unconscious. From this incorporation,individual and collective agency is thus madepossible. I decided to use the idea of a proto-game, and show how Echo and Narcissus neednot die, and the audience could ‘save’ Echo andNarcissus, but the outcome would still be unpre-dictable and have the complexity of a life decisionwhere the factors are too various to determine thesolution. Thus, towards the end of Echo the audi-ence is asked to choose an ending, but theseendings are slightly unpredictable, with three vari-ations: (1) Echo and Narcissus die; (2) Narcissusfalls in love with another man, but Echo gets hervoice back to resist the Gods; and (3) Echo andNarcissus fall in love and they no longer needthe Gods, who disappear. Thus, the game elementbecame added to the multi-screen gallery format,and needed to be integrated in such a way thatthe audience knew what was required was morethan just passive spectating. This meant that thedramaturgy of the piece needed to include theaudience very early on to establish with themthat they would be called upon to act and interact.
The expanded cinema form to which Echo andHindsight belong is still very rare: it is only withthe advent of digital media and computer network-ing that it has been economically possible tosynchronise different screen outputs together,keeping the sound together with the picture.Expanded cinema and video art have traditionallyrenounced accurate picture and sound synchroni-sation to experiment with visual space, and artgalleries have generally devoted their spaces tonon-narrative forms. In addition, Echo had aninteractive element not common to either film orexpanded cinema. Thus, Echo needed to lookbeyond the frame of screen media in order tofind a suitable paradigm. Another reason for
choosing to adapt a Greek legend was that the nar-ration could tap into a rich seam of theatricalhistory and remediate devices from ancientGreece and from Elizabethan theatre.
The multi-screen geography of Echo is looselybased on Greek and Shakespearian theatre (seeFigure 1 Greek Theatre, and Figure 2 Eliza-bethan). The actors appearing on the prosceniumin Greek theatre are represented by Echo and Nar-cissus and their human world, on three screens infront of the audience. The Gods, Zeus and Hera,and the world of Mount Olympus are on a topscreen, as actors might have appeared in thegallery of the Swan Theatre. Tiresias, narratingthe story, functions in Echo as a Greek chorus,half-man, half-woman, and in a realm where seameets land, and is somewhat in the place of theorchestra but, in the installation, is placed on ascreen behind the audience so that the installationhas a feeling of a Virtual Reality Cave3 with 360-degree visual access. The advantage of this kind ofstaging is that the imaginative worlds of the Godsand humans, although they have separate spheres,feel unified through a virtual geography. Wefilmed the Gods on stage in a simple Greek stylepalace against a green screen of clouds, Tiresiasagainst a green screen of sea and rocks, and thehumans in the countryside of Merthyr Mawr, amajor dune system in South Wales, yet as multi-screens they should create the feeling of aunified world and hence a transparency effect(see Figure 3).
As the remediation of a piece of theatre ratherthan film, the interactive element of choice is farmore familiar. Popular theatre has always incor-porated aspects of audience interaction: thehissing of villains in melodramas and pantomimegoes back to the medieval passion plays, and anotable example of a more similar interaction tothe choice in Echo comes in Peter Pan (J.M.Barrie, 1904) where Tinkerbell is represented bya spotlight which will go out with her deathunless the audience ‘will’ her to live. Also, the360-dregee design of the piece, where audienceshave to look around the screens for the action,remediates elements of popular theatre wherecharacters enter from all the various entrance
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points and interact with the audience from withinthe auditorium. Thus, theatre has the dual charac-teristics of remediation: transparency—we loseourselves in the characters and the drama; andhypermediacy, where the audience are remindedof their presence.
The convergence of forms around Echo is notunusual. The digital turn has made this conver-gence of remediation possible and even necessary.Nearly every activity we now attempt is nestedwithin a digital paradigm, and it is not surprisingthat they have all converged to be remediated sim-ultaneously rather than separately. However, thiscannot be a true or absolute convergence as,according to Bolter and Grusin (2000), there isno essential language of new media. There are dis-ciplinary paradigms which do not shift as quickly
as the technology, so tools are a non-linear videoediting program dedicated to specific, not con-verged activities. For example, one cannot use anon-linear video editing machine to act as avirtual reality creator or a render farm to doaudio editing. The primary discipline determiningthe form of Echo was fiction film-making. Asworkers and collaborators on the project, wemostly came from film backgrounds, the technol-ogy we used was designed for shooting video,and the editing software designed not for installa-tion but projection on a single screen, with a flatscreen display in which we edited the film in five‘boxes’. Thus, at a hegemonic level, videodrama/film was the medium which was remediat-ing everything else (rather than, say, a gamesengine). This has disadvantages as well as advan-
Figure 1. Plan of Theatre at Epidaurus, with positions for audience and layout of orchestra, proscenium and stage.Source: Thomas G. Hines, Department of Theatre, The Ancient Theatre Archive, Whitman College, USA, 2003.2
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tages, because some of the language of classicalfilm has had to be relinquished in order to accom-plish the five-screen display, thus creating con-fusion and ambiguity, and also because thelanguage of film as we used it in Echo, has norma-tively tended to force the piece not into a five-screen expanded cinema display, but a single,split-screen work for exhibition in cinemas, festi-vals or on computer screens (see Figure 4).Indeed, my recommendation to anybodywishing to make multi-screen video dramawould be to arrange an editing system which
does mimic the multi-screen conditions of exhibi-tion, and make sure the output from any editingmachine is displayed spatially, although this wouldprobably require programming or the special devel-opment of new equipment, because our single-frontal screen did restrict the way we could editand test the installation. Nevertheless, it is in thearea of editing for five screens, and for 360-degreespace that the research of the piece has been mostfruitful, because aesthetic and technical solutionshave been sought for the difficulties which havearisen.
Figure 2. Johan de Witt. Swan Theatre. From the copy by Arend van Buchell 1596.Source: Utrecht University Library.
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The grammar of film language has now settledinto two well-known approaches: classical ‘conti-nuity’ editing and ‘montage’ editing. The continu-ity system preserves screen direction to create theillusion of a coherent narrative space and subordi-nates time and space to narrative imperatives. Itachieves this primarily through the use of shot-reverse-shot and point-of-view strategies whichorganise space and create often subtle ellipses intime in order to create a visual field governed bythe characters’ looks (their eyelines). In Echo wedeployed the use of looks in order to create the illu-sion of a coherent visual field across the fivescreens. We knew in advance that the Godswould perform in the top screen, the humans inthe middle and Tiresias in the rear screen. Whenwe were storyboarding, rehearsing and shooting,we therefore created eyelines that would createthe correct optical illusions if the humans lookedup to the Gods, or if Tiresias spoke to Hera andZeus. Where there were screens which were dark(devoid of any dramatic action), we filled themwith shots of the landscape of the Gods (clouds-capes), the humans (the countryside and dunesystem in summer) and Tiresias (seascape androcks). These were fitted in to the edit through a
kind of patchwork system, where they built up toa coherent and emotionally pregnant landscape.Thus, although our locations were verydispersed, the illusion was that they were all in‘one world’.
However, shot-reverse-shot and point-of-viewstrategies are really particular examples of amore widely held and perhaps essential part offilm—parallel action—where two actions arefilmed and then cut against each other to createnarrative, but also to control time. For example,in a filmed conversation between two people, theeditor has the choice of different reactions to cutto and can pace the conversation accordingly.Neither actor will be on screen for the entirety ofthe scene, and by cutting to and fro the editorcan leave and re-enter each of the actors’ perform-ances. In addition, the director may shoot ‘cut-aways’ which can be placed in a scene to enableediting freedom. In a multi-screen or even asplit-screen piece, this may not be possible. Forexample, a conversation taking place can only berepresented on three screens by having threecameras filming the original action (one for eachactor and one for the wide establishing shot).These would then have to be run continuously
Figure 3 Echo Digital ‘mock up’ of installation, showing staging. Designer: Ben Morson, 2009.
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throughout the scene and there would be no spacefor editing. In Echo there were such scenes, butthese were dispersed across locations, so that itwould have been impossible to film them simul-taneously with multiple cameras, and also some-times the directions governing characters’ lookscould only be determined in post-production; forexample, a God watching a human chase acrossvarious landscapes was shot before the chasewas constructed and edited together. The timingbetween takes and screens was impossible tokeep absolutely synchronised and therefore cut-aways were imperative and needed to be designedfor each screen. Because we were unable to useparallel action to control time between screens,we ended up using what I would call ‘screensa-vers’—landscapes—which mirrored the charac-ters’ feelings and were substituted for them whenthe actors were not present. For example, whenthe Gods were not actually looking down on thehuman action, we substituted shots of clouds andthe heavens for them. This technique itself feels
unique to multi-screen and is not usual filmgrammar. Closer matching between dialoguescreens could be achieved in post-productionthrough the imperceptible use of motion effects(slow motion) which enabled the illusion of char-acters acting in different scenes in synchronisa-tion. Indeed, the attempt to create continuity andtheatrical story-telling in five different screens(or on a split screen) can only be achievedthrough the digital turn and the ability of non-linear editing machines to enable users to makesophisticated decisions with immediate feedback.
Looked at through the filter of film as amedium, projects such as Echo can be seen asdefamiliarising the language of film in a straight-forwardly modernist way, using split-screen andmulti-screen to create hypermediacy, and makethe audience freshly aware of film as a language.
David Hockney has argued for a number ofyears that viewers of both still pictures and videoare bored with linear, photographic perspectiveand that multi-screen montage offers a new way
Figure 4. Echo as split-screen display, and as designed for a cinematic or online platform – reproduced by Coral Houtman (2010).
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of building of creating a more psychologicallytruthful way of looking that reflects the humaneye’s multiple points of focus and is using videofor his latest landscape pieces (2010). Jim Bizzoc-chi, in his comprehensive literature survey on thesubject, observes some filmmakers
such as Peter Greenaway and Mike Figgis usedigital capabilities to break what Greenawaycalls ‘the tyranny of the frame’ and makeexpressive use of a multi-windowed cinematicenvironment (Bizzocchi 2009, p. 2).
The multiple pictures act as montage, not as conti-nuity, creating juxtapositions with each other.Even as early as the 1920s, Sergei Eisensteintheorised these juxtapositions as: metric; rhyth-mic; tonal; overtonal; and intellectual methods ofmontage (Bordwell 1974)—not unified pieces atall, but dialectic and clashing oppositions—andthere is no doubt that split-screen and multi-screen pieces deploy these. In Echo there iscutting to music within and between screens(rhythmic montage, using the visual rhythm ofthe shots to create a composition); tonalmontage—where landscape is used on fivescreens to set a dominant tone and to create deno-tative significance—for example, the idyllicsetting in Merthyr Mawr for the human action;intellectual montage in the archive footage andits picture of human desolation and devastationcontrasted with the world of the Gods whichimplies a causal link. However, in Echo the mostexpressive form has been overtonal montage, thecinematic language of connotation, where a domi-nant scene is enacted within one screen, but theother screens mirror (or even echo) this througha form of pathetic fallacy, in the landscape shots,the screensavers. For example, in one scene, Nar-cissus breaks off a relationship with a male lover,and the scenery around him in other screensbecomes progressively more arid (it moves fromlush vegetation to dull sand and rock), and alsowhen the Gods fight, the seascapes on Tiresias’sscreen become stormy.
Modern multi-screen/split-screen piecescannot merely rely on Eisenstein’s logic ofmontage in isolation as today’s multi-screen is
actually with sound, not silence. John Belton hasargued that:
Sound lacks ‘objectivity’ (thus authenticity)not only because it is invisible but because itis an attribute and is thus incomplete initself. Sound achieves authenticity only as aconsequence of its submission to testsimposed upon it by other senses, primarily bysight (Belton 1985, p. 64).
Thus, sound needs some notion of a stable visualsource in order to guarantee its authenticity andgive it sense, and this makes a problem formontage in both single-screen and multi-screenfilms. Eisenstein’s response to sound was tomove from a montage theory to more of amusical and harmonic theory, one which wasakin the total gesamtkunstwerk of Wagneroperas. In this, Eisenstein was able to have a dia-lectic between picture and sound, in for exampleIvan the Terrible Parts I and II (Sergei Eisenstein,1944 and 1958), but this is only possible usingsingle screen. With multi-screen there are otherchoices which have to be made; in one way oranother, the sound becomes the dominantmedium because it draws the viewer’s attentionto a particular screen. In Chelsea Girls (AndyWarhol 1966), an early split-screen piece,Warhol chooses to use the sound from only onepicture and have the other picture muted, asvisual montage. Thus, he is not interested insound synchronisation and this becomes anotably modernist and fragmented technique.Whereas Multiple SIDosis (Sid Laverents 1970)takes the opposite approach, showing Sidsinging and improvising a song in multi-screento an overdubbed sound track. Thus, a soundtrackis synchronised to all picture tracks. More recently,we can see a similar range of form in digitallymade pieces. As Bizzocchi writes:
The current rebirth differs from the 60’s/70’srenaissance in that the split-screens today areused with comparatively more restraint. Theytend to act as a punctuation within a film’sbroader style, rather than as a defining motifas in the earlier period (Bizzocchi 2009, p. 2).
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These films use multi-screen to generally heightenaction sequences or show details of actions inother screens; in other words they preserve thesoundtrack as dominant. Films that use continuoussplit-screen such as Prospero’s Books (Peter Green-away 1991), whilst creating a modernist visualmontage, also generally stick to a master sound-track, either hitched to a single dominant screenor synchronised to all screens. Mike Figgis getsnearest to using sound in a freer way. In Timecode(2000) he uses a jazz paradigm to shoot four parallelscreens in real time, with parallel scenes, all lastingthe ninety minutes length of the film, and allwithout (visible) edits, and mixes fairly freelybetween the soundtracks of the four screens. Thefilm sound mixes a single soundtrack to becomemore dominant, especially when there is synchro-nised dialogue, but enables the other screens torun freely with variations on audio and connota-tions which reflect upon the ‘active’ synch soundscreen. In Echo, because the original design is fora gallery multi-screen, each of the screens has itsown soundtrack, generally synchronised to dialo-gue or music and with spot effects emanatingfrom particular screens. Atmospheres are laid forall the screens (in Dolby 5.1), again unifying theworld of the drama. The theatrical presentationthus means that when one screen (visual track)becomes dominant, then sound is needed toattract the view to the particular screen. Thismight be dialogue, but in order that the viewercan keep up with the story, a dramatically motivatedsound cue may be placed earlier. For example, if theGods become active in the top screen, thunder willannounce their entrance. Although we might havetried to create a modernist freedom from sound syn-chronisation, in practice, we ended up with thesoundtrack as dominant structural feature, and cutthe pictures accordingly, at least in the dialoguescenes. Any dialogue scene was first constructedon one or more screens, and subsequently all theother screens were cut in accordance with this.Thus, we followed neither Warhol nor Figgis increating a modernist fragmentation of meaningthrough image sound dissonance.
It might appear that Echo, by sticking to itstheatrical remediation and narrative transparency,
is aesthetically conservative. Bolter and Grusin(2000, pp. 79–84) summarise the various argu-ments held in feminism and film studies, throughLuce Irigaray and Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman,et al., to show the operation of patriarchy, and theyreinterpret this through a new media frame:
All this suggests a psychosexual interpretationof the dichotomy between transparent immedi-acy and hypermediacy. Transparent immedi-acy attempts to achieve through linearperspective a single ‘right’ representation ofthings. Linear perspective becomes thenormal and normative way of looking at theworld, while hypermediacy becomes the sumof all the unconventional, unusual, and insome ways deviant ways of looking. Hyperme-diacy is multiple and deviant in its suggestionof multiplicity – a multiplicity of viewing pos-itions and a multiplicity of relationships to theobject in view, including sexual objects. Lor-raine Gamman (1989, 12) has suggested thatthe female gaze can be distinguished from themale gaze by its multiplicity – so that it maynot be appropriate to speak of the femalegaze at all, but rather of a series of looksfrom various perspectives (Bolter and Grusin2000, p. 84).
Echo is a female-centred narrative and the heroinemanages to achieve agency in the face of patriarch.Formally, the hypermediacy of actually having tochoose to watch a particular screen (or set ofscreens) and the inability to watch all screens sim-ultaneously does place the viewer in a fragmented,more active, modernist position. In the split-screenversion, the mixture of hypermediacy and trans-parency enables them access to multiple perspec-tives. In the gallery version, the audience arefrequently sited between the looks of the charac-ters as they interact between the screens, andthus the idea of looks is deconstructed and politi-cised. The audio does help the audience to createcoherence, but there is no doubt that withoutrepeated screenings they are unable to see every-thing and this will create a kind of hysteria intheir viewing position. The patchwork editing ofthe landscape into this is very much a feminine
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aesthetic, using material in a decorative way to fitwithin the interstices of the story, and therefore theideology. The new media aspects of Echo—itsmultiscreens and interactive gay and heterosexualendings; its themes, agency and narcissism and theimportance of engaging politically and personally;the female-centred narrative; and the point of viewstructures—all put Echo firmly within a feministand radical aesthetic without the piece becomingyet another example of a male-dominated difficultmodernism.
In summary, in making Echo as a multi-screensynchronised interactive drama, we needed torework existing conventions in film languageand grammar within the form of expandedcinema. This consisted of creating:. A setting of virtual space which creates a holistic
sense of a fictional world through the use of eye-lines, synchronised sound and character inter-action between screens;
. The creation of a geographic world through theuse of landscape shots in montage on variousscreens;
. The use of slow motion and speed effects tocreate dialogue interaction between charactersin different environments on different screens;
. The use of ‘screensavers’ to stand in for charac-ters when they are not directly interacting withinscenes;
. The use of associative and connotative editingon screens in order to create an emotional paral-lel or comment on the content of scenes throughlandscape or abstract shots;
. The embedding of choice both within the story,through the choice of screen to watch, and alsothrough the interactive element and multipleendings.
These are the formal aesthetic innovations of Echoas a piece of research. It remains to be seen whetherthe piece will work as art and communication.
Notes1 The production team of Echo consists of members of
the academic staff and graduates and students at theUniversity of Wales, Newport, with myself aschief researcher and also as writer/director.
The cinematographer, Humphry Trevelyan, anddesigners, Don Parker and Leonie Sharrock, arelecturers at the school and experiencedprofessionals film-makers. Simon Davies, afreelance director and ex-student, edited the projectand I wrote and directed it.
2 The Ancient Theatre Archive is a non-profit,educational project, located at Whitman College,USA. Research and publication partially fundedthrough grants from Whitman College, The UnitedStates Institute for Theatre Technology, and TheNational Endowment for the Humanities. http://www.whitman.edu/theatre/theatretour/delphi/delphi.htm [Accessed 11/08/2011].
3 A virtual reality cave is a technical term for the 360-degree view constructed for the wearer of a virtualreality headset. Computer games rely on 360-degree space in order to create transparency fortheir users.
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Coral Houtman is a fiction film-maker and theor-ist particularly interested in integrating theory andpractice in her teaching and research. She gainedher PhD in 2003 at the University of Kent on thesubject of ‘Female Voice and Agency in FilmAdaptations’. Coral was a graduate directingstudent at the National Film and TelevisionSchool where she directed Augustine, a fortyminute costume drama which won the award forBest Film 1995 at the Houston International FilmFestival. Coral has worked for fifteen years invarious roles in the film industry, writing anddirecting films and eventually becoming aneditor of documentary and fiction. Her currentresearch areas are: theory as practice; narrativetheory; gender; psychoanalysis. She is currentlycompleting a multi-screen narrative installationentitled Echo, working with a mixture of pro-fessionals, staff and students from withinNewport Film School, University of Wales,Newport, where she is Senior Lecturer in Film.
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