Interactive Work Proposal

Title of Project:

Immemorial

Summary

This project will comprise of a CD-Rom based interactive narrative portraying and immersing the user in the concept of the fragility of memory.

Brief Synopsis

Immemorial will consider the effects of senile dementia, on both the sufferer's memories and their relationships with others. Specifically, it will focus on the set of circumstances surrounding my grandmother, Rae Moles; on her relationship with myself and others, and her downward spiral from an acutely sharp memory into disorganized thought patterns.

As such, Immemorial will rely heavily on deconstructed narrative and meaning. It will focus on the trust relationship between narrator and viewer, and on the battle to make sense of unordered narrative fragments. The various elements comprising its narrative world will also be called into question.

Major Theme and Purpose

Senile dementia is a progressive wasting of the brain cells or loss of brain function due to the hardening of arteries in the brain. There are many types of this condition, and few known causes. Rae's case stemmed from a diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease, and as a result primarily affects those areas of her brain relating to memory.

Up until the onset of the condition, Rae's life had been one of mixed emotions. She was born in England, the youngest of nine daughters. She did not get on well with most of her siblings, only ever really befriending those close to her own age. Some ancient photographs vaguely trace her younger years, through school to a career as a professional model. During the war she eventually met my grandfather Peter, a nuclear technician in the British navy. Because of the nature of his job, they were forced to move around a lot. She gave up her modeling career for the man she loved, settling down in Malta after the war. Soon she gave birth to my mother and uncle, and shortly after moved to Sydney, where she would remain for the rest of her life.

She was often impatient with her children, according to my mother, though as a grandmother she was always overly caring. Still, she retained an air of almost detached formalit, preferring me not to call her by her first name, as I did my parents. She was extremely vain and placed great importance on good manners, most likely due to her days modeling. She would often spend hours doing her make-up in the mornings, much to the dismay of my grandfather who knew he was past his prime and would whisper to me 'frankly, I don't care my boy'. She was terrified of most animals, particularly snakes and mice. In her later years she ceased visiting our house, apparently afraid of snakes in the long grass which she was not used to.

For a long time Rae struggled in a downhill battle against dementia, but slowly and inexorably the condition claimed first her short-term memory, then her emotional balance, long-term memory and ultimately her ability to function in modern society. Her once pristine home and garden began to grow less kempt as the condition built up. With the recent hospitalization and eventual death of my grandfather, she was unable to care for herself and was placed in a nursing home for sufferers of dementia.

She is still able to converse, yet conversation with others is not an easy thing for her. She jumps randomly from one wild tangent to the next, often reliving experiences that she went through over half a century ago. She is no longer able to recognize those she is talking to, rarely showing recognition to even her own daughter. Sometimes she will act as her old self for brief periods, however, leading me to wonder if her old identity is still somehow trapped, masked behind a damaged mind.

Immemorial aims to capture some of the internal struggles Rae must live with every day: loss and unreliability of memory; inability to cope with everyday life; confusion of time, reality and mind; regression to past thoughts and experiences; and even disassociation from and trust of the self.

Interactive Pathways


The diagram above depicts the transitions possible between different areas. The left side represents mind. Each small rectangle is a memory giving some distorted data in a variety of ways. Transitions between memories are possible in any direction, through a user-guided, yet inherently confusing and chaotic 3d movement. Some memories may also contain pathways to reality, emerging at a point that holds some bearing on the memory.

The right side corresponds to Rae's world as it is today, represented again through a 3d environment, yet this time in a way modeled as exactingly as possible on reality. This area will take the form of a nursing home, containing people, objects and rooms which can be walked to and interacted with in any order. Pathways will stem back to various memories, from objects or people which may trigger those memories.

Narrative World

The underlying goal of Immemorial is to cause the user to take on characteristics of someone suffering from senile dementia, and to hence further an understanding of the disease. That is to say, the user aims to make sense of chaotic memories, following a path of their choosing between memories, entities in reality, and from memory to reality. Having unrestricted movement between these areas will cause the user to build up a web of meaning, following paths that they believe to be logical. In creating their own narrative path the user takes on some of the burden of the storyteller, which in turn forces them to consider the difficulties with telling this particular story. They must encourage and help Rae narrate the story of her life.

It is important that the project begin with the user being thrown unwittingly into a random memory. There is no explanation offered, no clue as to what it may all be about. They must navigate their way between reality and memory, gradually building up a picture of what the story is all about. They will at first have no idea what persona they have been offered, and must very slowly work out what that is. They could either be acting as Rae, trying to make sense of their tangled mind, or merely observing, trying to work out the story of her life. At different times they will be acting as combinations of these two.

The relationship between the user and the way in which data is presented to them is very significant. The assumed fact that the user has a normal mind, whilst possibly problematic, actually lends another level of meaning to the project. In the reality section, the user is able to direct Rae's movement. They are aware of their surroundings, but is Rae? This links back to the symptom of occasional moments of clarity, as if the intact persona is still present in some form.

Both narration in the mind and in reality aims to be unordered, chaotic and deconstructed, but in different ways. The deconstructed memories in the mind will be confused by their tenuous link to others, arranged arbitrarily in 3d space. It is up to the user to forge their own pathways between memories, and so these pathways chosen by the user will more often than not cause greater confusion, mirroring the disorganized thought patterns of a dementia sufferer. The temporal relationship of story fragments is broken, to make sense of them the user must also journey to reality- a distorted memory of a wedding may bring the user back into reality staring at a photo of a bride's dress, thus making sense of it. In reverse, an apparently meaningless piece of furniture may link back to a memory of a house or visiting an old friend.

The world of Rae's reality will be as exact a model of her nursing home as possible. The user will be comfortable moving about, and will be able to quickly ascertain the locations of and narrative relationships between different entities. However, there will still be an element of unpredictability present. Engaging characters in conversation will yield confusing results, hinting that the characters remember previous events that the user does not. Users turning around to again view an object just looked at, may find it moved or replaced with another. This unpredictability will give a feeling of insecurity, the user again taking on the persona of a dementia sufferer unable to remember these simple things.

Throughout the project, it should be noted that the very essence of Immemorial is the fragility and unreliability of memory. Indeed, the title is strongly sarcastic and suggests that what is depicted may not have actually taken place. As the user moves throughout the narrative world, their trust of what they are being shown will fluctuate. Since they are really viewing the memories of a narrator / character, apparent discrepancies in motion, image, voice and text will lead to distrust of the memories, and of the narrator. For example, voiceover and image may carry opposing meanings. Distrust of the narrator equates to distrust in Rae, yet at times the user must act as Rae. Hence the user comes to distrust them self, mimicking symptoms of senile dementia.

Interface Design

As already stated, the interface will consist of two main areas, those of mind and reality. The appearance of the mind navigation, that navigation used to move between memories, will be on the surface a chaotic web of white lines on a black background, symbolizing the hardening arteries in the brain. At various points within this 3d web will be small systems of white lines like nerve clusters, always oriented towards the camera. These clusters will roughly approximate the visual element of a memory, which can be accessed by clicking on them.

The user can navigate freely in any direction, using the mouse to move, and holding down the mouse button to rotate the camera. This in itself presents a challenge, for the user must gradually map out this space in their mind, in order to try and work out where they have been, and in what direction they are heading. A fog effect will stop the user seeing too far, and if they stray to the edge of the network they will simply be unknowingly moved to the other side.

Whenever the user is moving within the artery navigation, incoherent, out of context snippets of speech will come about at random intervals, and graphic images of geometric tangents will flash up in the background. This serves to remind the user that what they are doing is unordered, and that this method of navigation gives them absolute control over the way they form their narrative, both with the order and level of connections they make. It also builds up the fact that there is a story present, but it is coming in tangential snippets that carry no meaning by themselves.

When a memory is clicked on, the camera will zoom until it exactly fills the screen. The network of white lines will fade, and the nerve cluster will transform into the visual content of the memory. If the user wishes to leave the memory and go back to the navigational web of arteries, they simply move the mouse cursor to the edge of the screen. This will transform the visual content into a semi-abstracted midpoint between the nerve cluster and the image.



Clicking will then fade out all audio and visual traces of the memory and return the navigational web.

The memories themselves will contain varying levels of interaction. Some will be passive and feature only voice, whilst others will contain animated sections and elements the user is required to interact with. Clicking certain parts of these memories will fade into a view of the counterpart element in the reality section.

The navigation used in the reality section will be reasonably easy to deal with by comparison. Like a standard first-person shooter, the user will be confined to movement by mouse and keyboard along a single plane, making navigation much less confusing. Clicking on certain objects or characters will spawn interactions, or fade back into corresponding memories.

Media and Technology Used

The artery navigational web will be constructed as a director 3d scene. Photographs from Rae's life will play an important part. They will be integrated into the navigational web by tracing them as line drawings and mapping them as transparencies onto flat rectangular polygons programmed to face the camera. Using the director engine will maximize compatibility and speed with most computer platforms.

Director 3d will also be used for the reality section, creating a first-person scene using collision detection. Models of the characters will be based on actual photos, using photographic textures, and animated and programmed to move about unpredictably. The nursing home will be modeled as closely as possible to its real-life counterpart. Objects such as paintings and photographs will again take their visuals from actual scanned images, the aim being to recreate the look and feel of a real location.

The memories themselves are 2-dimensional in nature. They will feature simple mouse commands and navigation and as such will not require a good deal of programming. Important objects and people from her life will play a crucial role in these memories, as well as her surroundings. Quaint old antiques from a bygone era, like my grandfather's ceremonial sword which once hung over the dinner table, will take on altered forms. They will be animated and altered startlingly to convey discrepancies in her memories, or softened and held motionless to show the timelessness of others. These techniques will also be used for depicting events, such as marriage or moving house. More contemporary objects from her life will be given a different treatment, shown very simply and literally in the reality section.

People from her life will exist as characters in demented form in her memories, however in reality they will exist with proper physical representation. Though the words they speak will be out of context and somewhat nonsensical, they will still offer pieces of memory, perhaps in a more real sense than the memories in Rae's mind. This will cause the user to begin to draw correlations between the character in reality and the character in memory. It will also, more importantly, ask them to make a choice: do they trust Rae's memories, or do they trust these outside influences? Perhaps the characters in reality are conveying a more realistic representation of Rae's life than her memories. This conflict also perhaps gives the user a picture of what Rae has lost from her memory.

Rationale

Immemorial is aimed at anyone willing to think deeply about ideas presented to them. It aims to give a better understanding of the condition of senile dementia, especially what it might be like to suffer from it. It challenges new media and technology to integrate modern computer-generated graphics smoothly with long-standing video, audio and imagery. It tests the programming techniques of 3d immersive worlds to deliver a rarely (if ever) attempted scenario of unpredictability in a concrete world.

Realizing the project in 3d, rather than simple 2d, benefits interactivity greatly. It asks the user to direct themselves explicitly around a world, rather than simply clicking and waiting to be transported to the next area. It has the effect of truly placing the user inside the narrative world.

Immemorial will beg the question, 'Can living in an unpredictable memory be better than living in the real world?' After all, an unpredictable mind begets an unpredictable reality.