Tuesday, November 18, 2008

Interactive Essay

Ever since I brought up the idea of an interactive essay in class I have been thinking of ways to make it work. Seriously, for some reason I have become really excited to work on this thing. My essay will start out on the broad topic of technology and then break off into two choices so far (biology, narrative). From Narrative it will break into one of two example narratives (narratives in music, written narratives) and at this level you will be able to choose from two narratives(the odyssey, house of leaves). Then it is basically on to some sort of discussion about concept albums and how they relate to narratives and technology depending on which choices you make. The prospective concept albums thus far include:[Poe:haunted, King Diamond:them, conspiracy (both make up a larger story), Ahab:call of the wretched sea, Mastadon:leviathon, Dimmu Borgir:in sorte diaboli, and my most important one (which is actually a 24 minute song and not a full concept album) Symphony X"the odyssey")]. I have actually thought a lot about this and have a fairly comprehensive decision tree (that grows with every good idea).

2 comments:

Nick said...

Revised Project Proposal:
I will be writing an interactive essay for my final project. The ultimate topic will vary with user input and will start with the broad topic of Technology and how it relates to the other choices (so far, the same as stated in the original post). The final project will most likely be in Adobe PDF format (because it is easy to choose "page __") or something similar.

Adam Johns said...

I actually don't have much to say at this point. I think the idea is great, and I think that pulling it off won't be trivial, so the important thing to do (since you have the decision tree already, especially) is leap in and start the actual writing so you can see how it turns out. The decision tree looked good, interesting, and (since it's an interactive essay, not an interactive story), pretty complicated.

My only other comment is that you shouldn't hesitate to prune the decision tree down a little bit as you proceed - you might find that you're doing lots of work to make even a very short decision tree actually *function* as an interactive essay.

I'm looking forward to it.