VENDING MACHINES, PUNISHMENT POLLS, DATABASE AESTHETICS: THE TECHNOCULTURAL LEGACY OF INTERACTIVE CINEMA By MARINA HASSAPOPOULOU A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2013 1 © 2013 Marina Hassapopoulou 2 To my family and committee members 3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Chair of the project, Terry Harpold, for his support and guidance. I would also like to thank the rest of the committee members, Barbara Mennel, Roger Beebe, and Jack Stenner, for their helpful feedback and suggestions for revision. Finally, I would like to thank the English department for its ongoing support for research and travel funding. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. 4 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ............................................................................................. 7 ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 1 INTERACTIVE CINEMA: EXPANDING THE FIELD OF FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES ................................................................................................................ 10 Introduction: Project Overview and Contextualization ............................................. 10 Interactive Cinema as Productive Liminality ........................................................... 13 Is there an “I” in Interactive? ................................................................................... 19 The Many Meanings of Interactivity ........................................................................ 32 IC Historiography, Archives, and Ephemera ........................................................... 37 2 INTERACTIVE CINEMA FROM VENDING MACHINE TO DATABASE ................. 48 Introduction: Pre-digital Interactivity and Digital Studies ......................................... 48 Transnational or Non-historicized? Hypercontextual Film Analysis ........................ 49 Kinoautomat as Case Study for Hybrid Analytical Frameworks .............................. 62 Kinoautomat: Remediated Reading(s) .................................................................... 70 From Kinoautomat to Digital Repository? An Applied Study of Media Excavation .. 83 3 PARTICIPATORY INTERACTIVITY, ISOLATIONIST CONNECTIVITY, AND SOFTWARE CINEMA ............................................................................................. 94 Introduction: Interactivity and Participatory Culture ................................................. 94 Interactive Fan Practices and Participatory Culture Theories ............................... 106 Face to (Inter)face: Algorithmic Authorship and Generative Cinema .................... 116 Code as Creative Design and Narrative Generator .............................................. 119 Reorienting and Remixing Reception Modes ........................................................ 125 Data-Subjectivity and Posthuman Awareness ...................................................... 129 Generative Cinema as Distant Viewing?............................................................... 138 4 AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION, COLLECTIVE AUTHORSHIP, AND PSYCHE- GENERATED CINEMA ......................................................................................... 140 Introduction ........................................................................................................... 140 “Now Prepare to Fawk up Someone Else’s Life”:Responsibility, Behavioral (mis)Identification, and Dissociation .................................................................. 148 The Collective Consciousness: Public Interaction and Conformist Behavior ........ 155 5 History is in Your Hands: Terminal Time as Collective and Subjective Historiography ................................................................................................... 165 Watch What You Wish For: The Interactive Psyche ............................................. 173 5 DIDACTIC INTERACTIVITY AND SUBVERSIVE FANTASY ............................... 181 Crime and (Virtual) Punishment: Sociopedagogical Interactivity ........................... 181 Extreme Interactivity: Stockholm and the Ethics of Play ....................................... 192 Mimetic Interactions and Virtual Reactions ........................................................... 197 Postscript .............................................................................................................. 207 LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................................................. 210 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .......................................................................................... 225 6 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS IC Interactive cinema TLC Tender Loving Care (David Wheeler, 1998) TWU The Weathered Underground (David N. Donihue, 2010) 7 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy VENDING MACHINES, PUNISHMENT POLLS, DATABASE AESTHETICS: THE TECHNOCULTURAL LEGACY OF INTERACTIVE CINEMA By Marina Hassapopoulou August 2013 Chair: Terry Harpold Major: English This project proposes new ways of interrogating the largely unexplored terrain of interactive cinema (IC), and identifies their place in the development of cinema and media culture at large by analyzing their varying reception contexts. These new frameworks are particularly effective for analyzing IC’s hybrid and liminal modes of spectatorship, and for rethinking the role of film narrative in contexts of national economies, transcultural exchange, and globalization. Interactive media attempt to empower their consumer by promising more creative control; by contextualizing major genres of IC, I expose how this democratizing fantasy is deeply rooted in contemporary sociopolitical responses to media. I also explore how IC’s reception practices reflect the spirit of collaboration as well as the (paradoxical) individualism and exclusionary politics of contemporary media culture, which I compare to related media behaviors such as crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, groupthink, and taboo role-playing. My subsequent analysis of the ways in which IC attempts to train and reorient viewer behavior offers insight into the pedagogical potential of interactivity, especially through extreme examples that test the boundaries of both interactivity and representational images. 8 While concepts of interactivity are generally bound to mythologies characterized by rhetoric of empowerment and/or user manipulation, I focus on historically, socially, and politically specific sub discourses associated with interactivity. These particularities enable me to approach interactivity as more than a technologically oriented phenomenon, and–significantly–to understand it outside of the developmental path that leads to (and typically ends with) digital media. The close analysis of site-specific installation work and performance-oriented cinema raises crucial questions about the marginalization of certain aspects of the piece, historical determinism, and the lack of emphasis on heterogeneous viewer responses. Ultimately, I find that my own process of rediscovering and contextualizing ephemeral interactive media makes a powerful case for considering the inherently political nature of film preservation and restoration, and for regarding the practices of archiving and digitization (creating digital versions of older media) as cultural processes that produce and codify cinematic heritage. 9 CHAPTER 1 INTERACTIVE CINEMA: EXPANDING THE FIELD OF FILM AND MEDIA STUDIES Introduction: Project Overview and Contextualization “A unique cinematic experience,” “a breakthrough,” “not just a movie,” “cinema with a twist,” and the now clichéd “the first interactive film ever.” These are catchphrases commonly used to promote the novelty of the media hybrid interactive cinema (IC). Despite significant differences with regard to when they have been released (mid-20th century up to the present), production and marketing (big budget, avant-garde, B-picture), and the media involved (celluloid, video, digital formats, theater, and more), interactive films make use of diverse strategies to differentiate their performances from other kinds of viewing experiences. Interactive films attempt to incorporate the audience into their execution by integrating elements such as live performance, audience voting, and motion sensors to create a participatory multimedia experience. Such practices are evident in IC endeavors ranging from: experimental works (such as Radúz Činčera’s Kinoautomat, 1967, which incorporates audience voting to generate a choose-your-own-adventure narrative), to Expanded Cinema (Roman Kroitor’s Labyrinth, 1967, featuring a traversable architectural space for viewers to walk through), to art installations (Lynn Hershman’s Lorna, 1979-83, which lets visitors interact with media to uncover the story of an agoraphobic woman), to popular commercial movies (William Castle’s Mr. Sardonicus, 1961, featuring a punishment poll that decides the villain’s fate at the film’s end). IC is a notably productive area of inquiry for contemporary film and media studies that has not yet been explored in depth. It has the potential to not only generate new ways of thinking