Between Real and Digital: New Forms of Narration in Space
Abstract
The “locative turn” of digital communication has made the idea of “extractability” more and more up to date: for Henry Jenkins it was related to the idea that the fans would take aspects of the story with them in order to bring them back and reuse them into the spaces of their everyday life (for example from playgrounds to merchandising). The new possibilities given by locative media, augmented reality technologies, etc., lead to an increasing interaction between digital worldbuilding and everyday experience and even to an actual overlapping of real and fictional spaces, in a perspective that places the performance of the public at the centre. The subject of this article is the so-called Location-Based Storytelling (or Site-specific Mobile Storytelling), a kind of interactive narrative experience based on applications that require the user to physically move in a space in order to reveal narrative fragments through the use of mobile devices. Here, in their figurative concreteness, the spaces themselves become platforms for the development of narratives which, through digital media stories, are inscribed within the places. The recipient interacts with them not only mentally, but also physically, as a body within a space that is already narrativized and set up as a narrative environment. The article proposes a first semiotic ref lection focusing particularly on three issues: first, the opportunities and constraints that similar projects offer about narrative construction; secondly, the relationship between the new practices allowed (and even stimulated) by digital installations and rental technologies and the more general (and much debated) question of urban spatial practices. Finally, the nature of the relationship between the “real” and the digital world: speaking of augmented reality requires in fact to specify its relationship with the “real” world, not so much ontologically but rather in semiotic terms in relation, therefore, with the construction of meaning.
