By Ali Rahman, Seb Speier & Darren Ortiz
(Unfinished) 2004
Until the computer age, narrative form has always been the standard for communicating and sharing knowledge and ideas. Facts were imparted in the form of a storyline complete with characters, climax, and a moral. Now, we are having to become accustomed to a new form of storytelling…the database.
The storyline is non-existent in a database driven world. Information is presented in a non-linear format where one bit/byte of info bears no more significance than another. The database and narrative formats are forced to live together in our world yet are in direct juxtaposition with each other.
Nonversations seeks to address the opposition between database and narrative, in the context of the electronic age. It does this by directly challenging the concept that a story/information cannot be told in both a database and a narrative format at the same time. Nonversations is a storyline complete with characters, plot, subplots, etc… yet is presented in a non-linear database format.
Our story is set in an apartment complex, inhabited by the various archetypal characters. Each character has been written with their own individual back-stories, and each into a larger unspoken narrative.
The form of the videos is designed to reflect the scattered and fragmented nature of the postmodern experience. They deliberately distort traditional perceptions of time, identity, and interaction. They abstract the experience of the characters until they turn into nothing but scattered, dichotomized data bits. These characters hardly know themselves let alone each other. They don’t really care about each other, they couldn’t really give a damn about what the other is saying. They aren’t really having conversations, they’re having “nonversations”.
Note: Nonversations was never finished. Many interactions are inactive. That said, it was a tremendous endeavor. Writing a non-linear script required two hundred pages of notes alone. Execution of the project with a two week timeline taught us a great deal about logistics, casting and pre-production.