Back in 2009 a small town in Sweden was getting set to open up a new store. The store didn’t have a very sizeable budget so it decided to approach Forsman & Bodenfors, a Swedish advertising agency, to help them find a way to maximise their exposure. The resulting campaign was a bit of a head turner, sparking a flurry of activity and massive exposure for both the store owner, which happened to be Ikea, and the Malmo store itself, principally via it’s store manager, Gordon Gustavsson.

This is what Forsman & Bodenfors did: They created a Facebook profile for Gordon, then over a two week period, photos of Ikea showrooms were uploaded to Gordon’s Facebook photo album. The word was then put out (not sure how, I guess on Facebook) that the first person to tag themselves to a product in the pictures, won that product.

Word spread rapidly and pretty soon people were beginning to ask for more photos to be uploaded, so that they could tag themselves to a new lamp, chair or other similarly flat-packed and fiddly-to-put-together item of affordable homeware. Before long, thousands of Swedes were speading pictures of Ikea showrooms across Facebook and not just by simply tagging themselves in a picture (which will automatically add that picture to your news feed) but also by commenting, sending links and directly promoting the campaign, off their own backs.

This is an example of a social value exchange being created. At a basic level it’s simply trading product for promotion, but in actuality, it’s a little more complex than a straight trade. Firstly, the value for the commercial enterprise lies in leveraging the potential social reach, breadth and speed, of connections being made within a social network. Secondly, the interactivity and immediacy of the medium provides the necessary platform with which to support quick-response, long-tail engagement of this kind.

The ability for people to connect to the social network from pretty much anywhere at any time, through different devices ensures a very mobilised, responsive audience. The audience gets several things in return for their efforts: They get a very believable opportunity to win something, immediately (no forms, no waiting for some prize draw), they also get the opportunity to actively choose their prize – they get some degree of control and they get novelty, which is actually quite valuable, because it creates attention. Novelty shouldn’t be underestimated: It’s an incredibly disruptive force and incites curiosity. So there are a number of different points of value intersecting or being traded here, in exchange for what is ostensibly logistics – the effort of pushing data around. But it is subtly more than just logistics, it is a recommendation engine, one that works by mobilising small cells of connections that then multiply outwards, to other cells, then eventually out onto other platforms and channels, as the frequency of repetition increases.

It’s worth noting that the ‘silent’ third partner in this relationship is the social network itself; neither party would get anything without the network’s existence and particular structure. The network implicitly benefits from the social activity it fosters, but only because it actively closes the loop between commerce and social engagement. It may be silent, but it is definitely not passive.

The value of people’s actions is multiplied in this form of social exchange. Value can get quickly inflated (or deflated) depending on how much reach or breadth is achieved. This means that the social network itself is a negotiable social market place. Social value depends on it’s ability to attract attention and elicit response. It can be flexible in a networked market place, but it is intrinsically tied to social activity. It’s about pushing stuff around. Without the social network’s system of maximising connections and spread of media formats this form of exchange would lose it’s value potential and the opportunity for creating social currency would evaporate.

Uniqlo took a similar approach this year on another social network, Twitter, with their Lucky Counter campaign. Again, this was a relatively short campaign, relying on a the potential speed of response across a broad network to inflate value. Inflation in this sense is tied to a perception of scarcity. We can only get so much in a certain amount of time. Reduce the time, increase the value.

So, Uniqlo’s Lucky Counter created value by discounting a range of goods in their online store, then trading discount codes for tweets, with every sixth tweet receiving a discount code to use on the store.

This is in effect creating an exclusive sale. So we have exclusiveness (created by chance) attached to scarcity (the window of opportunity). Exclusivity created by chance creates value by incentivising people to increase their chances by increasing their effort (more tweets) and scarcity, created through diminishing time creates value because it incentivises us to act quickly. Thus we have two value drivers that seek to tie in to the areas that are valuable to this kind of social currency exchange: speed and reach (or spread).

The value for the consumer here is the product again. But the mechanics of this don’t work quite so elegantly on Twitter as they do on Facebook. There’s a lack of ability to nuance the activity and so a very basic level of connection is afforded. This might leave people getting annoyed by the messages (spam is a devaluing by-product of social networks) and the potential for devaluing social value is greater. I guess the point is each social network is different, because of the way their different infrastructures enable social interaction.

I’ve been following Dan Robles Ingenesist Project blog, which is looking at what it terms ‘the next economic paradigm’, referring to a form of social capitalism. I retweeted one of Dan’s blog posts, which he very courteously corrected me on (I was referring to social currency, and Dan assured me we’re talking about value, not currency). Off the back of this I asked Dan if he had a model for his view of a social value exchange. He promptly published a model on his blog. I think the model is ok, but it’s in no way complete, more of an example. I’d like to see a more robust model, maybe Dan will post one? Anyway, regardless of robust models or not, I would recommend having a look at Dan’s blog. There’s a ton of interesting ideas and comparisons, even though I must confess I don’t understand all of them!

The internet has fostered a sort of conflict between storefront capitalism and not-for-profit social exchange since it’s inception as the world wide web. In a way I think it was inevitable that socialism and capitalism, two things that seem to be the yin and yang of modern society, would have to find a better way, or would be forced into a more harmonious relationship. At the moment they are a cause for conflict and confusion, but Dan Roble’s ingenesist Project is precisely the kind of thinking that needs to done in order to start seeing the building blocks, the mechanics for how such a system as Social Capitalism could work.

The impact of social interaction, inherent in the web’s ongoing resistance to aggressive free market economic forces, is something to understand as a sign that people do not wish to be reduced to mere numbers and monetary calculations. Social relationships are more complex in terms of value than a straight exchange of goods, and integrating social value into capitalism will be a many sided shape that evolves over time. I think it has the potential to have a very positive impact on our lives though.

I’ve had the pleasure of attending two transmedia (or cross-media, if you prefer) conferences this year. The first was Transmedia Hollywood, over in LA, which was hosted by the venerable Henry Jenkins. And the second was Power to the Pixel (or PttP) this week.

Both were pretty similar, with similar aims: to look at how multiple media touch points, channels and formats can be used creatively to build meaningful, participative experiences. Both focussed on storytelling, because that’s a deliberate approach to harnessing transmedia has so far been adopted mainly by entertainment brands, or brands whose products are stories.

PttP perhaps had more of a mix of fringe players on the transmedia storytelling scene, the kind of people who are busy (and importantly) innovating alternative models of distribution, such as Jamie King of VO.DO, or more accidental (or even reluctant) transmedia storytellers, such as Tommy Pallotta. For this reason, and perhaps also due to the presentation format, as opposed to the panel set up for Transmedia Hollywood, it felt a little less intense, as well as less intensely focused on a relatively narrow description of Transmedia Storytelling. That said, there were still a lot of ARGs.

A few speakers stood out. Mike Monello gave a great presentation, as you might expect, on transmedia storytelling. Lance Weiler delivered a very insightful, clear view of the approach he’s had to take in order to plan complex, transmedia properties. And Tommy Pallotta gave a heartfelt and soul baring account of his own personal journey as a creative producer, that has led him from projects such Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly to increasingly experimental, transmedia projects, most recently Collapsus.

What was clear from all of the accounts from the likes of producers, directors, creators and writers, many of whom have come from more traditional backgrounds, was the feeling that this was still a very embryonic area for creativity and storytelling. Nobody seems to know what the rules are yet. And this is even after ten or so years since the first commercial ARGs were created, e.g. The Beast.

It really is only in the last year or two that an acceptance that transmedia projects can actually be both commercially viable and drive enough engagement for brands, and that’s still only for some fairly specific entertainment franchises. In the world of advertising, the mention of transmedia in relation to consumer brands is still likely to raise an eyebrow or even a blank stare. A transmedia approach to audience engagement is still yet to find a consensus within creative agencies in terms of what that actually entails. This is why conferences like PttP are so important to help raise the profile and understanding around this evolving area of creative engagement.

One of the really fascinating keynote presentations of the day for me was Michel Reilhac’s The Game-ification of Life. Michel, who is currently Executive Director of ARTE France Cinema and Director of Film Acquisitions for ARTE France, has been involved in producing, directing and writing films since 1998. His talk wasn’t about film making though. Michel instead spoke about how games and the notion of ‘play’ have recently emerged as models to incentivise engagement, learning and social change.

Michel posited the idea that games have contaminated reality, now more so than ever. Contamination sounds a little OCD, but I think the premise of infiltration works. As if gaming is leeching into the system, below the radar. Michel went further to suggest that the ‘As if’ scenario within a fantasy game structure, is now becoming an ‘As is’ scenario in reality. By this I think he meant that the mechanisms of gaming are being folded into the real; the lived, physical world. A game structure can now be used to wrap around other things in order to make them more attractive as well become an integral form of interoperability – between ourselves and the world around us, as well as with the people we engage with.

Michel maintained that the reason games are beginning to proliferate into our daily lives is down to two factors: Social networks and geo-localisation. Both of these factors you should note are down to technology making it possible for us to connect on the move, and across multiple types of networks. So it’s about our improving ability to connect, that and the fact that games are more fun, as Michel says, than reality. Once connected, we can now have ‘fun’. We can now play.

The concept of play really resonated with me as something that is not only integral to how we learn (Michel made this point too) but also something that needs to be comprehended when considering what makes transmedia storytelling different to more traditional one to one or one to many forms of storytelling.

When stories are performed the performers have to assume fictional roles. This is play in it’s most instinctual form. And It’s something I’ve definitely noticed in my own children’s play. A story that is played is a story that also needs to be negotiated. Rules of engagement need to be agreed. This is an aspect of storytelling that doesn’t exist when we watch films, or listen to a story, but children do it all the time.

Negotiation in this sense is the negotiation of fantasy. Negotiation within a shared suspension of disbelief. As the audience tries to maximize the value of it’s involvement in the fiction, it has to support the structures that fiction relies upon and that means supporting one another. The more people who support the fiction, the richer and more valuable that shared fictional space can potentially be. So, negotiation is not only to do with role and identity but also with a shared, mutual goal. To play.

Michel Reilhac’s presentation was a great way of setting the scene for the conference and indeed he was the first keynote speaker of the day. But for me his talk was also the most prescient in terms of understanding where transmedia storytelling is different from other forms of storytelling. In it’s most basic essence, the difference is in transmedia storytelling’s ability to enable the audience to participate in the telling or creation of a story. Understanding how mass participation changes the way a story is told and, ultimately, experienced is what is still being worked out.

ARGs are undoubtedly the genre of transmedia experience that is the most refined and certainly the most tried and tested commercially, and as with Transmedia Hollywood, PttP had a natural focus on ARGs. But I found myself wishing for more diversity to be shown. ARGs feel a bit shackled to a the entertainment industry and a particular kind of experience. As a genre, it is already beginning to feel a bit arbitrary, clichéd even, to some degree. And there is much more opportunity here for the definition of what a story is to be explored. I was hoping to see more of a glimpse of what transmedia experiences could be, beyond the format of an ARG. Perhaps I was expecting too much. But I felt a little frustrated that there wasn’t more discussion around how transmedia storytelling could evolve in different ways.

For me, the debate about transmedia should be about emerging forms of storytelling and creative, participatory experiences, brought about by a greater set of opportunities to connect and respond, both to one another as well as our environments. This new set of circumstances will surely create many new definitions of what stories are as well as how we engage with them. ARGs for me are just the tip of the iceberg. A very necessary step, but still just another step in the evolution of story.

At next year’s PttP forum I certainly expect, and sincerely hope, to see new ground being broken within the ARG genre, but I also would dearly love to see more debate around (and a few more examples of) how our rapidly growing capacity to connect and participate in multiple different ways, and different places, can be creatively envisioned in numerous, different ways; of how the idea of what a story actually is can be reframed within a context of multiplicity. It’s absolutely right and necessary to have a focus on emerging genres, it’s also vitally important to continue to creatively push the exploration of what we can do in what is an ever diversifying space.

I’ve written before about our progressive move towards greater degrees of participation in the way we consume and curate media and the fact that brands will inexorably (albeit with a bit of heel-dragging) gravitate towards audience participation, as a means to engage with them; in the process relinquishing some degree of control of their own messages.

I’ve also alluded to a necessary, symbiotic relationship between fact and fiction or at least, a perceived understanding of reality and fantasy, as a means with which to make sense of our indentities within the linear trajectory of time.

This coexistence of fantasy and perceived reality enables us to idealise ourselves in quasi-fictional ways. We rely upon fantasy to augment our perceptions of reality so as to successfully project ourselves into the future and so plan for the inevitable present.

Advertising is a reality-blender; a projection device overlaying the unreal onto the real. Advertising is in fact a multiverse of semi-plausible fictions; alternate realities. The act of advertising elicits a positioning of the self within a super-reality – a half-real dimension that is at once a mirror of our own lives while at the same time an addition of things that don’t yet exist for us; an augmentation of reality. The residual superimposition creates a friction between our own sense of the present and an alternate, idealised version of that same present.

These visions are not always extraordinary, although the extraordinary and the surreal are often present. We perpetualy brush past portholes into the semi-normal, semi-mundane fictions of product-centric worlds in our regular traversing of the public spaces we inhabit. Our cityscapes are crammed with windows onto the believable, so much so perhaps that we no longer recognise the idealised vision of the hyper-normal from the normality that encases it.

These amalgams of the normal and the fantastic are, in essence, parasitic. They embed themselves into the skin of our physical environment, becoming enmeshed into the fabric of the fantasy of our lives, however mundanely, however trivial seeming, then hatch little mutations, altering the DNA of our daily fictions.

But what if we could inflect these images with their signs and symbols? What if we were able to connect and participate more with the projected fictions? Pick them up, manipulate and participate with them, bring them more to life, so to speak. Imagine a multiverse of colliding and contiguously inflating ‘unreal’ ideas.

Phantom ideas yet to be realised in the reality of our own physical world. Through a blending of our own present, experienced, real-time lives, with a fictional, narrative framework, we can create alternate realities, believable realities, that become participative semi-fictional stories, with varying degrees of immersion or opaqueness.

An old college friend of mine had an idea about doing something along these lines – blending entertainment media with consumer brands to create visions of the near-future within which to posit audience driven brand development. It was called Purefold and it was a brilliant idea.

Purefold sought to utilize several emergent forms of engagement and media production to create entertainment as well as brand engagement. Sadly, the project wasn’t completed. I don’t know all of the details but seemingly Purefold’s business model presented challenges that were deemed insurmountable for the commercial interests involved. In my opinion it may have just been a little too ahead of it’s time. Regardless of the project’s demise, I believed, and still do, in the central premise: that there is a rich, as yet untapped, space, between storytelling and brands, and audience participation is the key to linking the two.

For audiences, the value in such a proposition lies in the ability to better realise (and position themselves within) a believable fiction; a blend of the hyper-normal and the super-idealised; a kind of magic-realism. A mimesis of the physical world that is at once a dream and a window onto the prosaic and the mundane; a quasi-normality and an infinite set of augmented-realities. It is entertainment. Science fiction. Fantasy. But it is also more than just entertainment. It has practical, developmental properties and these are driven by the audience, through their participation.

It is actually only through a participative audience that brands are able to have a viable space at all within entertainment media, with which to develop their brands. I think this remains a massive opportunity both for brands and for consumers, as both can potentially walk away a lot happier.

Objects, not just egos, can be revised and reborn. Brands can be reengineered. Time can be reordered.

Science fiction has long provided the space to idealise and interpret new ways for us to live, both utopian and dystopian. Fiction itself provides the only space within which to idealise the future, however near or far that may be imagined. The present simply provides us with a testing ground for the past visions of the future. I suspect the Philip. K. Dick’s and Isaac Asimov’s of this world did not intend themselves to be latent product designers but nevertheless, science fiction has resulted in a form of product conceptualisation.

If the consumption of science fiction accidentally helps us idealise and visualise new kinds of ways to live and engage with the world we physically live in, and these visions then actually lead to real-world products, then can’t we deliberately aim to do this?

Just as Second Life saw real-world brands setting up shop and trading across the border between the physical world and a fabricated, hyper-fictional environment, participative entertainment formats could evolve that would similarly support the fictional lives of real-world brands, and the creation of new brands, where anyone can participate and help create totally new products, services, tools or applications.

If my experience of culture has proven anything to me it is that we have an insatiable desire to escape our own realities and create new ones. It also points to a fundamental psychological reliance upon fiction as a way to understand the world and our place within it. Idealisation relies upon fantasy. We could not plan for the future without fiction. Fiction is embedded into our everyday lives, in a hidden way, amongst the folds of the mundane and banal. Our brains are hardwired to be fictional. We incorporate the unreal into the real in a seamless way.

We constantly create a simulacrum – a simulation of the real – through a kind of constant, inner storytelling. But this simulacrum, something the French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal, is inflected with fiction, in order to idealise the future and place ourselves within a navigable position in the rich socio-political cultural context of human life.

Music and psychotropic drugs may have been the first real immersive forms of media, but the printed press provided the means to the first mass immersion medium. Books arguably illicit more imaginative work on our part, compared to more visual mediums, in order to realise ourselves within their fantasies, but it has been cinema that has proven the most compelling mass immersion medium.

When cinema was first shown to audiences, at the turn of the twentieth century, the film was silent and shot in black and white. Even so, the initial sight of moving celluloid were so compelling that the audiences in some cases believed them utterly real. The first publicly screened film was of a stream locomotive pulling into a station. The sight of the train coming down the tracks directly toward the audience caused mass hysteria and the audience fled their seats in terror.

The tangible immediacy of film – it’s seemingly real mimicry of the real, together with it’s effective sublimation of the audience (darkened theatres, surround sound and nothing to do but watch), means cinema manages to immerse us more completely than other fictional media consumption. I have talked before about how the way film editing techniques sample the way we subconsciously montage the world around us into sequences of images in order to create meaning – dreams being the most vivid example. This echo of our visual mentation further subsumes us into the story-worlds cinema places us in.

Technology has been fast laying the tracks upon which we can build the next seemingly-real locomotive with which to throw us out of our seats again. VR is a concept that has been around for over two decades, but the technologies required to create realities that seem as real as film are yet to be developed to such an extent that they are compelling enough for us to engage with as a mass immersive medium. I have no doubt though that this is not far off. It is the natural progression from cinema and gaming. A fully immersive story-verse. Part pre-made fiction, part reactive-fiction – where the alternate realities you are immersed in are partly reliant and determined by yours and others actions.

In lots of ways, the signs of our desire for the next stage of fictional immersion are planted all around us. AR (Augmented Reality), which has struggled to find relevancy and value in both desktop and mobile applications has still managed to ignite our imaginations and has fueled many uses of the technology. But like Virtual Reality, AR is yet to find it’s true value.

Although VR is still the holy grail for full-body immersion, AR could well become the semi-immersion of the every day. AR provides a skin of technology across our view of the world. A digital filter. It’s something that can potentially be dialed up or down to control how augmented our experience of reality is. This will surely be a largely service-oriented domain, with hyperlocal information and commercial services being plugged into the space around us. It’s the mobile capabilities of AR (and I don’t mean on mobiles, because that current use is incredibly limited) that will push forward our use of tech as a lens through which we make sense of our experiences.

Augmented reality could be seen as one step removed from full immersion, but it perhaps best describes the lowest level of immersion we can expect to inhabit in the near future. We increasingly choose to augment our lives with a film of technology.

3D cinema is also another sign of our desire to be pulled further into the realms of fiction. When Avatar was released, some newspapers reported fans getting withdrawal symptoms from the film, so real was the sense of immersion to a place deliberately created to feel like Elysium. The film was very purposefully created to make us want to escape to it. And now we have 3D TV, an altogether less immersive experience but one that demonstrates again the desire people have to augment and immerse themselves within fictional realities.

What would the future look like with increased immersion? How would the ability to immerse ourselves manifest itself culturally? Entertainment will undoubtedly continue to be the major growth area for immersive media but as I mentioned before, fantasy is integral to the understanding of things, so I expect to see immersion media being used for education as well as remote access and connectivity.

One of the oldest forms of immersive media has to be psychotropic drugs. In terms of entertainment, technology is not the only thing that continues to be developed for immersive escapism. Acid, E and more recently developed psychotropic drugs, are used in their millions. It is a mass, albeit illegal, market and it’s thriving more so today than ever before. I think that technology and drugs are going to go hand in hand in the future and can see whole new clubs being created to house very immersive, psychotropic experiences. As I write this, I feel like I sound like a cheap Ray Kurzweil clone, but I  really do think this is something that will happen. Whether this is chemically or technologically induced, or both together, is up for grabs. There’s a lot of development around

Gaming is already becoming the new cinema, the new immersion medium of choice for audiences more used to playing an active role in fictional story-verses, and this is the area that will lead development into fictional immersion. Storytelling is already developing into a participative format through gaming. Aside from console gaming, ARGs, participation dramas and particularly MMO gaming is increasingly popular and from increasingly younger audiences. These relatively new forms of multi-participation entertainment are on an evolutionary collision course with mainstream cinema immersion, and I expect to see a lot of development in more immersive forms of participative, fictional storytelling.

A greater degree of fictional immersion in our consumption of entertainment will surely also bring with it a greater blurring to our understanding of what ‘real’ is. I’m not sure that the problems will be necessarily any different to those we currently face with reality and the level to which we allow fantasy into our understanding. It will surely have a magnifying effect on those issues though.

What will constitute the real in a world of multiple, very real feeling, realities? Maybe multi-dimensional immersive realism will become our new reality, enabling us to fracture our lives in ways that free us from constraints and will usher in a new renaissance and then again, maybe it will just be a total head fuck. It will most likely be both.

The great thing about this video, of a Radiohead concert in Prague, is the feeling of being one of the audience. The not-so-near viewpoints, arms waving in and out of shot, the jumbliness of it all. It gives a greater sense of being there. It also perfectly matches the authenticity of the project, because it was initiated and produced by Radiohead fans, not Radiohead.

The video footage was entirely shot by a bunch of Radiohead fans, who made what they’d captured freely available online. Radiohead then retrospectively provided the audio track for the video.

Nice bit of open, friendly co-creation, where everyone’s happy. Would love to see more of this kind of fan-initiated collaboration happening with other artists.

Disclosure: I first heard about this here: www.psfk.com

Most people never get to see how brand engagement ideas are born. I wanted to show this process with a few images, that encapsulate the process of visualising creative thinking, or scrawling on walls, in other words. The following images are photos I’ve taken in the middle of working out creative strategy for several brand engagement projects. They don’t show you the many hours of wrangling and debating that also go into this process (maybe I’ll post a video at some point, but be warned, it will be messy), or the final outcome, but hopefully they give you a snapshot of the first green shoots are developed (this is pretty much the same for creative strategy as it is for campaign activation idea generation). It’s a bit of a jumble, but that seems fitting. Creating ideas often involves a lot of kicking around.

Storytelling surely must be embedded into our DNA. I am no neuro scientist or genome specialist (no, really), but I find the idea utterly compelling. Each moment of every minute of every hour of every day is a continuation of our own, self-told story. We understand our lives and the lives of others by continually building our feelings, ideas, impressions into a system of interconnecting narrative structures. Time is at the heart of this. Without time we would have no stories. Everything would happen at once, in one massive, amorphous rush. But because we live our lives within a construct of time, we are able to use memory to create meaning, stories.

When we give someone directions, we give them in a linear order, because that is how we travel, linearly. But our memories and impressions of our own lives, although created along the linear trajectory of time, are not recalled and used in a linear way. The stories we tell ourselves are not linear. They are non-linear and in some ways are much like a life-stream of digital communication (friendfeed, Buzz, etc). Other peoples lives intersect ours, some people frequently and repeatedly, others in more random ways. Each of those others has their own life streams, intersected by others. When we meet someone for the first time, we immediately set about placing them within the context of our own lives, our own perceptions based upon our own experiences.

Through time, we build a constantly changing story of the people we meet. We tell this story back to ourselves every time we meet them, every time we think about them. And it’s not just people, but also events, places, objects. We tell ourselves stories in order to understand the things we pick up and hold as well as the places we visit and the environements that surround us and all the time, each little story, each new or repeated encounter, adds another short story to the stream. We recall these short stories; the trip to the seaside, the walk through the city, not in a linear way. These are not stories that exist linearly, we only believe they do because we see them refracted through the construct of time. they come to us in flashes, get spliced together in new ways, to create new meaning, get recalled and reused.

When we dream, we don’t dream in a linear way. Our dreams are a montage of emotion, imagery, sense, pushed through the metaphor of language. Our fears and hopes created into a stream of memory. Memory of places, faces, sometimes colours, feelings. Sometimes it’s so chaotic so as to not be fathomable at all but usually we are able to recall a story.

At the turn of the twentieth century, film – moving film, became a new looking glass from which we could see reflected the strangeness of our own dreams: the sudden disappearances, changes of view point and location and meaning. And I mean this very deliberately, because films are only linear because of time, and are completely non-linear because of dreams. Yes, we can record a passage of time and see within it, if there are no edits, no cuts, that people, cars, bikes, clocks, the movement of the sun, these things move linearly. But we do not construct meaning linearly and we do not construct stories linearly. We create film, with edits, jumping back and forward through time and place and viewpoint. Jumping from one person to another, from one feeling to another, rapidly and abjectly; because this is precisly the way in which we create stories in our heads.

This is the same way we create stories from our own dreams, the constant flux of emotion and recalled imagery forced into meaning. And, importantly, it is not linear. Our understanding of our lives and of each other is not dependent upon linearity, but it is utterly dependent upon stories.

I while ago I was asked to give a presentation on the future of navigation interfaces. I came across these examples on my travels. eyeRobot, anyone?