Junction of Image, Text, and Sound in Net.fictions
Since modernism, the experimental art has been filled with the flow of “intermedial turn“, projected in/through all its forms and has found one of its ”stations“ in the form of digital fictions. The subject of my attention lies in the research and analysis of the multimedial fictions on internet through the junction of image, text and sound into the communicative unit. I implement the narratological point of view, and perceive these works of art also from the prism of their reception and subsequent reader’s projection of the fictional world, which could result in her immersion in it.
After the initial “insight” into the theories concerning receptivity of net-fictions (focusing mainly on the reader’s emotional response – D. S. Miall, K. Walton, V. Zuska, N. Carroll), theory of fictional worlds (mostly Marie-Laure Ryan´s understanding of fictional worlds and her concept of immersion), and the notion of multisensory reading (M. Back, A. Mangen), I proceed to hermeneutical practice, and thus the analysis of net-fiction Playground from the Dreaming Methods project of Andy Campbell. The interpretation processes the already mentioned theoretical approaches, and follows through with G. Genette´s narrative discourse and P. Ricoeur’s concept of time in narrative.
Playground is built on the combination of textual fragmented narration of autodiegetic heterodiegetic narrator, and the internal focalization of the young boy. The focalization functions on two levels, the first one is the focalization in the text, the other one is the focalization displayed by the audio-visual part. The audio-visual unit functions as the “reification” of boy’s perspective on the scale of sensory inputs and the motives of his ideas. The fiction’s multimedial element thus cannot be regarded only in the terms of the aesthetic complementation of the textual narration. Fiction’s multimediality is a possible means of presenting character’s world, considering both - his perception and his cognition.
