Of old, narrative and storytelling were used to weave useful pieces of information into stories that could be handed down orally, generation after generation. These stories were often conceived in the form of quests, rhythmically built on redundancy and interlacement and laid out on a map.
In the past hundred years, storytelling has progressively distanced itself from this model: mechanical reproduction of music, images, movement, and text has transformed the language of communication across these media and channels, turning seamless immersion into self-conscious reflection, physical struggles into psychological tensions, and traveling the world into traveling emotional landscapes.
Organizing space to represent or visualize experiences is a fundamental human trait, so, in what is both a predictable but unexpected turn of events, the Web, mobile, and digital media have brought once again spatial thinking, journeys, and quests center stage. Navigable space can both represent physical spaces and the abstract information spaces of Facebook or Uber, but what kind of space are we talking about? Some 21st century version of MS Bob? Some glorified FPS?
Using such examples as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, camp musical videos from the early 1980s, early 1990s videogames, and Hollywood movies, this talk argues that as digital and physical blend into unstable cross-channel experiences our conceptualizations shift towards direct manipulation and understanding of abstract navigational and place-making grammars, rather than towards literal, skeumorphic representations of the real.