Immanent Story Worlds: The Making of Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man: A Hollywood Fable

Abstract

Coyne’s critique of the rationalist modernist perspective in information technology proposes the relevance of a postmodernist perspective, drawing on Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysical and logocentrism (Coyne 1995: 102–104). Derrida’s contemporaries Deleuze and Lyotard also sought to deconstruct the metaphysical as the undeclared totalising principle of liberal humanism; Deleuze via establishing the dichotomy of the transcendental and immanence in his critique of the Cartesian subject-event relationship (Deleuze 2014: 203), and Lyotard in his discussion of narrative and scientific knowledge generation (Lyotard 1984). Twenty years after Coyne’s critique, the postmodernist perspective on information technologies is still not fully established in the design and analysis of human-computer interaction, although media theorists in the interim period, e.g. Hayles (2002) and Galloway (2004), have addressed the subject in their critique of the totalising influence present within both cyber-Romanticism and distributed network protocols, respectively. In the interest of furthering a postmodern (or even post-digital) approach to the design of interactive storyworlds, this study aims to identify principles that counter or disable the facilitation of transcendental (totalising) structures and support an immanent subject-event relationship through analysis of the work of theatre company Punchdrunk, pioneers of immersive theatre as interactive systems in physical space. The enquiry was formed around an analysis of the conditions of making and experiencing storyworlds during and after the build and run of The Drowned Man (beginning in spring 2012 and finishing in the autumn of 2014), with part of the research occurring as a participant study within the design team, complemented with semi-structured interviews with members of the company (‘Com’) and audience (‘Aud’) participants. The objective of the research was to gather observational data from the making of and participation in live Punchdrunk productions. Further data was gathered on social media, followed by analyses of lay reviews on TripAdvisor and the Punchdrunk fandom discourses on Facebook and Tumblr. The concluding section of this chapter proposes three features of Punchdrunk’s work that are key to immanence and can be implemented in digital interaction design, and applies the conclusion to the reported outcomes of Punchdrunk’s digital R&D project with MIT (Digital R&D Fund For the Arts 2012).