Catalogue

The idea behind five story building was to explore narrative within a 3D space and within the confines of the animated GIF format. This file format enables you to create small repeating animations on the internet and thus it sets up several rules which affect the kinds of narratives that can be told. Within these restrictions we wanted to add the restrictions of our own practice which involves using text within a 3D environment as a way of generating new meaning from the placement and animation of that text within virtual space.

As we were approaching narrative from a structural perspective we looked at work that had been done to break down narrative into structural elements to see if this applied to the work that we were trying to create. Within this research we came across the work that Vladimir Propp had done around the structure of Russian folk tales. This work showed us a way that narrative could be defined by structural elements, and thus - inversely - narratives could be built and retold from within a regime of forced structure.

Each of the five pieces in the gallery attempt to discover something different about narrative, whether they are retellings of eternal narratives or comments on the internal workings of narrative devices. The thing that unifies them all, however, is the circular nature of the repeating animated GIF, which serves to reinforce the perpetual and eternal nature of all the stories that are told, retold and lived out every day.

Other pages in the catalogue can be viewed by clicking on the catalogue buttons of the individual pieces.