FilmsFolded

Edited on 4 May 2012 for minor readability improvements.

This collection of essays reports on a project that is one of several diverseprojects. Together, these projects are an attempt at modeling human cognitive processes. The goal is to model the dynamic structures we apparently use in our minds, and use them to understand and build cognitive systems. Within that larger study is this study of narrative in film, because we think film exposes these dynamics.

Long form movies are our modern literature, the slate on which we write our shared cultural narratives and the blackboard where we experiment with concepts. We believe that if you want to understand the human mind, and especially the collaborative human mind, you need to look at the central intelligent art. Right now, that is movies.

Of particular interest to me is the fact that the narrative structures of most films have several meta-levels of variety and richness not found elsewhere — not in the past, other media or parallel social institutions. While the ‘social networking’ phenomenon currently is getting attention, it lacks the depth of engagement. Indeed, much of what it has is borrowed from films.

Film is vital; its expressive grammars are evolving quickly, both in the structure of narrative forms and in the cinematic vocabulary used to convey them. If just for this reason, films are worth looking at for the way we reach for rich contact; the story of how storytelling is changing is just too engaging to ignore.

And there are so many interesting films!

The study itself is fairly simple: to empirically observe how we engage in complex narrative dynamics in film. The only novelty we bring is the nature of the abstractions used; in this work we think of films as machines (or organisms) made of moving parts consisting of causal agents.

Agents include characters of course, and plot points, but extend to any identifiable element or even quality. Of particular interest are cinematic devices like camera stance and frame; also what we call folded devices like irony and self-reference.

These causal agents pull from one or more worlds in the story, worlds outside the story and perhaps inhabited by the viewers and mixes (or ‘folds’) of these worlds.

Many familiar elements take on new colors when modeled with this set of abstractions.

The core of what we have here is a simple bottom up study where certain principles are observed in films, modeled and presented. Some sections here consist of essays on dynamics of the model. In another section on this site (Link to Tool Section) are more technical perspectives on implementing the abstractions as an intelligent system, and on building user interface grammars (Link to Kutachi Section).