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The pacing of the sale seemed very slow- this may have been a symptom of the sideways scrolling - the lack of panel closure. .... one thing i did miss with this was the ability to flip through the book, scanning the narrative in a non-sequential manner to see if there was something that the narrativew was building to...
See, now this is very interesting to me. WHEN I AM KING requires a certain level of trust from the audience, and we're no longer used to that.
Because of its click-through format, WHEN I AM KING is a temporal experience, like a film or a play, rather than a spatial experience like a sculpture or a painting. Print media are a hybrid--a physical object that is experienced over time--and can be scrambled, taken out of sequence.
With the advent of home video and DVD, film (which had previously been a strictly temporal medium, unfolding over a set period of time) became plastic, malleable: you can shorten a film with the fast-forward button, or stretch it out by rewinding scenes, or scramble the order with the DVD's chapter function.
The sheer availability of (text) information about films have made the expoerience of watching a film less of a surrender. Time was that you could conceivably go to a movie or a play and not know what it was about, that you would have to figure it out as you went along. Now, though, when I go to the theater or see a film, I pretty much know what to expect: it's unavoidable.
WHEN I AM KING, though, unfolds as it does over time--with no hype, with no preordained conclusions, with no preconceived notions--and requires the viewer to surrender hir need to control the experience, and just let it happen.
That is very rare in a media experience these days. That it takes place in the very channel that has made information on other media so unavoidably ubiquitous I find a tasty irony. |
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