Excerpts from Jessica Helfand, "New Narrative Structures for Multimedia: The Legacy of Film." Print, 49:5 (September/October 1995) 98-101.

Interactivity with the screen has been, up until very recently, primarily a consequence of seeing and responding internally--viscerally, even--to a moment observed. For over a century it has remained the role of the writer, the director and cinematographer (and on occasion, the designer) to render a moment in time through plot and character, sound, motion and emotion. Over time, as technology grew to support greater complexity in film 'making', so, too, did the experience of responding to the screen expand in its ability to elicit in us a variety of reactions: pain and laughter, fear, terror, anticipation and excitement. The public's continued love affair with the movies is a constant reminder of the enduring power of the screen as an engaging, seductive, even hypnotic medium.

As we struggle to reconcile our conflicting reactions to information overload, the dramatic--and dynamic--model of filmic storytelling offers a more compelling way to think about the power of visual narrative. From scene to sequence, montage to mise-en-scène, visual staging on the screen has a long a distiguished history. Why has this rich legacy been virtually ignored in the design and development of interactive, screen-based media?

Over the last decade, the growth of the consumer electronics market has introduced opportunities for designers ranging from on-air graphics to video games to a host of information services, requiring a skill that has come to be commonly referred to as interface design. Led (and occasionally restricted) by the technology that serves us, its visual vocabulary has emerged as a reductive pictorial syntax, an ironic casualty of late-twentieth modernism taken to an info-graphic extreme. Efforts to make complex information accessible to all have resulted in a new global language of sterile, stilted iconography: miniature hieroglyphs featuring cartoon-like facsimiles of task-driven processes, file folders and trashcans and most recently (and lamentably), emoticons. In earlier columns I have discussed what critic Andrew Olds has dubbed an "ideogrammatic mode of organization", expressing my own dissatisfaction with what I have come to refer to as the desktop legacy: the icon-driven graphical language that is, to date, the dubious aesethetic hallmark of the so-called computer age.

Today, these intransigent emblems of consumer technology offer little leeway for expressing the greater complexities introduced by dynamic, time-based media. Better to look at the narrative models suggested by screens other than the computer: most notably, the silver one.

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