STUDIA GENERALIA Visiting Lecture
"The 2D to 4D of Oz - The Power of Moving Image Narration"
by Maureen Thomas

An interesting public lecture as a part of Thomas' workshop "Logics, Grammars and Rhetorics: solid structures, clear communication and engaging expression" for the Interactive Audiovisual Narrative (IAN) focus area in the Media Lab.

Maureen Thomas - a writer, dramatist and director for stage, radio, film and interactive media - is Creative Director of the Cambridge University Moving Image Studio (CUMIS), Senior Creative Research Fellow at the Narrativity Studio, Interactive Institute, Sweden; and Associate Professor in Interactivity and Narrativity at the Norwegian Film School. From 1993-1998 she was Head of Screen Studies at the National Film & Television School, UK.

Maureen conceived, wrote, developed and directed the interactive digital video hypermovie Vala, which involves interactors directly, theatrically and actively in a narrative game of chance, destiny and time-travel. (First demo prototype Nedslag, Fylkingen Centre for New Music and InterMedia Art, Stockholm (May 2000); full-length demo prototype Electrohype, Malmš, Sweden and Rencontres Electroniques, Rennes, France (October 2000); full interactive prototype Arts Picturehouse Cinema Cambridge International Film Festival UK (July 2001), Nordic Interactive Expo, Copenhagen, Denmark (October 2001), PDC Art/Work Exhibition, Malmš, Sweden (June 2002). Shortlisted for BAFTA Interactive Arts Award (Sept 2001).

Press (Svenska Dagbladet): 'Ten years. That's how long it has taken for the belief of enthusiastic American literary theorists in the artistic potential of digital media to come to fruition in practice. 'Vala' realises dreams of a fusion between computer and art - I have never seen anything like it. I felt for the first time that I was personally being addressed by a digital performance (managed by a computer) - as though by a living being. Vala is truly engaging.' (Helsingin Sanomat): 'I cannot remember encountering such profound and harmonious multimedia before .. Through music and moving images, rather than following what happens to someone else, I have myself become the protagonist in an interactive movie . .'

Other recent work includes Goodbye 13, (feature film-script) dir. Sirin Eide (LUCAS Award for Best Film, Frankfurt International Festival, 1996, and Best Film Award, Antwerp International Film Festival, 1997); Iceworld (Wall to Wall TV/Discovery/Channel 4 TV drama/documentary Spring 2002) (research, language invention & direction of actors); Neanderthal (research, language invention & direction of actors) (Wall to Wall drama/documantary dir.Tony Mitchell, C4 2000); Lombroso (libretto) in About Face (composer Rachel Leach, commissioned Royal Opera House Covent Garden Linbury Studio, premiered June 2000) and Alice Through the Looking Glass (based on Lewis Carroll's book - co-librettist and director, with composer Stephen Daltry, Chapter & Verse, British Library London, July 2000; New End Theatre, London, Christmas Season 2000/1). Music theatre commissions include Zuppa Inglese (story & librettist, commissioned Pimlico Opera, composer Daryl Runswick, London/Oxford/Leicester 1993) and Taking the Air, or Bright Sparks (young people's rock opera, story & librettist - composer Daryl Runswick, commissioned Western Arts, Bristol 1989).

Maureen's writing for Radio includes The Wisewoman Speaks (BBC Radio 3, producer Piers Plowright, 1987), a poetic drama inspired by the Viking age poem Voluspaa (Song of the Seeress), dramatic verse she first explored creatively at a multilingual movement/theatre workshop on Myth as Drama, which she led at the Nordic Drama Festival in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1986, and which also provides the starting point for her hypermovie, Vala. Maureen directed a live performance of The Wisewoman Speaks at the Royal Festival Hall, London, in 1987. Her related article, 'Women's Voice in Old Norse Storytelling', discussing issues of authorship, including that of the poem Voluspaa (on which The Wisewoman Speaks is based), appeared (in Icelandic) in Skirnir (Reykjavik, Spring 1987). Maureen's other work for radio includes scripting and presenting Tristan & Isolde (BBC Radio Belfast drama feature prod. Peter Brooke, 1984. 'The Briar and the Rose - Tristan goes North', her discussion of the transmission of the story of Tristan and Isolde through mediaeval Europe in oral and manuscript form, was published in Arthurian Literature 3, 1983 (D.S. Brewer Barnes & Noble, ISBN 0 85991 149 7, 53-91). The first cinema feature whose script Maureen worked on, with Icelandic Director Agust Gudmundsson - The Outlaw - was based on the mediaeval Icelandic Saga of Gisli; it won the Silver Bear Award at Taormina in 1984.

With her background in theatre, radio and cinema, Maureen works to bring the immediacy and richness of traditional dramatic art into the digital domain, where after three centuries of text-based storytelling and proscenium-based theatre (including a century of cinema and TV), less confined and more spontaneous, participative forms of dramatic narrative experience, related to music and dance theatre, have become possible in the 21st century. She very much enjoys working in the Nordic countries, and her (2001) interactive digital video research production, the hypermovie Vala, builds on her work on oral, pre-literate storytelling as an experimental model for non-linear narrative drama.

At the Nordic Interactive Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, in October 2001, as well as panellist on Interactive Narrative and PhD School leader on Narrativity and Interactivity, Maureen was key speaker on Electronic Arts, Entertainment & Industry. At the Nordic Council of Ministers' Digital North conference in Helsinki in October 2001, she was a panellist on Promoting Creativity and Production. In March 2000, Maureen was advisor and keynote speaker for the London Production Show's seminar on Convergence between Film and Interactive Games, and in September 1999 she co-organised and was key speaker at the Nordic Panorama industry seminar The Impact of Digitality - Movies and Games. In 1995 Maureen spearheaded the design of the NFTS CREATEC digital media research and production centre, founded with a DTI Technology Foresight award in 1996, and from 1996-1998 she was on the DTI TF Sub-Group for Creative Media, and its Task Group for Education & Training. Her analysis of the relationship between cinematic narrative and the structures of 35 interactive adventure-games is forthcoming in the volume Architectures of Illusion, which she has also edited (Intellect Books, Bristol 2002).

Maureen Thomas & The Cambridge University Moving Image Studio
http://www.arct.cam.ac.uk/cumis/

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