Interview with Alex Mayhew

Interviewer: Alex, tell me something about yourself. How long have you been doing multimedia?

Alex Mayhew: It was in 1993 when I first go interested in computers to extend my interests in arts and image manipulation. I had a fine art degree. On that fine art degree, I was interested in combining different mediums or using different mediums. So I did a lot of photography. I did a lot of drawing. I did a lot of painting, print making. I also was interested in sound and installation art. I did everything under the sun. Multimedia combines all my different interests.

Interviewer: What is your vision for creating interactive multimedia art?

Alex Mayhew: I see the difference between a traditional relationship of author and audience in books, images and film and the potential of that relationship with interactive media and similar to our being observers of real life events and participants. This is especially true in regards to emotional engagement. If you're watching some people in front of you having an argument. You might get a bit nervous. Sort of agitated. Maybe a bit scared or whatever. But if you're actually in the argument--you went up and started arguing with them--you're going to get heart palpitations or you're going to start to sweat.

So if you imagine that in a film context or the novel context, you're still going to be effected emotionally by watching these things. But if you're actually involved yourself or effecting people on an emotional level yourself, then there's that potential to get so much more from the user.

Interviewer: The role of the audience in interactivity has been a pretty hotly debated topic in the context of our Digital Storytelling Festivals. We often discuss the idea of the user constructing narrative. The bulk of the criticism of interactive architecture revolves around the notion that a branching narrative is at all valuable as a dialogue between an author and their audience.

Alex Mayhew: This branching narrative business is wacky.

Interviewer: Most people who have been active in interactive design realize that, first and foremost, you're probably designing an immersive environment--that the world that you're creating is the strongest authorial role that you have. Because, in essence--using again the metaphor that you were talking about--if you are going to put people in an environment where arguments are taking place, it's one thing if it's in a park the size of a Hyde Park in London or if it's in a room to which there is no exit. The immersive aspects of the narrative--which you can get in a novel and you certainly get in film and you get in any linear form--that that becomes very important in an environment where the user is invited to have direct agency in the construction of the story. Even if those are a single screens, our path through a "multi-path" or non-linear story suggests little beginnings and middles and ends. So the fragments become narrative components. In the same way frankly that a chapter or page is itself an invitation to interaction. Writers and filmmakers have experimented with breaking up linearity in innumerable ways so that you're not thinking about linearity as time linearity. You're thinking about it more in terms of narrative structure, and in a sense, a larger sense of beginning, middle and end.

Alex Mayhew: I think there is some potential in a non-linear narrative. I'm not saying that it's a complete load of rubbish. What I'm saying is a complete load of rubbish is that so many people seem to believe that interactive media is strictly about non-linear paths. I think it's quite a negative obsession. It doesn't actually matter where you're going in a sense. It's how you're engaging the user.

As an example, I made an interactive postcard before working on Ceremony of Innocence. There's this postcard. You're able to turn it around on the screen. The text on the back is about this person that has visited London and has been to Buckingham Palace and wants to see the queen. Actually, to see the king--because it's fictional. They talk about how lazy the monarchy is and how they don't do anything. A political comment. As you're reading this, you start to notice a snoring that's going on. If you look very closely, in the little stamp is the king who is asleep. Lazy king, basically. You've got your little cursor and you can prod him with your cursor. Like tickling him with your cursor. You prod him and he almost wakes up. It interrupts his snoring and he almost wakes up. Then goes back to sleep again. Because you just prodded him once. You prod him the second time, you've agitated him even more effectively. So he wakes up. He's pissed with you and he's pissed with what's written on the postcard because he reads it as he wakes up. He spits out of the stamp, all this saliva--a gob--comes out of his mouth, lands on the text and the gob drips down and makes all the text drip down with it.

So the point is, you the user, you were responsible for waking him up. The thing is, it's a complete linear sequence that you're simply activating. For me, the secret is creating an illusion. Not that the user is uncovering a narrative--which is really what they're doing. But that they're actually creating the narrative through their interaction. They have effected something. Whatever emotion it activates, they've effected it emotionally. Or effected a sequence of events. This different from having buttons which give the users a choice of what happens to the narrative. Where you say, "I want her to die or I want her to live." If you actually did something such a putting a banana skin underneath this person that's walking along, that makes them slip over and break their neck, it would be more effective and maintain some of the poetic dignity--the narrative. And some of the magic--if you didn't actually have the user directly making that choice but indirectly making their choices.

Ceremony is more or less completely linear.