Interview with Jonathan Delacour

Interviewer: What are you working on in the context of digital storytelling?

Jonathan Delacour: I've been working on this project for what seems to be an eternity, funded in part by the Australian Film Commission, called "Scenes of Everyday Life, La Japanese." It is a hypertext story for the Web that blends autobiography, and a series of essays, fiction, and documentary.

Over the last two years, it's changed substantially. In order to balance the images and the text I had to do more research. So that necessitated going to Japan a couple of times. Because of the scale, 1000 or more pages, I decided to use Web database technology to handle the technical, logistic side of things. I've got a programmer to write an application that allows me to enter the stories into a database via browser interface. And then all the stories are in this excess database application called Cold Fusion. Cold Fusion builds the pages on the fly as a story, or story pages requested into two or three design templates. Depending on the context, the viewer, or the user, or the reader, sees one or another.

The visual design is such that you don't actually scroll, each page, each lexia, come as pages that fill the browser window, and you simply advance to the next page.

There are a series of stories. A story could be anything from one to 22 screens . Initial screens are served up randomly, and if interested you can follow any of the stories.

There are four, and eventually five, sections for the entire site. There is an index page for each section. And the index page is a mosaic of thumbnail images. So you can choose to read a story by clicking on one of the thumbnails. And the database tracks which ones you've read and which you haven't. And whether some are partially read or not. We then write a Cookie[small application that connects to the user's browser] that keeps the user informed about where they are, and what they've done.

Interviewer: Did you draw from particular experience that you had, positive or negative, out there on the Web, looking at things that you thought were effective or not effective?

Jonathan Delacour: I think the piece that most struck me was "My Father"? That Joseph Squires piece? That seems to be extraordinarily simplistic now. And I mean it's not even really hypertext. It's just a kind of linear story spread across 30 screens or so. The Squier piece and Dana's Next Exit blew me away.

Because I was a photographer for such a long time, I was aware of how easy it is to be seduced by technology. I've had the experience of people coming up to me during an exhibition, and asking me what camera I used, what film I used, or what shutter speed was this one taken at? And for people who don't know a great deal about photography, or who are learning, or who are starting, or whatever, those seem to be the most important issues.

And in fact, they're the least important issues. And it struck me how Dana had managed to maintain the balance between content and technology with a greater degree of success than anyone else I've seen. I've worked on very complex CD-ROM projects, and you're always fighting not to let the technology drive the creative storytelling choices that you make. I thought that Dana balanced that supremely well. That he was working with digital means of creation, but the overwhelming experience of being with the work was kind of a blend of poignancy, and humor, and sadness. So human emotion was foregrounded, rather than the technology.

I work in for a living in the multimedia business, and now in the Web business. We have these extraordinarily powerful tools. Essentially, it's heartbreaking, the trivial use to which they're put.

Interviewer: There are many issues in interactive design, and given your acknowledgement of two linear examples, in Squier and Atchley, how are you addressing the issue of interactivity in your work. Is it the same experience as reading a book? Is it a different experience?

Jonathan Delacour: I think it's an utterly different experience. I should say that I was also influenced, from a design sense, by the way the East Gate hypertext works. I played with story spaces for quite a while, while I was developing "La Japonese." In deciding to go the database route, I went a different direction, I was very influenced by there approach to the presentation of information, screen by screen.

Jacob Nielsen of Sun Microsystems has done research indicates that users don't scroll. Research indicates that users actually don't know that they're going from one site to another on the Web. I'm going to try and make something where you don't actually scroll. The problem then became how do you create screen after screen after screen where the content is sufficiently compelling to make people want to press that forward or back arrow.

I can remember someone, maybe it was John Sakowski(sp), the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who said, "When you look at photographs, a good photographer kind of takes you on a journey." He was talking about Arjet(sp), the French turn-of-the-century photographer, who photographed Paris obsessively for 30 years. He talked about the photographers being a kind of gifted pointer. Someone who would point at something that no one else had noticed. And his audience would follow, in a sense, the direction of his finger. And see what he'd selected and take different kinds of pleasures from that process.

I think that even if people don't understand where they are on the Web, they do understand, or I hope they understand, that they're in a particular place with a particular set of rules. East Gate has a description for this process called "guard fields"which enables the author to control the user's route through the story space.