Third Artifact......

With my previous artifacts I felt I have concentrated on the first part of my question and neglected the second part somewhat. How the relationship between reality and narrative effect the audience’s understanding of the art form, I feel I have gained some knowledge on the subject with my previous artifacts but I wanted to use this artifact to explore how important the value of narrativity is in the representation of reality.

I decided to write two short stories, both very different from one another. I would leave the stories by starting a sentence and leaving a …….. for the participator to complete. For example, the first story finishes with “straightens his tie and steps into…..” as the second story ends “David turns around and….” These prompt the participants to dive straight into the story instead of thinking of a whole new sentence to carry the narrative on with.


The first story is a dream-like narrative, which jumps from both first person story telling to third person story telling. Giving the participants free-reign to continue with the narrative in any way they saw fit. The first paragraph is from the third person, describing the location and sights whereas the second paragraph I jumped to the first person and described emotions, feels and a “reality check” as the character looks at the clock. Within the borderless world I was sure to put details of a house and a dead father, in order for there to be some connection with the character.
The second story is about a man in the toilets of a restaurant as he composes himself before asking his girlfriend to marry him. The narrative in very linear and is set in one location. I used a lot of inner-monologue and flash back-story telling. There is lots of speech in this narrative with conversations between the characters.

The results show that when offered a reality in which anything can take place, 80% of the participants chose to take the story back to reality by referencing details of the narrative from previous chapters and placing the character back in a familiar place (home/bed…etc…). With the second story 90% continued the narrative in the reality in which was set.

These results add even more fuel to the theory that the value of narrativity is important in the representation of reality. If we look back over the last three artifacts now, in a short summary :

1.) The participants arranged the film stills in the correct order and the results show they had a better understanding of the narrative the further from reality it was based. The realistic narratives scored poorly and the fantasy narratives scored the best.

So from these results i wanted to test if the understanding of narrative would continue in moving images. So i made the obvious progression to films......

2.) The films, Malcolm and Barabara, Downfall & eXistenZ, showed a steady increase in the understanding of the narrative as the representation of reality decreases. A fair understanding of the narrative was present throughout but eXistenZ scored the highest and the audience were keen on expanding on their answers and using much more imagination in the questionnaire.

So from these results i wanted to test the audience's imagination and see what representation of reality they would come up with themselves when given the brief story with hints of narrative.

3.) And as shown above the results were that 80% of the participants chose to pull the narrative back from a boarderless reality and 90% chose to continue with the linear narrative presented to them.