RELATED TERMS: Avant-garde movements; Ergodic; Historicism; Interaction Design; Literary theory; Music The term aleatory derives from the Latin word alea, meaning dice or game of chance. In composition, whether literary, poetic or musical, it implies the use of the element of chance and dependence on contingencies. Marc Saporta’s novel, Composition No. 1, which is entirely loose-leafed, andContinue reading “Aleatory”
Author Archives: aparsons474
Agonistic Politics – Mouffe
RELATED TERMS: Arendt; Focalisation; Politics and the Political A Greimasian approach to narrative environments emphasises actantiality, as a complex field of inter-related, systemic or networked inter-actions involving actants of many different kinds, from conventional characters to various kinds of artefactual entities such as climate change and religious symbolism. Nevertheless, there still remains the problem ofContinue reading “Agonistic Politics – Mouffe”
Agonism and Avant-Gardism
RELATED TERMS: Agon; Avant-Garde Movements As is noted under the term Agon, the terms, agonism, agonist, antagonist and protagonist can be of great value in developing and understanding the dynamics of narrative environments, particularly when considered from the point of view of dramatic conflict. Renato Poggioli (1968: 65), furthermore, argues that agonism is a moment of enormousContinue reading “Agonism and Avant-Gardism”
Agon
RELATED TERMS: Actant; Agonism and Avant-Gardism; Antagonist; Dissensus – Ranciere; Dramatic conflict; Focalisation; Human Actantiality; Narratology; Protagonist The word agon and its cognate terms, agonism, agonist, antagonist and protagonist are of great value in developing and understanding the dynamics of designed entities, particularly when considered in conjunction with a notion of dramatic conflict. Agon is aContinue reading “Agon”
World
RELATED TERMS: Dau Project; Diegese and Diegesis; Lifeworld – Lebenswelt – Umwelt; Storyworld; “these three types of world — the world, my world and a contained world-like domain — are often difficult to distinguish.” (Gaston, 2013: x) “Every human lives in a world”. (Reed, 2021) “the word ‘world’ constantly shifts between its cosmological, ontological, theological,Continue reading “World”
Diégèse and Diegesis
RELATED TERMS: Diegesis; Storyworld; Narrative environment design Rather than the process of story-telling, that is, diegesis contrasted with mimesis in Greek philosophy and poetics, the term ‘The diegesis’, i.e. as the English translation of Gerard Genette’s term diégèse, is understood, here, as the world of the story in its entirety. This includes unseen or not presented parts of it, theContinue reading “Diégèse and Diegesis”
Heterarchy
RELATED TERMS: Actantiality; Affordances; Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop; Within the understanding that socio-genesis and techno-genesis are inherently interwoven, each as an original supplement of the other, designs can be said to form strange loops: tangled hierarchies that articulate a heterarchy of values. In part, they do so through the deictic framings and cross-referencing which theyContinue reading “Heterarchy”
Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop
RELATED TERMS: Deixis and Deictic Acts; Heterarchy; Metalepsis; Ontological Metalepsis; “A weird knowing. Weird, from the Old Norse, urth, meaning twisted, in a loop.”(Morton, 2017: 92) Douglas Hofstadter (1979: 18) argues that a strange loop occurs whenever, by moving upwards or downwards through the levels of a hierarchical system, you unexpectedly find yourself right back where you started.Continue reading “Tangled Hierarchy and Strange Loop”
Medium and Media
RELATED TERMS: Transmedia, Cross-Platform and Multimedia; Visual Arts and Visual Media; World-Building “To me, the facade of a building is like the first sentence of a novel – it sets the tone, the mood, and hints at what’s to come.” (Alexis Dornier quoted in Sharma, 2025) The choice of what media and materials to useContinue reading “Medium and Media”
World-Building
RELATED TERMS: Arendt; Design of Narrative Environments; Global Challenges; Heidegger; Lifeworld – Lebenswelt – Umwelt; Ontology; Sloterdijk; Terraforming; Theoretical Practice; World; World-as-Milieu Use for: World-forming, World-making, Worlding, World-shaping [Welt-Bilden] “the last man will save from the rubble a stool or a tree stump on which to rest from his labours …” (Cliff and De Chabaneix,Continue reading “World-Building”
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