Interactive installation: Authorial control and narrativized design strategies

In this thesis, I revisit the problem of interactive narrative and problematize some common underlying assumptions. I argue that a shift away from understanding the problem as an opposition between immediacy and hypermediacy can point to directions often neglected. Interactive narrative films have often been conceived of as screen-based systems where the interactor experiences the branching work by clicking on hotspots in the video. A future direction of interactive cinema however might lie not in a text that changes but a body that moves. Unlike linear media in which authorship is commonly understood as the control over narrative content, structure, and timing, in interactive media it also extends to the interface and the interactive design. I present three projects that contextualize this understanding in the form of embodied interactive narrative installation.