Dear Charlotte,

good questions 🙂

On how the transmedia storytelling could be adressed, I have one artistic project which is very close to the transmedia storytelling described by Jenkins : The jejune institute project http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/us/22bcculture.html . It was set up by an artist from Oakland Jeff Hull.

In this particular show I feel that Cuss group and Gilles Fürtwangler are the two in which we can see those kind of energy. Gilles wrote 4 different poems, some are printed in the publication, two others on posters and he’s gonna make a live concert at the end of the show. The posters pops up here and there in the city and the publication can be found outside of le Commun but all the part of the poems are telling one same story so maybe we can see here a kind of transmedia approach?

For my part, I tried to built it once. I got invited to give a conference in the frame of an exhibition display which was a trailer for HTWW. It had to take place in an artist run space for one evening only. I decided to make the conference take the form of his subject. I changed the classical talk format by fragmenting it and spreading it on different times formats and places during the evening. Concretely the conference was cut in 4 distinctive parts: I gave a very short regular talk (around 20 minutes) which was in itself already multi-media based, using recorded voices, projection, different type of discourses, etc., another part of the conference consisted on a readen text made of theoretical quotes putting one after the other without signatures. This text was recorded with a male voice and played inside one of the two toilet cabin of the space. The door was close from the inside and fake shoes were visible from under the door to make it look like if another speaker was repeating his conference. The third part was an online evolutive diagram visible on a tablet in the space in which people were able to navigate. And the last part was made of anecdotes. I told them to some of my friends before the event and ask them to drag them into the conversation as their owne during the post-talk drinking moment.
This part was really funny because people where thinking to be in a regular “opening” moment but actually they where all speaking about transmedia experiences and still part of the conference without really noticing.

But all those projects are not just exhibitions and it leads us directly to your last question… Transmedia projects intrinsically uses different platforms and are built to involve people in the story/decision line. In that sense, it addresses many questions to the classical exhibition format. First it usual character of indivisibility or wholeness (entier). And then, among other the status of the Author/Curator/Artist as the main and only creator; the question of the evolution in the process; as well as the fact that by involving more people it can induce the unexpected and the possibility of fail.
You said that “storytelling has been one of the main attribute of art practices » and you are very true. In that way a part of our practice will surely be influenced by those new way of telling stories.

I know that you’re also teaching, do you already noticed it in your student works or thoughts ?
And do you have any interesting project poping in mind which really plays with this idea of telling stories (in the new or classical way of it)?