Aesthetics of Transmedia Screen Narratives or How Transmediality Has Become Millenial’s Reality (and a Nightmare)
In 2017 I got my Ph.D. in Art History. My research has been focused on how technology and web in particular changes the way we tell visual stories. Below is my Personal Statement explaining my interest in this topic.
Here is the abstract of my research in English (downloadable). And here is the full version of my Ph.D. thesis in Russian.
It’s weird to think how something that was born when I was only 32 days old defined the way I live my personal and professional life.
I’m 32 days older than World Wide Web.
Strictly speaking, I have never really lived in the pre-web era. The first month of life doesn’t count since it’s the time in-between the cosmic peace of the prebirth reverie and painful breaking into the eternal fuss of life. Few more sunsets, few more dawns, and here you go — the wheels are all set in motion, changes are underway.
Kids still play anything but Minecraft, lovers leave messages on answering machines, the mail is not yet electronic, information is not yet that massively everywhere and dramatically everything, but the air is already alive with the feeling of the Future (future is always a feeling) — and nobody notices.
It took me 9 more years (the first click Internet Explorer button), 204 months (the first use of the video editing software), and 6570 days (the first account in social media and experiencing the feeling of being surrounded, stalked, loved, and despised by all the people I listed/unlisted as friends) — to cross the line of becoming a hybrid without even realizing it.
Of course, we were not called “hybrids” when the term Web 2.0 was coined. Nevertheless, had we a trendy name. I and my peers were chosen to be a generation that brings hopes of positive changes and at the same time frightens others with deep, inimitable, sincere, inborn narcissism. Yes, we were the “millennials”.
Everyone blamed us for being selfish and immature. Nobody has ever warned about the nonhealing wound we were to carry with us throughout our lives.
The wound of always remembering and comparing: “how life felt BEFORE web 2.0” with “how we thought it should have felt with web 2.0” and, finally, “how life really feels with web 2.0 in it”.
Before web 2.0 life was or at least pretended to be linear. We thought that we would gradually grow older, smarter, and will eventually be brought to success and happiness by some lucky occasion, yet unknown but desirable.
Digital technology and Web 2.0 should have been that occasion. It covered us with the storm of opportunities to be heard and seen. And we started — first saying, then showing, then shouting and showing off — because it turned out to be too many of us, wanting to be heard (and heard of).
We never actually were.
Age of Promise turned out to be the never-ending Age of fighting the fear to become completely indistinguishable in the avalanche of fancy avatars and cover images.
For there were immediately way too many amateur filmmakers, mashup-ers, YouTubers, Instagram girls, video essayists, bloggers, vloggers, experts, you continue.
Life has officially become a fractal set. It feels that we are swimming — not yet drowning — in the ocean of media opportunities without any chance of diving deeper or touching the bottom with the tip of the toe. And by the way, we are being followed by the next generation that is said to swim much faster without even considering the option of diving deeper.
The whole generation of technologically-trained media scanners versus a few generations of earnest divers. This world of ultimate hybridity and technological singularity looks like a dream that comes true too fast and then starts looking like a fascinating nightmare.
I enjoy examining this weird hybridity of friendship, love, hate, and hype we’re all living in. I am watching how my friends are gradually and diligently turning themselves into a peculiar human-mass- media and do the same with myself.
We create online personas so skillfully, all driven by the fear of ending up like this little Russian vlogger in the video that went viral: “No one ever came to a fan meeting”. The good thing is that misery also helps to catch some hype.
Our reality is transmediality. The reality of hybrids, swimming and scanning around.
It seems quite natural for me to be interested in any kind of hybrid form. As far as I remember I was never fond of the “pure” state of things. When I first thought of doing Ph.D. research, I considered it as the «strongest motivation weapon» that would make me dig deeper into concepts and subjects that always intrigued me with subtle vibes of almost mystical ambiguity and significance for media landscape: transmediality, comics, games, fictional worlds, alternative and shared Universes, narratology, postmodernism and, of course, metamodernism, computing, web, marketing, storytelling techniques. I wanted to bring everything under one roof of my work.
The key question I asked myself at the beginning of the research was:
What TRANSMEDIALITY even means?
This phenomenon, both surprisingly trendy and eternal, represents the results of multifaceted teamplay between media, arts, brands, technology, and other social and cultural layers of our daily life poetry.
I believe that researching different aspects of transmediality is my personal way to find the remedy for the psychological and social issues caused by media and technology. Starting out within the framework of Art History was an organic decision to me since I am a filmmaker and a writer.
Today, when the hybrid of 267 pages (my Ph.D. thesis) is born and even defended in front of the board of experts and scientists, and I’m still digging deeper.
(This essay has been written in 2017 as my Personal Research Statement for the program at the Moscow Strelka Institute).
