Light from aside: A screenwriter’s perspective in virtual reality
(2023)
author(s): Cecilie Levy
published in: University of Inland Norway
This PhD project in artistic research by Cecilie Levy investigates the language of spatial storytelling in virtual reality through artistic research. Drawing on screenwriting practice and theory, as well as creative documentary approaches such as room-scale virtual reality design, the conceptualisation and partial production of the experience Finding Frida is central to this investigation. In its final form, this single-user, room-scale virtual reality experience will be approximately 20 minutes long; it is intended for general audiences, including those who are unfamiliar with virtual reality.
Beyond the reconstruction of a personal narrative – that of forgotten artist Frida Hansen’s life and art – the experience seeks to combine linear storytelling devices with spatial ‘dreamscapes’, giving the spectator access to the protagonist’s private memory world, through representational spaces.
A vertical slice from the VR experience was presented publicly at The Norwegian Film School and at Qvisten XTND in Oslo, June 2023. The vertical slice is a test-scene in VR that will serve as an illustration for the virtual reality concept, giving an impression of transitions, interactivity, and spatial storytelling. The test can be viewed individually in the VR Lab at the NFS (Norwegian Film School) in Oslo and lasts approximately seven minutes per viewer.
An essay, available at this page, presents the conceptual and creative groundwork for the work-in-progress storytelling in Finding Frida. The essay also seeks to convey insights from a writer’s point of view of the hurdles and challenges of transitioning from temporal to spatial storytelling in virtual reality – and the aligning of narrational and stylistic choices in an experiential, technically complex and innovative form. An appendix provides samples from the script at different stages of development.
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New Ecology of the Book
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
In our exploration of the spatiality of language and, specifically, the activation of the site where writing "makes" rather than takes place, we propose a multilayered experience of the book as an object, as well as a geometrical, topological, and especially performative space, which we understand as an "ecology of the book". Extending this practice beyond the book's margins, yet simultaneously embedding it within the material and technical affordances of the book’s medial articulations, we evoke a "new" ecology—one unfolding alongside the interaction-landscape and its actual and invented inhabitants, as well as the techniques of its production. Texts, drawings, figures, figurations, methods, and both human and non-human authors weave together the heterogeneous texture of the book’s "new" ecology.
In our monographs, "Fauna. Language Arts and the New Order of Imaginary Animals" (2018), "Flora. Language Arts in the Age of Information" (2020), and "Fiction Fiction. Language Arts and the Practice of Spatial Storytelling" (2023, De Gruyter/Edition Angewandte), we explore and map the territory of language arts. This approach manifests, on the one hand, through the transgression of traditional scientific methodologies and a shift in models—from thinking-of-the-other toward thinking-with-the-other, and on the other hand, through the agency of our eponymous characters, Fauna and Flora, who not only title our books but also act as conceptual operators—figures that navigate, perform, and activate the very spaces our texts explore. Applying Michel Serres' methodology of thinking by inventing personae, these characters move within and percolate through the margins of text (written, figural) and space (concrete, fictional), reconfiguring the notion of authorship and placing literary texts and digital drawings within the frame(less) collective of more-than-human and more-than-organic actants.
"What the Probes Report": An Exercise in Operative Fiction
(last edited: 2025)
author(s): Elena Peytchinska, Thomas Ballhausen
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
With Operative Fiction, we introduce a practice of spatial storytelling driven by the dynamics of prepositions rather than verb-centric narratives. Here, the textual body becomes embedded in the medial spatiality of a printed book, digital interface, or performance space. The physical or virtual site of the text thus becomes integral to the storytelling process. Spatial production methods merge into the texture of the text itself; simultaneously, the text reshapes the unfolding of space, place, and site. The material and procedural qualities of the text actively engage and activate the digital interface as a site of narrative unfolding, intertwining textual and spatial experiences.
We begin our first exercise in Operative Fiction with Thomas Ballhausen’s What the Probes Report, transposing the text from the printed page (FLORA, 2020) into the digital interface of a Research Catalogue exposition. The non-human protagonist – emerging through and evolving within the text – disrupts subject-centred narration. It becomes entangled in the linguistic and scenic fabric of its own development, thus, through its procedural logic and function, becoming an active agent in its own staging. A line, speculatively re-enacting the machine's operations, simultaneously traces the topographic texture of the digital landscape.
Using a drawing technique typically applied in performance design drafts, we explore the friction between staging and spacing by deploying minimally visible images and textual cues of direction. The operational plasticity of these technical images enables dramaturgical intensities to gather (staging), while also allowing the story to disperse through the digital architecture of the exposition into hyperlinked virtual spaces (spacing).
Alongside a linear reading mode, which follows the story’s original chronology, we propose a contingent reading mode activated via time codes. These time codes function both as compositional elements within the drawing and as hypertextual links. They suggest the duration and shape of a staged terrain, occasionally layering multiple time zones within a single topographic entity. In this way, the timelines act as more-than-texts, generating a multiplicity of positions and proximities, and intertwining temporal aspects of space with the speculative grammar of the story.