Joris Lindhout
Narrative is one of the ways in which knowledge is organised, and storytelling is the way how knowledge organised like this is passed on.
Knowledge organised in narrative is like a present: the content is wrapped up in a nice wrapper, and the act of unwrapping is just as important as its content (in order to resemble a present it is required that the wrapper is nice and that it has nice content).
Because of the relation between the wrapper and the content it is also a difficult and 'unsafe' way to organise knowledge. Look for instance at one of the oldest collection of narratives known to man, the bible. A lot of discussion takes place around interpretational issues. Times have changed dramatically, and people cannot make a clear division between wrapper and content anymore. This is also the reason why the world of science got rid of the wrapper and made an effort to develop a language capable of organising knowledge in its purest form.
On the other hand an industry developed itself around the wrapper: the entertainment industry (maybe there was a necessity for just wrappers since in our professions we deal with knowledge in its purest form). Both these other formats in which knowledge can be organised are specialisations derived from the original format narrative. What would happen when we bring those specialisations together again, so the content and the wrapper can form a present again?
My essay Beyond George Stringwood: collected writings consists of a few documents written by a contemporary storyteller named George Stringwood. His re-search concerns the question posed above, and illustrates it with one of his works, a short (unfinished) movie. My choice for these documents as content for this essay is best expressed by a quote from Deleuze
Cinema 1, the movement image
":
"Bergson´s second thesis
"although it stops halfway
" makes possible another way of looking at the cinema, a way in which it would no longer be just the perfected apparatus of the oldest illusion, but, on the contrary, the organ for perfecting the new reality.
"
George being concerned with the border between the real (the content) and the virtual (the wrapper), and cinema (the medium of George's interest) being both a manner and a method to mediate knowledge organised as narrative with, he is the person most likely to re-unite the wrapper and the content and to give us the present that he comes up with.
As a teenager I was addicted to a computer game which felt like a virtual-reality game to me, even though it wasn't played with a VR-helmet and VR-gloves. It was in the days when there were still arcades in the Netherlands (those big spaces crammed whit computer games), and I think I washed every car on the block at least once a week in order to make money to go and play the game at the arcade.
Years later I saw a strange western film during some kind of public screening of short movies. It intrigued me because of the symbiosis between the image and the soundtrack, between America and the Netherlands, and between history and present time. It felt unfinished, but provoked enough questions in order to constantly keep me trying to reconstruct and finish it in my head.
By chance I found out that the creator of the game and the director of the short movie was one and the same: a guy named 'George Stringwood'. Curious if this George guy did some more cool stuff, I googled him. It was very hard to find anything on him, since his scarce fans were dwelling deeply in the underground. I managed to find out that George had the aspirations to become a famous Hollywood character, and was well on his way at achieving this. He was working on a short movie together with a New York based independent producer, and had just finished the first shoot for it in the Netherlands. He made an appointment with his producer to meet in an editing suite in NYC, to make a first rough edit with a professional editor, but he never arrived in NYC.
If we have to believe the airline he was supposed to fly with, he did board the plane, but the American costumes have no record of somebody named George Stringwood entering the USA on that date. Basically nobody knows where he is, and the police stopped searching over a year ago (what means that they assume he is dead). On the usenet (http://www.deja.com) different theories go round; the most interesting one being that George Stringwood was a fictional character in the first place. The guy who 'played' George is supposed to be obsessed with the theories lying at the base of the works made by George and totally lost track of reality, living his life as actor, with other words: acting out his life.
"
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