Traversal Hermeneutics: The Emergence of Narrative in Ergodic Media

Digital technologies are capable of simulating traditional media and to give rise to new media forms that often closely resemble the experience of somatic technologies. Their interactive capabilities are partially responsible for this, but procedural authorship and poïesis are supported by process intensity and generative potential. Designers, the systems and their human operators have very different and maybe irreconcilable points of view, which profoundly affect their experiences during the dia- logical construction of the works and of their effusions. From its particular point of view during the traversal, the operator develops a hermeneutic experience during which models and simulations of the system are built. The operator’s actions within the system greatly contribute to this development, but it is their capacity to create theories of the system that is paramount to the success of this effort. The analysis and critique of these digital artifacts, indeed the procedural pleasures attainable through these systems, are indissociable from their procedural understanding. Although traditional aesthetic studies of surface structures or outputs are still possible, once we regard behaviors and computational processes as an integral part of the system’s content, it becomes essential to understand how the operator relates to these beyond a strictly mechanical relation. This paper discusses how models and simulations allow the operator to anticipate the behaviors, reactions and con gurations of the systems. How they are continuously revised, con rmed or falsi ed throughout the traversal, and how this process results in a dialectical tension that is the basis for the development of narratives and of dramatic experiences with these, otherwise highly abstract, systems