WHAT EXACTLY IS IT?
After watching the acclaimed AMC television show, The Walking Dead, did you read the Rise of the Governor novel, jumping backward in narrative-time to follow the evolution of a legendary villain suddenly infused with a cathartic human dimension? Did you also immerse yourself in another apocalyptic dimension of The Walking Dead story universe by playing a new character faced with terrifying moral dilemmas via the downloadable video game? Before seeing the Disney film, Tron: Legacy (2010), did you play the Alternate Reality Game and learn that hero Kevin Flynn from the original film was still alive? Did you then end up watching the Tron Uprising animated television series, which takes place between Tron Legacy and the original Tron (1982) film? Do you ever follow the trail of other stories from one platform to another? If so with any of these examples, you are engaging with transmedia storytelling, a natural outgrowth of media convergence, which in recent years has finally garnered an official screen credit by industry’s Producer’s Guild of America.
Transmedia, while perhaps still in the midst of being defined, is a term which has been explored for modern purposes initially by media scholar Henry Jenkins. Fundamentally, transmedia storytelling is the process of telling a story through integrated plotlines and messaging artistically developed to engage audiences while unfolding across multiple forms of media and distribution platforms. Within each medium and permutation, stories function by themselves to different degrees, while at the same time making unique contributions to an overarching cohesive experience across media. Transmedia narratives whether fictional or nonfiction, can be expanded in linear or nonlinear ways, reaching backwards in time or across alternate story realities.
Not all media projects or even “franchises” are transmedia. But increasingly, projects from immersive game franchises to comic books and films move beyond their initial roots to utilize a transmedia approach, often developed from the onset of a project. A franchise can even be launched simultaneously, like the Syfy Channel’s series Defiance and integrated Defiance MMO video game with its interactive canonical experiences in which participant choices can even impact the show. On such transmedia horizons, multi-faceted projects can be artistically challenging and extremely rewarding for creators. Such a creative approach can also grow, satisfy and evangalize fan bases, as part of a business model or even as a strategy for social activism, utilized by the full spectrum of media-makers, ranging from independent filmmakers to huge studio conglomerates.
WHAT THE HECK IS IT? (PART 2)
Bear with me here. Geometrically speaking, a Tesseract is a structure, like a square (which is 2 dimensional) or a cube (3 dimensional), but conceptualized in 4 dimensions. So, a tesseract is to a cube, as a cube is to a square. We can’t technically “see” into other dimensions (yet that is) so the tesseract or “hypercube” is a projection of a four-dimensional equivalent of a cube.
A cube can “unfold” into six squares in 2D space (conversely six squares fold back up into a cube).
Similarly but in 3D space, a tesseract uncannily unfolds into 8 interconnected cubes.
Tesseracts have stirred the imagination about the fourth dimension for more than a century, with a rich history spanning across literature, art, television, film and gaming. Science-fiction writers have explored what it would be like to move through such an extra-dimensional construct. In Robert Heinlein’s 1940 short story, And he Built a Crooked House, an architect builds a bewildering eight room tesseract-shaped home. When he returns to his creation with his clients, the exterior appears to the eye as a single cube-shaped house. Once inside, the new homeowners uncannily move through eight different cubic rooms, each equal to the seeming size of the entire house. Passing through door after door, they emerge in seemingly impossibly linked regions and rooms across the house, as if trapped in an M.C. Escher sketch.
In his 1954 work, Crucifixion, Salvador Dali, whose surrealist work literally plays with dimensionality, painted Jesus on a cross-like eight-cube tesseract. From classic novels like A Wrinkle in Time (1962) to more contemporary TV shows and films such as Andromeda, The Cube movie franchise, and the 2012 big screen Avengers comic adaptation, tesseracts have been used frequently as key plot devices and cosmic or dimensional doorways. Iconic games like Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and Starflight, transform the tesseract’s structure into befuddling labyrinths or artifacts that contain esoteric knowledge. Outside of creative media, theoretical physicists continue to delve into the nature of higher dimensionality, exploring the concept of the quantum multiverse and parallel realities, intersecting with the same described tesseract-logic.
This very story of our fascination with tesseracts weaves across the arts, science, technology and culture. Meanwhile, many structural models, such as plot mountains, building blocks, or emotional rollercoasters have been developed to describe story and used as creative tools by storytellers, generally applied within individual mediums such as film or gaming. So, it’s fitting that the mind-bending concept of a tesseract with its intricate structural framework, be re-imagined with interconnected shifting “portals” akin to how both artists and users now ultimately can make choices about creative content and experience. Such a perspective can be used to consider the quantum leap that is transmedia storytelling:
The Transmedia Tesseract is a creative structure which explores and expresses new dimensions of storytelling unfolding across multiple forms of media and platforms.
Christian Raymond
For inquiries about the Transmedia Tesseract creative structural model and supporting materials, contact: Christian@transmediatesseract.org. If you are a student in one of Christian's classes, please use his college email.