The Hermann Story

THE HERMANN STORY

Game as a medium between our reality and a fictitious one

We already know what the word means; it is a transmitter of some form of information. Now think of a medium in the most esoteric sense: a literal middleman between the creator and the recipient of the information.

Lost in transmission, mutated through translation to and from the language of the medium, information gets transformed and sometimes even newly emerges: with every added dimension, another layer of content, a new form of presenting what is known also creates room for accidental details and sometimes forces the “creator” to display unheard-of information.

This grey area of self-created content, shaped by the medium itself, is of special interest to me as a creator of creativity.

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A sentence put into Google Translator and translated through many different languages, eventually coming back to the original one, will change the meaning of the sentence tremendously. I tried this with the following sentence:

Fiction is important for our development of wide variety behaviour and helps spark

imagination.

After the process of translation through twenty-one languages, this is what came out again:

Adaptation promotes a broad spectrum of nature and psychology.

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Where do those differences come from? They were created by the intricacies and quirks of the mediums they briefly had to adapt to. Some languages allow for ambiguity, while others are very precise and have a broad vocabulary. Being a cultural tool, nuances are created not only by the obvious limitations and rules (like grammar in tongue, the range of hearable frequencies in sound or the literal borders of a panel in a comic book). They also emerge as the usage of the medium shifts and evolves over time, influenced by both sender and receiver, a conceptualizing corporation and its target audience, point A and point B – artist and consumer.

When a story gets translated into another medium (shifted upwards in the dimensional structure), the “artist” (as in: executor of the realisation, e.g. visualisation, of the art) often has no choice but to let go of certain things and add others. This can happen fairly obviously, or subtly to the degree of the “artist” themselves not realizing their addition – as it is not their conscious choice, but one dictated by the medium.

To give an illustrating example: when a story formerly only captured in prose gets turned into a graphic novel, additionally to the obvious translations (from e.g. mood producing word choice to colour-created vibe and atmosphere) and the extra layer of dimension (in this case, the visuals), “accidentally” added details (like previously unmentioned objects in the background illustration or subtleties in a character's facial expression) further expand the extent of medium-specific content.

Sometimes seemingly irrelevant objects let us conclude a definitive, they imply a backstory potentially affecting the entire world a story is set in.

As a similar experiment to the one I did with Google Translate, one could have a set of artists independently adapt a piece from, let's say, a short story into a movie into a radio play into a comic book back into a story.

You could even go as far as to have them compress a six-part novel collection into a single painted image, or a piece of piano music.

Or you could barely change medium, but only alter a few conditions: now the novel series becomes a short story, and then novels again.

This is precisely what I did (or am doing) for this first of my five more fleshed-out experiments.

In the beautifully nostalgic fashion of a Hermann cake or questionable chain mail, a story I wrote is currently travelling through the aether, being re-designed, -shaped, -invented and -created by artists of all trades.

In the exhibition, you will be able to see how the story has changed, by translators and mediums alike.

Using the abovementioned adaptational cycle, ideally entertaining an intelligent algorithm based off of existing adaptations instead of the sort of human computer consisting of actual artists, you could (theoretically) endlessly generate content from (almost) nothing. Whether that could then still be considered art, however, is for someone else to decide.

Building or composing a system that will perpetually generate new information and therefore be independent from its primal originator would mean successfully achieving the stage of universally fertile art – if you take fertility as the only defining criterium for art, that is, and intend to absolve it of a concrete creator of any kind.

Personally, however, I believe the bond between creator and artwork to be of great importance when it comes to other aspects I consider to be characteristics of art: the emotion coming out of and going into it, for example.

The difference between a system like this and generative art lies in the complete detachment from any kind of sustaining artist.

#thehermannstory #theory #games