It is embarrassing to start one’s first blog with a completely blank mind, a writer’s block, but here it goes. I promised the Dimeke Story Market (Tarinatori) editors to write something today.

So, I emptily stare at the distance and my eye catches the note that I have had pinned on the walls of my various studies for over ten years now. This note has travelled with me from the Fujitsu Labs of San Jose, California, where we investigated the use of Commedia dell’Arte as a design metaphor for multiplayer virtual worlds to the K3 Department of Art, Culture and Communication at Malmö University, Sweden, where we applied Viking oral storytelling traditions to interactive film; and from Malmö to my current work place, Crucible Studio at Media Lab Helsinki, the Department of Media of the Aalto University School of Art Design, where we continue to investigate the art and design of storytelling in new media. This note reads:

“Storytelling is one of the oldest forms of communication.  Its aim is not to convey an event as such (as information).  It submerges the event into the life of the storyteller in order to give it to listeners as an experience. In the process, the storyteller’s mark is set into it like the handprint of a potter on a pot.”

The quote is supposedly from Walter Benjamin’s essay The Eye in the Crowd (Silmä väkijoukossa). It’s on my wall to always remind me that when we investigate and develop the ”new” structures of interactive/generative/procedural/participatory/game/etc. storytelling  – the high level abstractions of which are popularly inspired by the structures of drama, fairy tales and myth by such writers as Aristotle, Vladimir Propp and Joseph Campbell – we must never forget the actual Life of the story, the Content, the storyteller’s Point of View to the world of information around us. Story is not just a structure, though it has one.

And, of course, the blank moment in my study described above is fiction (or a past moment in my life, I’m not sure). As I write, I’m sitting in the lunch room of Hotel Lasaretti in Oulu, surrounded by eagerly talking and eating people, a group of animals of sorts, and am online via an open network curiously named ”panoulu” (the Finnish readers will get the gist, when I wonder what the heck is ”ulu”).