Exploring Media Space in a Narrative Way: The Ongoing Desktop Narration Between New Digital Media and Contemporary Cinema

This article takes into consideration some narrative traits in the experience of the media user within contemporary screen interfaces. I will start from the assumption that the research, visualization and appropriation of media contents of a different nature (textual, photographic, audiovisual, etc.) necessarily passes through the exploration of different environments with respect to which the interfaces define the degree and modality of the interaction that is determined. Secondly, I will stress some hypotheses on the emergence of an ongoing narrative based on "topological choices” and allowed by that forms of interaction described in the first two sections. I will consider this form of narrative as not structured a priori, but determined moment by moment by the actions performed by the media user. An embodied and situated narrative. In the last section, I will analyse how this form of spatialized ongoing narrative is staged within the desktop film Searching by Aneesh Chaganty, and I will move some considerations on its role in the construction of a “situated parallel plot”.