I’m right in the middle of the millennial range (born in 1989), so I have a pretty predictable relationship to the internet. I grew up around computers, but without social media. I didn’t have a smart phone until my 20’s. I’m familiar with the feral grinding sound of dialup, and being told I needed to get offline so my mom could make a phone call.
I was able to access the internet from home, in middle school, and used it to read webcomics, play NeoPets, watch music videos on Yahoo! (YouTube wasn’t a thing until I was in high school), and publish short stories to FictionPress (yes, they are still up there, and no, I will not be sharing that link). 1 l34rN3D 70 7YP3 L1K3 7h1Z so my AIM away messages would unironically convey that I was a specific type of uncool. One I was aware and in control of.
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My first really tangible memory of interacting with transmedia storytelling was the Donnie Darko website.
There was an older girl in my art class who would wax poetic about the phonaesthetics of the phrase “cellar door”, and the sort of mysticism of darkness, and how Donnie Darko resonated with her. She was a goth with long dark hair and piercings lined from her cartilage to her lobe. She was wispy and mysterious and probably read Anaïs Nin. I was a punk in baggie pants and no idea (as evidenced above) how to be cool. So I watched it, in some attempt to attain her moody depths, but wasn’t into it.
In my Extensive Research™ to figure out what the big deal was, I stumbled upon the film’s website.
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The Donnie Darko website was flash, so it doesn’t work anymore, but it was created by the digital marketing firm Hi-ReS! leading up to the film’s release in 2001. It was originally slated to have 7 “levels”, but the firm ran out of time and the site was left open ended after 3 levels. The site featured ASCII art, cursors with trailing text, pop up windows, and layered, splintered graphics that unfolded by finding the right clue or clicking the right element. The content included a countdown (count-up?) of days since Donnie’s alternate universe ended, “government documents”, little clips from the film, and a handful of satellite sites (included a local news site). The site requires a degree of digging through its content in order to advance through it (and/or knowledge of the film and it’s universe), but also expands on that universe, offering details beyond the scope of the film, such as the fates of some of the secondary characters.
This is one place, of many in this project, where it feels important to me to highlight the intention behind an object I’m examining. The purpose of the Donnie Darko website was, at the end of the day, to engage the film’s audience in worldbuilding beyond the constraints of the film itself, to keep them engaged and on the hook as consumers (so you’d see it again in theaters with your newfound context, or buy the VHS, or the DVD, or see the sequel——there was a sequel, right?——or buy merch, whatever).
I wasn’t familiar with net art then, which was what influenced the website, and where I really would’ve gotten excited.
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The lines between art and marketing feel especially sticky and blurred when it comes to film and cinematic universes. Expanding a film’s universe is not an inherently bad or weird thing to do, I think it’s really cool——but it’s seemingly always tied to the purpose of capital. Forget the secondary content, is the “art” itself (here: a film) still art if its purpose is to generate money, vs. some other “artistic” purpose? Either way, directors need those big numbers to produce their next film, and the team behind Donnie Darko didn’t partner with a net artist to build a companion to the film. They hired a marketing firm to advertise it; and that firm borrowed from net art to gamify marketing in a way that was relevant to both the film and the moment in culture that it was released.
It’s frustrating that even as a Very Online young person, I didn’t have the navigational tools to know that there was more of what I wanted out there, let alone where to look, so I was stuck with the corporate version of it (for a film I didn’t even care about).
> wwwwwwwww.jodi.org (Jodi.org, 1995)
> My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (Olia Lialina, 1996)
> King’s Cross Phone-In (Heath Bunting, 1994)
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In 2010, while I was in undergrad (spending almost no time online, and still somehow unaware of the net art genre), I remembered the website. I felt nostalgic for the excitement in my chest as I worked to unravel connections that may or may not be explicit, letting my own mind fill in the narrative gaps. It inspired my BFA thesis project. I couldn’t code, so I focused on AFK space and built a shed (by roofing off my school studio space), and filled it with art objects, photography, books, and ephemera——all gesturing towards a story I hadn’t built firm boundaries around. It was a sort of visual puzzle with no answer, just loose worldbuilding. In this way it reflected the (unintentionally) unfinished nature of the Donnie Darko website. I’m not sure it was very successful, sometimes I liken it to a bad escape room.
But I think back to something Zach Blas said in a talk at PNCA this past fall: that while he may not know how while he’s working on them, all of his separate projects fit together. They may seem entirely unrelated until years later when a new project bridges the space between them. I think that installation makes more sense, now, a dozen years later, within my wider body of work. I understand and can speak to why certain objects and images made their way in there.
And this is something I think transmedia storytelling does——it finds the porosity in the linearity of the time and space of a narrative; allows you to sneak in new parts, to build infinitely in/outward.