Christine Pillsbury

Class of 2005

Background
Christine is an interactive design director, designer, and programmer with over 8 years experience working for top tier clients such as: IBM, Lotus, Adidas, RCA, Sprint, SAP, Lycos, and more. She has received numerous industry awards including: a OneShow Interactive Award, London International Advertising Awards, a Macromedia Site Of The Day, @dTech Awards, New England Web Design Awards, and Omni Intermedia Awards.

Prior to attending graduate school here at MassArt, Christine was an Associate Creative Director at Ogilvy Interactive, New York, and before that she was an ACD at US Interactive, New York. Her specialized skills include: strategic planning and direction, interactive advertising, information and interface design, motion graphics, and Flash ActionScripting.

Currently, Christine is a freelance consultant, principle of OpacityZero.com, and design instructor. She has taught at MassArt, Boston University, The New England Institute of Art and Communications, and Endicott College.

Thesis direction
At some point, all mediums face the transition from the utility of information transfer to the translation of subjectivity, experiences, and expressions. The human condition has a long history in narrative, and the very progresses of culture and civilization have depended on stories to fuel our mass and individual understanding of existence itself.

Interaction and participation have always been components of storytelling, but they are now moving from implied to the explicit. A participatory audience is branching out from cognitive to tactile, and authorship itself is being reconsidered.

Authors are well accustomed to designing their stories. Now they are challenged with not only writing and even visualizing a story, but additionally must consider the dynamic systems of the procedural front and backend. Even the manner of storytelling itself must change, allowing for the levels of variation necessary for their new dynamic condition. The story, the interface, and the database are not mutually exclusive layers upon one another, but are equal parts of a greater whole.

Each story, or at least each type of story will have a unique system - there will be no magical cookie-cutter hyper-narrative engines, just as though there are no &author in a box& replacements. Hyper-narratives will be visual, audible, tactile, and most unique - explicitly procedural. This IS interactive design!

Authorship essay
Download

Inspirational links
www.designiskinky.com
www.mediaterra.org
www.aec.at
www.whitney.org/artport
www.joshuadavis.com/
www.davidsmall.com
www.uncontrol.com

Selected Work from the DMI Archive:

Market Garden

I've been spending so much of my time here at MassArt experimenting with "Interactive Narrative" -- trying to find useful ways to essentially treat the qualitative as quantitative. Dissecting the aspects of story and trying to create "systems" that...

911: Hyper-Cinema Interactive Documentary

We live in a time where the barrage of visual, and sometimes other sensory, media has a direct effect on our human ability to connect with a given subject matter. Whether or not this has a positive or negative...

Hydroponica

The user enters the circular meditation chamber and is directed to sit by the only light illuminating from the screen highlighting the pillow seat before the interface. Before her is a rear projected blue grid of circles behind an...

You Are Here: A model for interactive narrative.

The condition "you are here" speaks to three states of being. "You" represents not only audience - the user - but is also a signifier of the point of view (POV) of that user. "Are" represents a state of...

A New Book: A Model for Interactive Narrative.

Create an interactive narrative environment where the user's behavior (clicks - quantity and quality) has a direct affect on the delivery, representation, and navigation of the story itself in a manner that reinforces the messages/themes of the plot....