Tulse Luper Journey and 92 Suitcases Adapting a film to a multiplayer online game

1. Tulse Luper Journey and 92 SuitcasesAdapting a film to a multiplayer online game Riikka Pelo Dimeke 19.11.2010

2. Tulse Luper Journey http://www.yellowsubmarine.nl/lab/tulse-luper http://www.tulseluperjourney.com/

3. Suitcase 36 Radio Equipment

4. Tulse Luper Journey • TULSE LUPER JOURNEY is a multiplayer online game production based on Peter Greenaway’s film trilogy Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003) released in spring 2006 as a part of Tulse Luper Suitcases mediaproduction • TLS-game project was a collaboration of several European media and art schools, universities, production companies and artists. Coordination, the multiplayer platform and concept: Submarine (Nederlands), supported by Culture 2000 • Production teams created 92 ”suitcases”, combinations of a puzzle game and a short film for the multiplayer game • The contents of the suitcases are based on the film’s protagonist’s Tulse Luper’s posthumous archives each of them revealing a slice of the mystery of his life.

5. Peter Greenaway Tulse Luper Suitcases (2003) Films The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 1: The Moab Story (2003, 127 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 2: Vaux to the Sea (2003, 108 min) The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark to the Finish (2003, 120 min)

6. JULISTEKUVAT JA TRAILERILINKKI

7. Tulse Luper Suitcases • TLS as a cross media production that spreads as a network of different media: • three DVD feature films exhibiting Luper's story • websites archiving the project and the story of Tulse Luper • an online game Tulse Luper Journey • visual workshops, TV-programs, CD-roms and internet site with navigable spatial interface (the Weblers), • exhibitions, stories written by Luper, an opera, a book (Gold) • http://petergreenaway.org.uk/tulse.htm • http://www.tulselupernetwork.com/basis.html • http://www.bolzanogold.com/

8. Peter Greenaway:Cinema Militans Lecture (II) • ” The film is a dinosaur-like medium with upper body already dead but the tail still moving ” • Digital new media technologies and aesthetics from television and web design are able to breathe life into the film medium again • First of all, cinema must be freed from four tyrannies that has tired out the medium's artistic possibilities, of the dictatorship of • actors • camera • frame • Text

9. “ Cinema died on the 31st September 1983 when the zapper, or the remote control, was introduced into the living-rooms of the world. Cinema is a passive medium. The ideas of excessive choice, personal investigation, personal communication and huge interactivity have come a long way since September 1983, and the act of cinema has had to exist alongside and be a partner to a whole new world of multiple-media activities, which have all intrinsically metamorphosed cinema itself. Interactivity and multimedia may well be words that are too familiar anymore to be truly attended to, but they are certainly the major contemporary cultural stimulants.

10. How will cinema cope with them, because it surely must. If the cinema intends to survive, I believe, it has to make a pact and a relationship with concepts of interactivity, and it has to see itself as only part of a multimedia cultural adventure.  We need to re-invent cinema. Every medium needs to constantly re-invent itself.” Let us now re-invent that cinema. We can. We now have the most amazing new tools to do so. Now we need the desire and the courage” Peter Greenaway: Cinema Militans Lectures (1995/2003) http://petergreenaway.org.uk/essay3.htm

11. Tulse Luper Suitcases as a rebirth of film? KUVA ELOKUVASTA Interactivity + Cinema? “There is no such thing as history, there are only historians.“ There is no such thing as story, there are only narrators?

12. 92 stories of Tulse Luper Tulse Henry Purcell Luper, (b 1928 Wales) a geologist, journalist, traveler, archivist and writer In ‘Luper' Symposium and exhibition in New York, historians offer theories and propositions on the life of Tulse Luper, a man who spent most of his life in different prisons and disappeared in the Siberia before the end of the Cold war Luper left behind a collection of 92 suitcases that come to light all over the world for the historians interest Builds up as an encyclopedic adventure through the oddities 20th century history parallel with the invention of Uranium

13. TLS as an experimentation with new grammar of cinema ? • Postmodern storytelling: • Open episodic and encyclopedic narrative with mathematical and allegorical structure/ • Never ending network of stories and sub stories • A literary form rather than dramatic • Comparable to James Joyce: Ulysses, Cortazar: Hopschotch, Perec: The Life; Manual, Musil: Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften

14. TLS as an experiment with new grammar of cinema ? • Excess of media languages and discontinuity of narratives: • TLS doesn’t hide its textual origin but plays with textuality building on excess of stories, listings and sub-narratives, as to make conventional narrative continuity problematic • Re- and hypermediation: • TLS converses an abundance of media languages to the texture of the film to develop a visual language that equates more with human experience in its interactions between reality, memory and imagination • Technology and experience : • Utilising and developing a multi-screen language to explicate the parallellity of experience, stream of consciousness – movement of history and time

15. Tulse Luper Journey – a chiasm of a film and a game

16. Creating 92 Suitcases In the Crucible Studio, Media Center Lume with two artist in residence and more than 50 students the of Medialaboratory, University of Art and Design Helsinki, University of Lappland and Vantaa and Helsinki Polytechnics

17. Starting points for screenwriting and designing TLJ • Defining our roles in the the productions: • Collaborative storytelling; a collecive mystery to be solved and created at the same time • Storytellers in a huge and open constellation of stories and in an endlesslly evolving storyworld • Mystery of Tulse’s character leads to the forgotten and grim secrets of the histories of development, technolgy, suppression • However, Tulse is is only a creation of another writer of another writer etc. It is all about narrating and mediating

18. Suitcase 91 Passport photographs

19. Starting points for screenwriting and designing TLJ • The content of each suitcase tied to the story or character of the TL and the material of the film but each fragment could be an independendent handicrafted fragment in it self • Technical requirements created basic limits for concept design: Flash-animations of very small size plus a 1 minute short films separated to 3 different layers • Abundance of available material: • Each suitcase used the contens of the given case and the everything about film and the networks but also material from other films of Peter Greenaway was available • Each suitcase as a universe in itself

20. Suitcase 69 Maps

21. Starting points for screenwriting and designing TLJ- suitcases • A practice based research case on the questions of Greenaway’s Cinema Militans lecture • Deconstruction the cinematic language and adaptation of it to new media rhetorics/ • With the limitations of the game we are not able to recreate the cinema again but bring cinematic and artistic aesthetics and dramaturgy to gaming • How to adapt a massive encyclopedic film into miniature puzzles and still to produce a aesthetically and emotinally triggering experience?

22. Suitcase 04 Love letters

23. Dramaturgical principles of the game desing • The role of the user in the whole multiplayer online game; to be a researcher among researcher – swift information and findings with other researchers • Idea of Interactivity: even though we wanted to and were also asked to bring the different genres of computer gaming into puzzles we did not want to design shoot’m and kill -games but to dramatize the role of the user to give a sensation of being involved in the mystery of the fictive world in a more uncanny way • We wanted to create more ”Greenmawayish” –player experiene, tie the experience of gaming to twisted allegories of death, coding and techonology, power relationships, shift of identities and the event of narrating as such • Interactivity as an intensified dramatic relationship between the player\s dramatized character and Tulse, as the the relationships between the jailer and the jailed, the oppressor and the victim rather than researcher and his object

24. Suitcase 52

25. Ideas for the Game Concepts • Greenaway’s own games as an inspiration: Drowning by Numbers; games with mortality http://petergreenaway.org.uk/games.htm • Finnish tradition of children and folk gaming and the imaginative roles of the players in them • Existing Flash puzzle game genres and models • Navigable spaces and Myst-like spatial exploring games (Interest in architecture in TLS) • Puzzles of coding and decoding information

26. Suitcase 67 Fruits

27. Dramaturgical principles for the short films • The short film as puzzle in itself • A triptych with separated layers, bits, dimensions; for example separate layers of text, background, characters – or separate beginning, middle and end to be collected in any order • A whole fragment as a poetic reward for the successful gaming • A metaphor, joke or haiku unfolding, developing or commenting the mystery Tulse’s life and identity • A fragment a concise whole in itself, a miniature film

28. / Suitcase 44 Old films

29. Storytelling in digital media • Storytelling in the digital era is not just about the new technolgical innovations, multimedia combinations and new story structures but through the interactivity which challenges and transforms the role of the viewer about ethics of experience • Screenwriter’s point of view: What is designed and constructed in interactive new media productions is the dramaturgy of the conditions of experience and activity in mediated environments • Freedom/Responsibility • Possibilities/Limits From temporal dramaturgy of action to the spatial dramaturgy of experience and activity Player, participator, viewer as the focal point and heart of narrating and in the end possibly a narrator herself / himself

30. Thank You. Kiitos. Contact Riikkapelo7@gmail.com