The Anishaman Presents Gilgamesh: Where Rap Meets Animation, Interactivity, and Fog

Abstract

With the advent of the internet and the ever-increasing capabilities of digital technology, today’s society is in the midst of a golden era of interactive storytelling. While digital innovations have facilitated and accentuated interactivity, it has always been a crucial aspect of storytelling. Existing millenniums before the written word, oral tradition is the earliest form of storytelling and arguably the foundation of interactive storytelling. At oral tradition’s core is a live human interactivity, emanating from the chemistry between the storyteller and the participatory audience. The practice is multi-disciplinary utilising a vibrant array of performative and visual arts, such as songs, dances, masks, and jewellery.

This research proposes that digital innovations can play a role in reinvigorating oral tradition for contemporary audiences, and in doing so rediscover the roots of interactive storytelling. The Anishaman Presents Gilgamesh is a live one-man rap retelling of Gilgamesh, wherein the storyteller conjures animation on a fog display and rear projection screen and interacts with their audience via mobile phone surveys. This paper reports on the trials and tribulations of mounting such a multi-disciplinary unwieldly beast.

Gilgamesh is central to this project, due to its status as one of the first oral traditions ever written down, emanating from Sumerian oral traditions as old as 2500 BCE. While Anishaman’s adaptation is arguably unhinged, the format is shaped to leverage oral tradition’s interactive attributes, namely: performance, participation, malleability, and voice. Performance is embodied by the show’s performative influences: the magic lantern show, Étienne-Robertson’s Fantasmagorie, Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur, and the Japanese benshi. These directed the project towards a synergy between the showman and the screen. Participation and malleability are modernised through the use mobile phones interactivity to augment the connection between storyteller and showman. Lastly, voice is embodied by the contemporary verbal art of rap. Naturally, these elements influenced the production pipeline, which culminated in two live performances of Anishaman. Overall, the project’s blending of narrative techniques and technology supplements and augments the interactive attributes of oral tradition, ultimately reconciling the oldest form of interactive storytelling with the latest iterations.