Da. Web-narrative laboratory 2024
The 2-week intensive workshop for students of –Digital art master program at Far Eastern Federal University in Vladivostok, Russia.
The course was prepared and led by Andrey Chugunov.
Participants:
Second-year master students of the –Da. Digital Art speciality.
Description:
The course consisted of 5 lectures, one reading session and 11 practical classes. There were 15 students on the course.

The lecture block touched on the evolution of media and how they have shaped the ways of storytelling. Students familiarized themselves with how narrative has occurred in literature, cinema, computer games, and art. The course included one guest lecture from poet and writer Egana Djabbarova told students about how narrative is constructed in literature and poetry.

The central focus of the course was to create an interactive narrative based on a website. We took an in-depth look at how Net-art artists approach this task.
We have reviewed and analyzed the works of such pillars of net art as Olia Lialina, JODI, Martine Neddam, Rafaël Rozendaal, etc. We also studied the phenomenon and aesthetics of Russian punk journalism of the 2010s.

During the practical sessions, we looked at how to work with step-by-step animations and scripts in Tilda, as well as exploring the node programming environment cables.gl, which allows you to create 2D and 3D scenes for web pages. The assignment asked students to tell a story from their lives by weaving interactive mechanics into the web-based narrative.
Web-narratives:
Short description of projects:

1) Viktoria Batorova - HOW ABOUT ANOTHER PILL
"The daily encounter of night is perceived by one artist with very high stress. Every time he closes his eyes,
the artist doesn't know if he will fall asleep that night, and if he does, how long it will last. And there is no telling what he might dream.
A site is a projection of the artist's daily ordeal of falling asleep and dreaming.

Development = a site-archive of the artist's dreams, and to get into it, you have to "fall asleep".

2) Galina Bikbova - Alone and her cat
"Autofiction story about a thought moment in life where fiction and reality are intertwined".

3) Marina Pereverzeva - 6mm
"This story is about going through a difficult period of life that began in August 2023. The ongoing struggle to make his body work continues to this day, through bureaucracy, the high cost of free medicine, the occasional incompetence of medical staff and the wheel of fortune deciding how his body will work today".

4) Ekaterina Karaseva - 9 nights
"Postmortem dreams. The story is told in the HTML code of the page, to see it you can press F12 or Cntrl+U on each page".

5) Ekaterina Megid - What a person is made of
"A reminder that no matter how broken your heart is, no matter what truths you believe in, no matter how your interests change, you are made of a million stories and very good people. "And that suits you just fine".

6) Maksim Ilchenko - Journey reflections of life
"This project allows me to go through different stages of my life, I can see how past events influence who I am today. As I look at each segment of my life, I gain a new perspective on myself and my actions. This helps me to better understand why I make certain choices and what consequences they may have in the future".

7) Eddie Jonathan Garcia Borbon - Russia in Moments: Particles of Memories
"The project is my personal window into the world of the experiences I had in Russia. This visually dynamic project aims to convey the essence of my travels and stays through a unique collection of photographs. Each time you visit the page, you will be plunged into a new series of images representing special and unique moments.
The main idea behind the project is to capture the magic of these meaningful moments and turn them into visual particles that make up a mosaic of memories, always changing. The page updates automatically, revealing new images and building a continuous visual narrative. Through this interactive interface, I invite visitors to explore the ephemerality of lived moments, where each image is not just a static snapshot; it is a particle contributing to an evolving story. The constant updating of images creates a sense of continuous discovery, reflecting the ever-changing and surprising nature of my travels and experiences in Russia".

8) Andrei Olin - Session_one
"Music is one of those things that helps me deal with stress. It's a kind of psychotherapy session for me right now.
When three is stored, along with it comes the encoding of thoughts and images, which are then sealed inside. One of the primary goals of the examination is to decode the symptoms, to identify the illness.
Decoding is the first stage of therapy".

9) Dmitrii Kobzar - What to cook...
"I've loved mixing different flavours since I was a kid and seeing the result. After all the games and cartoons, I wanted to learn to learn how to cook for myself. This site allows me show who I was at the beginning of this journey and what I have come to in the end".

10) Ioanna Funtusova - poem
"The memory once captured on paper loses its privacy in digital space. It is becoming public, gaining a voice and having the opportunity to become a parable, a moral or a confession.
Because the stories recorded in our childhood diaries often play a bigger role in our lives than we realise.
The viewer is invited to live the moment of the author's encounter with poetry and to determine for themselves whether they could feel what the author felt".

11) Iana Podolskaia - We are all aliens
"My life's journey, which is about learning about human diversity veiled as a tourist spaceflight.
Story Description 1:
Travelling through the solar system with one very specific Martian, who will tell you about his life and how different aliens are.
Story Description 2:
Ever since I was a kid, I've been interested in outer space. Looking up into the night sky thinking about the vastness of the galaxy and wondering "Are we really alone in this universe?".
Yes, I was drawn to the topic of space, I read books, studied documentaries, believed in aliens and dreamed of becoming an astronaut and seeing everything with my own eyes. Time passed, and the question "Are we alone in the universe?" remained unanswered.
But very soon I realised that we are all aliens who came to Earth from different planets. Observing people, I noticed their similarities with each other and their differences, and when I heard a phrase about a stranger who was different from others "It's like he's from another planet" I understood everything! Become a passenger of my spaceship and I will show you why "we are all aliens" and which planet belongs to you.

12) Dmitrii Shchelkunov - A glimpse of the present
"The concept of the project is an attempt to create a visual representation of the stream of consciousness for a certain period of time using graphic elements to display thought patterns and connections. In other words - I propose to look inside my head".