Turning the ordinary into the exceptional: digital storytelling and the works of Daniel Meadows.

Creative works are no longer to be intended as a given product, but as an ongoing ‘emergent’ process at the intersection between porous media boundaries. The exceptionality of the work of art is questioned by highlighting the interstitial, processual and translational dimension of any cultural production aiming at being recognised as aesthetic. Narratives ― novels or hypertexts, art exhibitions or cultural events, video games or political campaigns, travelogues or company profiles ― spread over multiple platforms and media, calling for a renewed interest in the ancient art of storytelling. In the new participative transmedia environment, storytelling travels across all sorts of cultural fields thanks to the re-creative and re-distributive processes allowed by the Internet and social media sharing. The medium enhances the practice: storytelling combines oral narrative (mode) in the form of a script (genre) but uses a variety of media (blog, web page, social networks) to create meaning. Emotive language is also essential. These discursive aspects involved in storytelling will be illustrated by examining by the work of Daniel Meadows (born 1952), an English photographer and participatory media specialist who pioneered digital storytelling techniques in Britain. Meadows’ work was influenced by Ivan Illich’s ideas as presented in Tools for Conviviality (1975) and the activity of the Center for Digital Storytelling at the University of California, Berkeley. In this perspective, he has produced fictional short video/photo narratives that focus on the participants’ creativity, dramatising cultures, traditions and life stories. Meadows questions the role of the Author by foregrounding the ordinary as a source of aesthetic value. The stories claim their exceptionality by embracing a sort of ‘anarchist’ view of society where individualism is the most vital source of aesthetics. Digital stories place fragments of a life on a broader world context and re-enact the point of view on History of the subjects involved. The paper suggests that visual culture, Heritage and narration are an area of mediation that turns the ordinary into the exceptional.