Christy Dena (she/they) is a writer-designer-director of multi-artform and interactive projects, and independent educator and researcher. Christy chats with Stefan and Hugh about her current projects of writing a book on redesigning narrative design away from complicity, an accessible VR project about radical friendship, and a co-operative improv storytelling card game.

It’s not the technology, it’s not the previous media; it’s actually a deeper cultural experience of limited agency.

Christy Dena

When applied to storytelling, negative capability is the art of building strategic gaps into a narrative to evoke a delicious sens of “uncertainty, mystery, or doubt” in the audience. This empowers audiences to fill in the gaps in their own imaginations while leaving them curious to find out more. In Convergence Culture, Jenkins quotes media scholar Mary Beth Haralovich and mathematician Michale W. Trosset: narrative pleasure stems from the desire to know what will happen next, to have that gap opened and closed, again and again, until the resolution of the story.

Geoffrey Long

Wikipedia – Negative Capability

Open, closed and ambiguous ending definition from Reddit

We’ve been trained to believe our truth… our personal truth is not on the table.

Christy Dena

Transient hypofrontality, then, means that for a while, under certain conditions, the focused thinking part of our brain gets a rest. This allows other parts and functions to become more dominant.

paraphrase Dr. Arne Deitrich