Connecting points of the Recombinant Fiction.
[Link to the complete version of this paper]

The ‘Performative Matrix’ of the ‘Recombinant Theatre’ studied by the Critical Art Ensemble collective in the middle of the nineties now has a new role in contemporary society.
The current era can be thought of as defined by ‘Convergence Culture’ and characterized through the explosion of pervasive personal media, interactive communication in public spaces, large quantities of amatorial content published online, the rising of a culture of participation, and a new kind of sociality generated by the mass of identities on social network platforms.

We finally have the perfect stage for
a genuinely immersive Recombinant Fiction.

This mode of storytelling utilizes multiple forms of media and stages, which are recombined in order to immerse the spectator in a story of a real world. The fluid recombination of identities and of their interpersonal connections via several media in a non linear time line allows for Recombinant Fiction, a multi-platform, multi-channels and cross-media form of storytelling.

The rise of ‘Transmedia Storytelling’, ‘Alternative Reality Games’, ‘Transfiction’, ‘Dispersed Fiction’ and ‘Viral Marketing’ is contributing to the increasing engagement with audiences. As such, Recombinant Fiction becomes an official new form of fiction: an interactive narration that uses the real world like a theatre with an immersive aesthetics of a pervasive spectacle.

This new method blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction, swaps the roles between actor and spectator and plays with the idea of time-bound performances. It reverses-engineer the process of storytelling.
Nothing is simulated, just transformed patterns for real-world actions. In the end the distinction between art and life collapses, and the artifact of human existence emerges.