Choice in Interactive Audiovisual

A Discursive Semiotic Approach

Abstract

This article proposes to understand choice as a fundamental enunciative element of interactive audiovisual, drawing on the tools of discursive semiotics. It argues that, although also present in traditional audiovisual, choice acquires in interactive audiovisual a constitutive dimension of the discourse’s own manifestation, since it depends on the addressee’s agency. Based on the articulation between the number of explicit options and the durativity regimes that organize their actualization, a syntactic typology comprising eight elementary configurations identified within the corpus examined is proposed. The semantic dimension of these structures is then examined, showing how similar syntactic organizations can produce distinct effects of meaning depending on the semantic investment made in each situation. Finally, the effects of these choices are examined across the different levels of the generative trajectory of meaning. It is concluded that choice constitutes one of the fundamental organizing principles of interactive audiovisual, offering an analytical framework applicable to the analysis of new works in this language.