Filmmaker, interaction designer, interactive multimedia author and researcher, born in Tel Aviv, holds an MA in Interactive Multimedia from the Utrecht School of the Arts and an MFA in Film production from Tel Aviv University's department of Film and TV.
Between 1998-2003 Noam was a junior asst. professor at the Film and TV department of Tel Aviv university, where he taught film aesthetics as well as several new media workshops. During that period he became editor and communities product manager for earthnoise.com, a video sharing website that preceded YouTube and offered online video editing tools.
In 2001 he began work (with Udi Ben Arie, Amnon Dekel and others) on the Interface Portrait storyteller system, an approach to interactive storytelling which seeks to posit gesture-based communication with a storyteller character as a means to drive an interactive story experience. The system and installations that were based on it were presented internationally at conferences and new media venues such as Upgrade! and the Netherlands Institute for Media Arts.
Noam's research project "Interfaces for Storytelling" continues his involvement with both interactive digital storytelling and interaction models, which he views as no less authorial expressions than the stories themselves. This project aims to propose a theoretical framework for the description, analysis and critique of Interactive Digital Storytelling (IDS) from a cultural-analytic perspective. It examines the shifting relations between author, work and subject. The project argues that works of IDS are userly texts which differ from previous forms of storytelling by virtue of their emphatic appeal to the subject's interaction with the work. This interaction is understood as an embodied performance motivated by epistemological and hermeneutic engagement rather than by a desire for control and agency. The significance for IDS works of the subject's performance is apparent in the structure of the procedural structuring of the processes of meaning-production and subject-construction. By examining these processes in conjunction with the IDS work's two main components - encoded story and interaction model - this project's theoretical framework makes possible interpretation, discussion and appraisal of IDS works as theoretical objects for issues such as authority, narrativity and agency.
Personal website: http://www.knoller.com/