With the Chronicles of Sophron, we explore the concept of broken walls. We are probably all familiar with these characters who address the readers, or the audience, whether in the theatre or in the cinema. A certain rather talkative Marvel superhero would quickly come to mind. Breaking the Fourth Wall is as old as the theatre, with Greek choirs speaking directly to the audience. But with new technologies opening us up to unexplored dimensions, these concepts are also set to evolve. We could talk about the broken fifth wall when this same mercenary shares his point of view with us as well as with the universe he inhabits and its creators In The Neverending Story, the fifth breaks from the moment the characters in the novel that Bastien reads turn to him to beg for his help. But why stick to only five walls?
Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence open up a particular path to other narrative dimensions. Our vision, at Productions Sophron Arts, invites you to consider these dimensions with an open mind. The Chronicles of Sophron involve creator-characters, character-authors, Dreamers who awaken in their own creation, and this is only the tip of the wall of ice. Here you can find our philosophy on broken walls. Follow us on social networks, discuss your impressions, your ideas, as long as this conversation fascinates you as much as it inhabits us. Above all, stay tuned for our upcoming projects. Because we are not going to limit ourselves to the novels we publish.
The first wall
The three proverbial walls that constitute our understanding of a narrative imply the concept of a closed environment. The reader witness events taking place inside a bubble, like an omniscient entity watching a movie. The first wall separates the audience from the stage. When it comes to a novel, we could state that this first wall draws an imaginary window between the reader and the events and characters found in the ongoing story. This division doesn’t break, and we find it in every story, novel, movie out there.
The second wall
This one separates the characters from their audience. If we assume that characters are existing entities, then this window separating them from the public acts according to Bertolt Brecht’s views on the magic of theatre.
Brecht suggests that an audience will be naturally drawn into a stage play’s ongoing story, and narrative. They will, at the same time, immerse themselves in the play’s universe and find themselves reminded of an enclosed venue called: a theatre.
This magical window separating the characters’ entity and the audience can be viewed as the second wall. At this point, the characters aren’t aware of any universe existing beyond the window separating them from the audience.
The first two walls act as a mean for the artistic performance to create an immersive experience, as Brecht describes.
The third wall
This one separate characters from a world around them. A pristine example comes with Luigi Pirandello’s play Six Characters in Search of an Author. In essence, that third wall acts as a closing device that encompasses the story within a three-dimensional space.
First dimension (first wall): the audience witnesses the characters and their environment.
Second dimension (second wall): the characters witness their own environment.
Third dimension (third wall): the characters still don’t acknowledge the audience but are aware of something greater occurring around them.
And then, we have the fourth and fifth walls:
The fourth wall
For the sake of storytelling, this represents the fourth dimension. In this one, characters acknowledge the presence of a reader, or an audience. The earliest manifestation of this storytelling technique can be traced all the way back to ancient Greece when the chorus addressed the audience directly. We’ve seen other instances of this use in modern plays and movies. The most famous ones include Deadpool, which also occurred in the comic book that served as source material for the film.
For a long time, we considered the magnificent comic book series Animal Man, from Grant Morrison, as being a stellar example of breaking the fourth wall. To me, this series acts as a major influence in my desire to explore this trope, and further experiment on the various possibilities that comes from it. Our more recent understanding of these concepts suggest that a comic book character who doesn’t only interact with the reader, but who is fully aware of the comic book universe surrounding him breaks the fifth wall.
The fifth wall
At the time of this writing, I have yet to pinpoint a clear and undisputable origin behind the concept of a fifth wall. For most of my life, and my experience as an author, I assumed that the moment a character becomes self-aware of an audience, they break the fourth wall. This would apply regardless of that character becoming aware of an entire universe supporting their creation as a character, and the creation behind the entire universe they inhabit, as a character. This idea makes more sense once we study Artificial Intelligence.
For a machine learning device to navigate among a vast and complex matrix, where billions of ideas, concepts, conventions, words exist, there needs to be a vast and expanding number of dimensions. Each of these acts as a specific bubble in which vectors points the robot in a specific direction, allowing the AI (Source, manifesto) to properly interact with prompts, and maintaining an intelligible form of communication. Our physical environment limits itself to three dimensions, encapsulating our immediate surroundings, and a fourth dimension to cover our personal experiences with the concept of time. However, in a reality that doesn’t limit itself to those finite dimensions, we can, mathematically speaking, envision an infinite number of dimensions.
For the sake of positioning our mind and our psyche within an imaginary environment, like the one we’ve just discussed, with characters growing self-aware of their existence as characters, we can end the counting with those five walls, or five dimensions.
The sixth and seventh walls
But what if there could be more? How could we establish the logical background to determine their value, and validate them as possible candidates to expand a character’s awareness? Sophron Arts Productions acts as a vast and complex experiment to explore these universes beyond the limited access that a reader, an author, and a character share. I personally believe that consciousness can be made self-aware of realities beyond that of our biological senses.
The dimensions that we’ve discussed, this far, don’t limit themselves to a physical environment. They represent abstract concepts, closer to mathematical variables than to an observable entourage. In that respect, there can, in theory, be no limit as to the number of dimensions a reader’s psyche could experience. Perhaps an artificial consciousness might be better equipped to navigate among those abstract conventions, but I trust that, with the right infrastructure, a human mind can travel across a vast selection of dimensions, breaking countless walls.
The entire cosmogony behind the fantasy world of Sophron supports this infrastructure. In fact, the entire infrastructure, every element of its foundation, was conceptualized in such a way that readers, and viewers, may break more than just the fifth wall. Same applies to authors and creators, on their journey to explore a character’s self-awareness.