First of all, I enjoyed the story of Bandersnatch and the way that it breaks the 4th wall, allowing the user become part of the story. It was fun and engaging for the most part, but I don’t fully believe that this was the “data space” that Bill Viola was thinking of.
“When I had my first experience with computer videotape editing in 1976, one demand this new way of working impressed upon me has remained significant. It is the idea of holism. I saw then that my piece was actually finished and in existence before it was executed on the VTRs. Digital computers and software technologies are holistic; they think in terms of whole structures. Word-processors allow one to write out, correct, and rearrange the whole letter before typing it. Data space is fluid and temporal, hardcopy is for real—an object is born and becomes fixed in time. Chiseling in stone may be the ultimate hard copy.”
This movie is fixed in time, with a set number of pathways for the viewer to navigate and each pathway coming back to a fixed amount of endings. What I take from this quote is that the data space Viola is talking about is fluid, it has a structure that changes or has the ability to be changed. Yes, the film’s endings could technically be changed, but there are only a few different alternatives, and each alternative is still a fixed ending. I think a truly holistic data space would be something that can actually be changed, for example, code in a program or website. The writer of the code is exploring the data space in a way that the viewer is not when watching Bandersnatch by actually changing the end product and nothing is “written in stone.”
I don’t think that this format is something that will become standard practice for cinema because of how much work it takes to create these alternate endings and because the amount of paths possible is not infinite, but gives the user the illusion of being infinite unless the user goes through each path until they have seen them all. Just like Stefan, the viewer thinks they are making choices but in the end come back to a fixed ending. I, personally, would rather sit down and watch a well written, entertaining movie or video that is linear in appearance and I think that most people would agree with me.