Visuo-auditory narratives such as narrative film are now unquestionably a central medium for the negotiation of issues of social relevance in myriad spheres of discourse, including the general public, in education, in transcultural studies, and so on. Yet despite the medium's prominence, exactly how this works is still poorly understood: the gulf between fine grained technical details of visuo-auditory narratives and abstract configurations of social import is still considered by many researchers to be too great for effective research.

The proposed Creative Unit addresses precisely this central research challenge by focusing on a highly constrained and yet crucial component of the visuo-auditory medium: the creation of emotionally-engaging narratives. The Creative Unit will develop empirically and cognitively well-founded formalisations of narrative and its workings by combining well specified and mutually complementary approaches from:

• hermeneutic, humanities-based analyses of narrative patterns,
• aesthetic and historical analysis of the medium of film, its recipients and contexts of reception, and
• fine-grained computational cognitive modelling of visuo-auditory narrative interpretation from the viewpoint of embodiment and formal narrative semantics.

These formalisations will in turn be tightly bound to visuo-auditory aesthetics by means of the new mediating level of discourse and textuality. This combination is unique in the international state of the art, and multiplies the individual strengths of several research groups across faculty boundaries in general, and within the University of Bremen in particular. By interfacing and employing the state of the art methods that have been developed in each of its contributing areas, the Creative Unit will complement existing approaches to media as a social phenomenon from media and communication studies. Moreover, the interdisciplinary nature of this project will open up exciting lines of future cooperation within the university, nationally, and internationally.