“I think we would be wrong saying that better interactivity is when people are highly involved, and bad is when they’re not,” Mr. Sweeney said by phone from Montreal. “Sometimes just moving a mouse in a very simple, minimal manner can be a beautiful metaphor of something. Sometimes we make people do something more radical. Taking an appointment is very radical.”

But he noted too that cinema has always existed at the intersection of art and technology. Sound. 3-D. Even documentaries. “Before ’59 all sound was postproduction,” he said, “and then in ’59 sound was synced to images at the same time they were captured, and that changed the perspective. It’s really about using technology to tell stories in an artful way.”

Stories equal narrative, but where exactly narrative exists in Storyscapes depends on the project. In “This Exquisite Forest” — inspired by the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpses, in which players add to a drawing without being able to see the previous contribution — animators build on one another’s work, and the results will be on view at the festival.

The creators of “A Journal of Insomnia” collected thousands of contributions from insomniacs, so the story has been under way for some time. The interviews captured in another offering, “Robots in Residence,” will be used to make a postfestival documentary, although one of its directors, Alexander Reben, is really in it for the interactivity. The project is based on his master’s thesis, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the relationships between robots and people. His co-director, Brent Hoff, is more the bona fide filmmaker; Mr. Reben’s interest is in how Tribeca audiences will deal with robots that are calculated to be cute.

“A lot of the dimensions are based on the ratios of a baby’s heads and eyes and that sort of thing,” he said. “Cuteness triggers many effects on the brain, and by making the robot look cute, it seems more vulnerable.” He said that a few years ago, during the testing phase at M.I.T., a runner from the Boston Marathon encountered one of the robots. The runner, unable to return home to Germany because of the eruption of the Icelandic volcano, wound up “spilling his guts,” Mr. Reben said. “He seemed to want to talk to someone.”