As part of my research I have been exploring at a number of interactive projects online that deal with place and identity in some way, create intimacy with the viewer and could be reference points.
I found a few through The Creators Project which led me to one of my favourite producer sites, the Canadian Film Board Interactive: Pinepoint, a beautifully crafted and resonant interactive documentary on a mining town that was created then erased from memory, using personal character portraits and reflections on place, memory, identity and change. This then led to a deeply intimate and disturbing one called A Call from Herman, based on phone calls with the Black Panther prisoner Herman Wallace who has lived in inhuman solitary confinement for 40 years, where an artist has created a vision of a house to live in for him which he will never occupy. And from that a high end production with Arte called In Limbo which enmeshes. your own live, data into interweaving of narratives, interviews and poetic reflections on digital memory and the Internet as global brain.
I also was searching for projects which bridged online and real structures, involving lots of people, and discovered that David Best’s resonant and. beautiful Temple project in Derry was given digital life via a Space commission in the form of a minecraft version built with teams of school children, – Temple Craft – and virtually burned online. This is kind of the reverse of what I did with Burning the Books and I loved the co-opting of my son’s favourite game to create something meaningful and radically jubilant!
Matt also pointed me to an early Blast Theory project Single Story Building, where you are given menu options via a phone call to explore the pre – created private spaces of 100 people. This involved around 2000 branching options for a journey! Then to something simpler in structure Dreams of Your Life, (no longer online but on Vimeo here) the interactive project attached to a documentary Dreams of a Life, about a woman Joyce Vincent – who had friends and family – and whose body was found in her flat three years after she died, totally intact in front of the TV, still on, and no-one had noticed. Deeply moving and incredible story which I had never heard of. By showing me this Matt was underlining the economy of this project as a really simple (the keyword which I had lost sight of..) but powerful, poetic interface and involving the viewer in a set of profound questions on the nature of their relationships and existence.
I alss made an appointment with the Journal of Insomnia, a website that doubles as a confessional as it invites you to make an appointment to listen to the story of a featured insomniac after 10pm one night and then to a whole fresco of audio, video and drawings and to contribute your own at the end. I looked at this a few years ago while I was researching interfaces for Burning the Books and I love it’s atmosphere.. And the quality of the voice as it lulls you to a sleep that will constantly evade you….
So absorbing all this, last week I trialled a simple guided audio journey (a basic prep test for something more interactive) involving a wall, with 10 people, some in person and some via email. I asked people to think of someone they hadn’t seen or been in contact with for a long time and later placed a wall in their way.
All the journeys were vivid, moving and brought up the person’s own very personal unconscious and – in many cases – unresolved relationships. I was taken to fortresses in the desert, walls of roses and thorns and walls that were membranes spanning the universe and met people living and dead…. It was deeply moving, often on both sides. It was very on the therapeutic end of the spectrum though and , listening back to them all and from feedback from Maria and Matt,it worked as a series of dreamscapes, that had a poetic quality and created intimacy with the listener and put them at the centre of the work. However it didn’t do the work of making connections or creating narratives around with the broader themes of the project – actual and lived experiences of borders, walls and internal barriers and the turning points of reaching or at least seeing through to the other side, that are going to characterise this work. He reminded me to keep the vision.
So after a mammoth session where Matt threw up all kinds of possible ways forward, we both felt like it had come back to complexity and an impossible task of connecting the personal and the political in a succinct and powerful way. So I went home a bit despairing.
But then, as sleep does, things kind of re arranged themselves in my brain and I listened through the recording of our session and realised there might be a possible path through.
I started writing an account of one of my own experiences involving an episode at Tehran airport, and turned it into an interactive script, with some further input from Matt as I took him through it. I’m going to edit /trial it these next few days…
I only have two weeks left! I have hardly seen anyone this end of town I had planned to and there is a lot I want to achieve before the end of April – though time is sliced between here and family – but this feels like a concrete direction and I have to say the mentoring , the understanding of what I am trying to get to, and. the reminder to break down the intangible process into tiny, concrete steps is SO what I needed.
It’s hailing outside. And there is a rehearsal for Operation Black Antler going on. I stayed last night and was able to be up early writing. This kind of space is giving me some clarity at last
