Storyge — My Journey Through Industries & Mediums of Expression (Part 1)

This blog series acts as the backstory to the ‘The Immersive Experience Designer’s Palette Introduction’ blog series

“Don’t just tell a story, show it to us through accessing your own archive of experiences.”*1

Carla Inez Espost, ‘Afrikaner Apokolips Shrine’ 2017. Multimedia interactive installation.*i

Carla Inez Espost

I’m obsessed with ‘Living Visual Narratives’ and enjoy developing stories for content across all platforms.

By making ‘antenarratives’ I integrate the private and the public in order to create new myths that help reclaim authority for the self against skewed ideologies.

I deconstruct reality, construct the deconstruction into fiction, whereby I then further reconstruct my own fictions into a non-linear, rhizome-like, ‘Living Visual Narrative’.

My interest lies in the storyteller’s act of self-reflexive recontextualization of personal experience into a distant political context.

This act defines the power of the storyteller aka mythmaker.

Using self-created myths as personal anchors, the storyteller helps his/her listeners to understand their relationship towards everything around them.

Thus the storyteller’s use of personal fictions enables his/her audience to integrate their lives into the bigger fiction (ideology) of their daily reality.

This montage of my portfolio also works as a concept depicting what ‘Afrikaner Apokolips’ might look like.

Today I can confidently call myself an Immersive Experience Designer, however —

Once upon a time I too was one of those kids who always drew. But I was never fully satisfied with ✒️ and 📄.

It simply just didn’t serve the outcome I had conjured up in my imagination.

So soon, in my pre-teens, technology found me in the form of an old digital film camera my parents had.

This introduced me to the amazing tool that easily duplicated realistic representations can be to a visual storyteller.

Finally, I was able to start making some final products that I was, somewhat satisfied with.

This work acts as sketch for the character Bettie van der Merwe (Jane-Lee Gouws). All photos were taken on 35mm film and digitally scanned.

Then my dad got a new digital camera from work and thus my interest in video was born.

Again things changed, possibilities grew and so did my imagination.

I kinda kept digital and analogue worlds at that time though, as I was trying to focus on bettering my skills in separate aspects of the creative process.

Carla Inez Espost, ‘Ineffable’ 2011. Digital Video Montage of Found and Filmed footage. (Even though this work was made more than 10 years after I was first introduced to video, with footage taken on an Ipod, cellphone, digital camera, Super 8mm film camera and various other types of devices, I see it as the epitome of my childhood interest in using video to document the world around me.)

On the one side, I painted, drew and made collages, using found material, or my own images.

I printed images from photographs and videos I took, scanned things I found and retouched and printed whatever could fit the representation of a thought I had.

And on the other side I had my fingers in the sculpting pie.

Carla Inez Espost, ‘Mzansi 2075’ 2014. Mixed Media Collage.

A sculpture I made back in early 2015. It’s a model of the game environment for Afrikaner Apokolips, a VR RPG I’m developing, set in Cape Town, South Africa. Left, is the layout of the environment from above. On the Right, is the clay model that I used to make the mould of that you can see in the image below.

Carla Inez Espost, ‘//Hui !Gaeb City’ 2015. Perspex, Polyurethane and LED lights.

However at some point I had the urge to reflect.

And here’s where it all started really.

The beginnings of my battle with Analogue/Digital.

Enter chaos

Left and Middle, the unsorted material of my mind. Middle, Jane-Lee Gouws (Bettie). Right, me trying to map the material parallel to my mind (2011).

At first I tried printing out representations of everything in my digital life.

This didn’t serve me well enough — for obvious reasons.

Then an artist and mentor at the time, Josh Ginsburg shared his method of building the architecture of his associative memory on the computer.

I followed suit and converted to digital, labeling my whole library with unique tags that could help me ‘write’ with pictures.

An early multimedia script development method I experimented with on Google’s Picasa application.

Soon though, this flat digital world wasn’t enough either.

Luckily, thanks to a great artist called Kathryn Smith (who was my supervisor at the time) I got introduced to Installation Art.

Finally I could incorporate tactility, interaction and sound all into into one mix.

It came naturally — I easily arranged analogue and digital elements into ‘spatially framed’ immersive experiences.

It felt like coming home, because now I had all the precious senses on my storytelling palette.

I could also now document and edit these site specific installations, thus not lose all the precious effort I had spent putting it all up.

This work deals with differences between inside/outside — and acts as an investigation into the fantasy genre as a vehicle for inward escape.

But wait, there’s more…

‘My Journey Through Industries & Mediums of Expression’ continues in Part 2 here.

Footnotes:

*i — A live tribute feed could be sent to #AAshrine for the duration of the show.

More blogs in this series

My Journey Through Industries & Mediums of Expression

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

This blog series acts as the backstory to the ‘The Immersive Experience Designer’s Palette Introduction’ blog series

A) The Immersive Experience Designer’s Palette

B) An introduction to Immersive Experience Design

C) The Immersive Experience Design Workflow

D) Storyge — Towards a solution

References

1. Miss Van Der Merwe, my High School Language teacher