Fragments
Inspiration and organizing one’s thoughts
“Painters know that everything is a combination of what’s observed, what’s imagined, what’s overheard and what’s been done before.”
- Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things
For a weekend, Flint, the Michigan town made infamous by its water crisis, lived under the Brooklyn Bridge in New York thanks to photographer Zackary Canepari who has documented the struggles of the community. For his Flint Is a Place exhibit, he presented his images, moving and still, as fragments: clips of water flowing out of a tap, photographs of daily scenes, gifs of prom night. The display reminded me of how we experience life: we catch snippets of information here and there, arrange and re-arrange them as we gather more, creating meaning(s) in the process.
I visited the exhibition, itself a fragment to be added to my slew of experiences, as I was attempting to articulate what I’d be sharing –and how– in my role as an Artist-Researcher in Residence in the Transmedia Zone at Ryerson University. Having just gone through the Master of Digital Media, I’m more used to taking the time to collect several slivers of knowledge, and then distil them in a carefully constructed manner.
But this is not that. The purpose here is to share my reflections, findings, failings (inevitable…) and successes (hopefully!) relating to interactive and immersive media often. I have a lot of questions, some about ethics, some about techniques. Many emerged as I was prototyping Virtual Aamjiwnaang, an interactive experience that integrates Indigenous storytelling practices in recounting the lives realities of the people of Aamjiwnaang First Nation, located in Southern Ontario. My intention was to consider first and foremost the original storytellers’ perspectives as opposed to the needs/wants/habits of the audience, as per the current paradigm unambiguously referred to as “user experience design”.
Yet, when I presented my project at the end of the year, I realized that I had overcompensated. I’d spent hours finding ways to address the Aamjiwnaang community’s concerns over how their stories would appear digitally, but seldom thought about the audience’s experience. Though there’s something to be said about disrupting user’s habits –especially when those do not align with the intents of the source–, too much change can be disorienting.
This realization has left me wondering how we can reconcile the audience’s expectations/preferences with those of the storytellers when designing interactive and immersive experiences. What navigation strategies can we use? What role do the aesthetics play? What tools can make these participatory, in a meaningful way?
This said, there’s no need to constantly reinvent the wheel. Some existing practices, in video games, in architecture, in performing arts, amongst others, can help. One of the challenge I faced was streamlining some of the processes required to make an interactive world. For instance, when building the prototype, I spent a majority of my time re-creating in CGI in Unity the entrance street corner of Aamjiwnaang. How can this task be simplified or even automated? How can it be scaled to other communities, or other projects?
And –this will come as no surprise–, one of the biggest takeaways of working on Virtual Aamjiwnaang was that though it’s important to dream big, the experimentation process constantly drives you to scale down. My ambition to build a Canada-wide platform had to be toned down, so I honed in on a community I knew well. Eventually, it became clear that the prototype would have to focus not on the whole territory, but on a single intersection.
For the upcoming ten months, as I explore some of the questions mentioned above and others to further my project, I’ll be working much like the painter from Teju Cole’s quote, combining different sources of inspiration into one interactive experience. New media is not all that unalike the “old”.
