Why do people always want to know more stories? What can be considered a good story in this post-linear narrative age with or without the help of new tools? Sometimes I listen to others’ life stories to experiment others’ experience. Did I live their lives while listening? Was that an effective story-telling?

I am always into story-telling, and this interest remains a habit and a motivation for me to figure good ways to tell stories. However, I figured that good stories often lie in personal memory. The closer to one’s memory, the more powerful the story would be. Also, if there was more shared sensual experience, the story readers would feel closer to one’s memory. This happens in literature a lot, and we never lack of examples of this. Marcel Proust , Virginia Woolf had all created successful examples which will be explained more in the coming project statement chapter of this document. After realizing this connection, my belief in story-telling has shifted to rebuilding memory through sensual experience.

According to my experience as a story listener, I was often led to another different space from the present one while listening to a good memory story. Often, what happened in the story was far more influential to my mind. It formed a second ambient on top of the old space at the same time. In other words, the mental space made of others’ memory led me somewhere else but the old environment. To sum up, my idea of listening to stories can be explained as a mental, physical and sensual journey. The process can be illustrated by using this formula :
(From narrator)
Remember his/her story
+ Tell his/her memory by using sensual information
= A second space being generated while narrating.
This is my foundation of experimenting with spatial and sensual experimentation in narratives.

[ It’s really about story-telling! ]
I am the baby in my family, and always the first one to go home. After turning the keys to our family door, all I could do in the afternoon was to wait for everybody to come back home. The first one there was my second elder sister. I started to talk to her about my school day and followed her form the front door to her room. What did I have for lunch? What did I learn and what were the jokes that were told by our teacher? What happened on the street on my way home? What was the cartoon in the afternoon about? When she needed to take a shower before dinner, I would crouch outside of the bathroom door, continuing talking. Or I would stay outside of our kitchen talking to my busy mother, who was cooking for the whole family. During dinner time, it was still me talking because everybody was tired of talking at the table after a working day. Instead, they happily enjoyed listening to my day. Sometimes I invented stories myself, and I would exaggerate a little bit to make them laugh. After there were no more people interested in listening to me, I would go back to my desk and start writing a journal about what I had had for a whole day.

So that became a habit of mine, which is retelling the same story to different audience. The rearrangement made the original story slightly different each time, which brought audience different surprises. Telling a story is like using Legos to build a castle. It’s always possible to start a new castle by rearranging the elements from an old one. New castles might not be totally different from the old one, but the difference surely changed space occupants’ behaviors in the second space. Same with stories, the new structure could lead to different reading surprises.
When studied in ITP, narration was still my main concern. Thanks to the post-linear narrative class in ITP offered in the spring of 2006, I gained a strong disbelief in interactive story-telling. A so-called interactive way to show or tell a story with options destroyed the nature of a good story. Do story-readers want interactivity? Do they feel satisfied by their choices in stories? When it became a digital story, we tried to add interactivity into every part of it. We tried to knock out analog pieces and put some thing interactive back. The results became more satisfying and I went back to more classical ways of story-telling after getting disappointed. I gained a chance to rethink all elements in narrative, even though we are already in a post-linear narrative period.
I followed Proust’s description about taste and smell when reading his memory about a village from a cake soaking in herb tea. The sentences he mentioned about smell or sensual experience was my climax interactive moments in story-telling. They turned on some interesting memories for me as if I could be at his present instead of mine. My current fact was influenced by the space, which was generated from his narratives. The reality was blurry mixed with both worlds. And the grey area was interactivity.

So I started my first smell project in the post-linear narrative class. The non-linear story-creating process brought by smell gave me new rules about interactivity in communication, which was natural and helpful, and remained surprising. I felt confident about my results and became more curious about the future picture of digitizing smell, touch and flavor. What can be done when people can communicate through intimate sensual experience? Will we hit the limitation of communication?

This work will be an installation intended to simulate a subtropical rainy afternoon. It will consist of a patio-size umbrella decorated with several smells inside of the umbrella. Those smells are smells that I have in my memory about subtropical rainy afternoons in Taiwan. People will be able to smell freely when walking under the umbrella and will experience my memory, which is my narrative of a rainy day :
(This will be what users will feel when under the personal space.)
“It’s raining.”
I was instantly being separated from the outside world under an umbrella under the pouring rain. I could do nothing but waiting. It became a world of my own; I am on my own.

The rain was too loud to be heard; I, myself, was good enough to be listened to.
It would be difficult to see through the rain, but it’s easier to see through my mind.

I hear something
touch something
smell something,

I feel them indeed.
Them in me, me and my memory.
In that way I feel more isolated, focusing, and imaginative.

The reason that I use an umbrella to show a rainy day scene was to isolate each visitor’s experience. My intension is to leave more space to them during the whole visit under the personal setting.

(My story behind will be part of my memory in my childhood with my grandmother.)
There was always nobody but grandma home when I got off from elementary school. I liked to listen to her cooking : there were lots of different sounds about washing cookers, fried pork with garlic, and cut celery into big chunks. She liked to add sauce, and the combination made me thought of her instantly. When I was home, there were two bowls of rice noodles, and we would exchange what we had in our bowls in the middle of our meal : she gave me the pork and I picked the celery to her. Grandma wasn’t that healthy after I grew more, so we would go buy lunch boxes instead she cooking for me. She always added a big chicken thigh on the top of the box. We carried the big box with strong chicken thigh all the way back home hand in hand. The greasy smell full of vinegar, ginger, soy bean sauce, and the old smell of an kitchen was my definition of lunch air.
When it’s around one, it started to pour. We always sat in the living room together eating the sorbet she made and waiting for the rain to stop. I would play her hand with lots of wrinkles, and the bracelet she wear. She always looked at somewhere far, or took a nap while we couldn’t go anywhere else.
The rain usually stopped suddenly in Taiwan, and the whole environment would full loud sounds from birds and insects. Grandma and I usually went for a walk along the osmanthus bushes. She would collect and pick some in her handkerchief. “The handkerchief will smell good for a long while.” she said. That was my air when walking on a brick road with her after the summer rain. When we were home, she would burn the incense and prayed another safe day. I looked at the ashes from the incense falling on our wet front balcony. And, an evening soon came with the smoke, with the humidity in the streets.

People who are sensitive to air changes (humidity,temperature...),interested in narrations in different forms.

People enter the installation and touch rain simulated by wires, smell the scent objects that hid in the rain, and they will hear the sound from a subtropical rainy day.

This work will be an installation intended to simulate a subtropical rainy afternoon. It will consist of a patio-size umbrella decorated with several smells inside of the umbrella. Those smells are smells that I have in my memory about subtropical rainy afternoons in Taiwan. People will be able to smell freely when walking under the umbrella and will experience my memory, which is my narrative of a rainy day.

It's a big umbrella hung with transparent wires and scent objects to simulate rain and release scent. There's also speaker inside playing the rainy day ambient sound on a subtropical island.