I began my process of synthesizing and clarifying my ideas by asking myself a couple of framing questions:

What does it look like to make art that is interwoven and in dialogue with the the living, changing tapestry of its audience? How might a creative work that has an intention to effect positive change also witness, reflect, and transform alongside its users as a value agnostic, organic complex-adaptive ecosystem? 

I went through my old projects, made a few mind maps and voice memos, parsing out my ideas. And then yesterday, I (miraculously) stumbled on a project that achieves nearly everything I’ve been trying to synthesize and explain. Better yet, the project description uses language and imagery that reads like second skin.

I’ve excerpted and put in bold the elements that resonate most directly with my envisioned thesis concept.

“Motto finds a way to be both documentary and fiction—incorporating participants’ lo-fi, un-staged footage into its own emotional narrative. It’s like a mirror ball that refracts its audience’s imaginations, rearranging the way they look at the world.”…..”When viewers experience Motto, they enter a world of meaning-making and play. As the ghost story unfolds, they are asked to contribute to the experience—it’s a scavenger hunt of miniature video clips, each one an easy, digestible task. Motto uses an ingenious, hidden logic to weave these videos into its narrative, letting the viewers’ own images become stand-ins for the narrator’s daydreams and mementos. Gradually—and, in a crucial design choice, anonymously—everybody who experiences Motto is joining forces with those who have experienced it before, adding intimate fragments of their lives to a pool of collective memory. Motto is told in episodes—an hour-plus experience presented as a series of discrete chapters. Because it lives on the web, as an interactive experience for mobile devices, users can take it with them, discovering each episode at their own pace. It up-ends the traditional role of the spectator, transforming the passive viewer into a protagonist and co-creator. You can contribute to the story even as you explore it—shooting clips with your phone that reappear in surprising and even emotional ways….

Incidentally, I am not looking to tell a ghost story, and my guess is the machine learning algorithm used to generate the magic of this project is a teensy bit outside of my wheelhouse.

That said, there are many elements of *Motto’s description that resonate deeply with my creative vision –  I’m thrilled to have their language as a reference.

My original idea for thesis was a layered, transmedia interactive experience, drawing on interviews and other media from our IMA community – with the aim of expressing multiple perspectives on one moment in time through different forms, including a podcast, three.js, docu-fiction, an interactive experience driven web app (inspired by Let’s Take a Walk).

I spent my winter break trying to prototype the first part of the project in AFrame just using personal footage, and some of the greatest hits from 2020’s news reel. It was a painstaking process, and in retrospect, I’m not sure it was the best use of my time.

I still love the idea of co-creative experience compilations. My take on Take a Walk With Me was to do Come Home With Me, and create a series of intimate moments facilitated by strangers, (or role models, or fictional characters) –  that the user is unlikely to spend time with in “ordinary” life.

The gist is that the “guide” leads the user through an embodied audio experience – whether it’s in the kitchen, at a desk, in the bathroom –  partnering with you, guiding you through something that they do in a particular way that brings richness to their lives – making an omelette, reading the paper, preparing to paint, etc. The concept is, that in doing a process with them, their way, you step out of your habitual role, and experience your home, yourself, and your rhythm, in a totally new and fresh way…. you don’t just listen to some expert and halfway follow along, passively paying partial attention and getting an interesting new concept while you multitask, you live into the experience of something unfamiliar…in your most familiar context.

Elements of this concept are expressed really beautifully in Motto and Let’s Take a Walk.

I have a ton of thoughts on how to iterate and layer that direction…but it feels  incomplete.

While untangling my diverse ideas, the thread that comes up again and again is investment in embodiment, sensory specificity, and the notion of modular transmedia interactions. So, to me, that means creating a system of Lego like pieces of interconnected, but distinct experiences designed to be encountered at different times, through different sense organs, and in different environments/contexts.

I imagine each “Lego” would target a specific sense or seek to stimulate a particular response from the nervous system. And like primary pigments blended and recombined into an endless spectrum of colors, these “primary content Lego’s” could combine and communicate a vast array of meaning and experience for a user.  So, for example, I might create a podcast and an LED installation in NYC, where the language of the installation refers to a question in the podcast. Encountering content visually in a public context and aurally in a private context, creates a third element – maybe it’s a sense of recognition, familiarity, connection, memory….uncertainty. I don’t know. But what we hear, see, feel, taste, etc. leave imprints in our minds and bodies in distinct ways.

(Meditative Stories is a podcast that does beautiful work with creating juxtaposition and inviting embodiment – i can see myself doing something like that, but taking it further, and layering one or two separate elements like haptic feedback, or a collective OM chant, along the lines of I heard there was a secret chord.

My goal is to create new experiential imprints that habituate integrated awareness and moments of mindbody synchronization….similar to we’ve been conditioned and habituated to respond to phone notifications and clickbait, but with more tentacles.

Ultimately, I want my work to serve as a tool that’s loosely analogous to an encouragement stick in Soto Zen– a method users will turn to out of a hunger desire to wake up, shake off the cocooned stupor of life lived on autopilot, and to connect with their own embodied magic..even (especially?) when the objective circumstances of life really suck.

Artist/Project Inspirations:

Marina Abramovic – *The Artist is Present, Rhythm Zero (My hero of all heroes….I also think it might be interesting to do a Zoom homage to Marina and The Artist is Present)

Maïmouna Guerresi

Anish Kapoor

Shirin Neshat

James Turrell

Ann Hamilton: *Event of a Thread (this is so close to what I would want to create if I was focused on a single experience) https://www.annhamiltonstudio.com/images/projects/armory/AHamilton_armory_pkg_final_full_res_public.pdf

Jenny Holzer https://projects.jennyholzer.com/projections

*Motto https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/motto/

*Let’s Take a Walk at Barbican https://www.nonzeroone.com/projects/lets-take-a-walk/

*Meditative Story https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/meditative-story/id1472106563?i=1000444999644

I heard There Was a Secret Chord https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/i_heard_there_was_a_secret_chord/

The Enemy https://www.nfb.ca/interactive/the_enemy/