911: Hyper-Cinema Interactive Documentary
Pillsbury, Christine
We live in a time where the barrage of visual, and sometimes other sensory, media has a direct effect on our human ability to connect with a given subject matter. Whether or not this has a positive or negative human impact depends on the situation of and the subject matter itself. Entertainment is one thing, but when our reality is not easily deciphered from what looks like entertainment our human connection can be distorted and even severed.
Take for example our mass experience of the events of 911. Largely due to the media, we have been overwhelmed by the immense amount of visual content associated with those events. In turn, we shut down emotionally, and grasp for a level of desensitization in order to "go about our normal lives".
But what if experience designer could offer a more intimate and personal connection to the story, rather than a never ending feed of Hollywood sequences? Perhaps we can strive to make the subject matter more digestible ‚ more retainable on an individual level? So we no longer struggle to "get beyond", but rather contemplate "getting into" our understanding of the situation.
I believe this is possible through the combination of a few factors:
- Create a space that is relevant to the subject matter's experience (Put the participant in a metaphorical location)
- Utilize non-traditional input mechanisms that allows the user to make a more human to human connection (Capitalize on a participants sense of touch)
- Employ an interactive kaleidoscopic narrative experience (Allow the user to have a more personal dialog with the story)
All this empowers the experience and makes it more tangible for the participant.
Place: Allows actual physical context to the experience.
Time: Moving through the installation, from one interactive video pod to the next. Creating a relationship to between the participants movement and the progression of the story.
Touch: Physical connection with personal object triggers the experience. So that the experience is no longer just audio/visual that we can turn and walk away from, we actually hold a real object that is our very real contextual contact. Connects to the physical world ‚ impacts the virtual world.
