Puntellare.

This multimodal project was inspired by the visual language of disaster reconstruction and the stories collected during my research of the 2009 and 2016 earthquakes in Italy. Audio of the seismic frequencies causing the earthquakes was reverberated through the scaffold pipes. A bed of foam and construction materials allowed for intimate interaction with the memory map suspended above, providing the researchers experience and giving a sense of the research process.

Reik (1949) posits a definition of empathy made of four key components: identification, incorporation, reverberation and detachment. This process involves focusing attention onto another in order to become immersed in their contemplation. Then, to make the other’s experience your own by internalising it, to then experience the other’s experience cognitively. The final step is to identify the distance between these components in order to develop an understanding of the emotional and situational experience around the information.

Gaining the interest of an audience in a matter, in order to allow an empathic connection towards something intangible, has the potential to block any positive action (Batson, 1990). This is due to the fact that empathy is a product of experience; an empathic reaction is formed from being able to relate to someone else’s situation (Reik, 1949). Without this connection, there is a potential to lose the attention of the audience, through dissociation from their own reality. This is where my interest lies in synthetic empathy, formed through a spatial narrative within multimodal information experience design.