Unstable Ground.
In collaboration with Jack Wild.
“A collaboration between Madelaine Dowd and myself, Unstable Ground is an interactive exhibition installation exploring the interconnected stories of the 2009 L’Aquila earthquake in Italy.
I have been experimenting with the applications of web technologies in exhibition design and Madelaine has been researching post-disaster relief and how communities can be rebuilt following a natural disaster. As part of her research she talked to earthquake survivors about their experiences, and how they have been rebuilding their lives in the years since.
We wanted to create an interactive installation which would allow users to explore the interviews in a way which was engaging and encouraged focused listening. The installation also needed to be cheap and easy to distribute, setup and run, and powered by consumer electronics so that it could be taken back into the disaster zone as part of a temporary pop-up exhibition.” - 2016, Unstable Ground Case Study, Jack Wild.
(Interviewee's photographed above, photography credit Oliver McLaughlin.)
“The first task was to make sense of the hours worth of interviews recorded. The conversations were annotated, mapped, edited, and divided into shorter clips, of around 30 seconds each. We then identified how the clips followed on to one another, before finally identifying connections between clips from the different interviews. The clips were then mapped in 3D space, with clips referring to the event being in the centre, and bring placed further out as the time since the earthquake passes, and then drew the paths of the interview’s progression and connections between different interviews. This was to form the basis of the interface by which the interviews could be explored.
Using the web as the platform meant that the installation could be distributed digitally and easily setup without the need for in-depth technical knowledge or specialist equipment which would likely not be available in a smaller community hosting a pop-up exhibition.” - 2016, Unstable Ground Case Study, Jack Wild.
We had to translate my spatial mapping of the conversation narrative in relation to the earthquake and the present. The images above are my different concepts for mapping out all the data. Jack and I then came together to create the digital architecture, which is shown below.
We created a web based platform that allowed divers to navigate their way through the narratives of the interviews. They would interact with the information and through the use of a digital architectural landscape, physically move their way though the narrative time lines.
The interface was placed inside a structure that allowed for an immersive and intermit experience. As the user would navigate through the digital landscape, their physical environment would respond. (Each interviewee's had a colour thread as shown in the interface display reel.) The structure surrounding the user was opaque, allowing other visitors to develop a curiosity before engaging with the interface.
This project was an experiment with regards to the ‘attention economy’. How can we get people to really engage with information and develop deep empathic understandings of events? In this case, it was inspired by ‘gamifying’ and narrative.
