Existence is now a bizarre thing without my alter ego ACTIV and their pathetic antagonist Jeff Shroud. It hasn’t been 24 hours and I’m still routinely checking twitter hoping that a salacious tweet might appear that I can share, helping to build ACTIV’s narrative…. Enough about my existential crisis though.
Waiting outside an exhibition that you’ve curated whilst two people experience it is a nerve-wracking but exciting experience. Although the content we had placed in these rooms was thoughtfully curated and laid out so that information could be uncovered in loose order, each experience is personal. I’m intrigued to go back over the footage of both Dan and Rachel and to see how they described the room. From what I can remember the weak links that both Ned and myself had earlier identified were picked up on but generally the narrative was experienced in a why that was consistent with our initial proposal. We wanted people to uncover a plethora of information broadening their understanding of narrative yet if information was missed the general narrative wasn’t compromised. One failing of our planning was that this understanding of the narrative was heavily dependent upon following the story via twitter and blogs. Often there were items in the room that only made sense when read in conjunction with a particular paragraph of a blog post. This is a rewarding experience for those who discover the link but could be seen as meaningless for those who do not.
If we were to present the installation again I believe that we would spend more time in creating multimedia content such as audio tracks and exploring the use of computers further. We had knocked around these ideas in planning but due to the fact we wanted the room to read as a real office we opted to go with just content that would be present it this way. I think that audio tracks might have been useful to convey information but by would have distanced the audience from their role within the story as intruders.
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