What is possible with storytelling?
physical artefacts, design process itself
Joseph:
- carpets - why not? genesis of the carpet, the sewing machine
- had worked in animation and videography
- textiles - tufting gun "an enigma"
- "I'm gonna try and use this thing like a paintbrush"
- propellant, dangerous, suggestive
- guns are an ongoing issue in the US - was having conversations about this
- how to link the tufting gun to something more official - NRA - the National Rug Association
- what we do is make rugs and talk about things, and try to unpack complex issues, reflecting on the complex nature of gun rights and the trifecta of values that are tacit
- if you're pro guns, you might be pro life, and you're probably pro war - and those three things as core values, there's a lot of stories that come back to that
- Experience of police brutality
- In 2020, the carpets he worked on were an exploration of those values and contrasting them, using the carpet to tell some stories
- carpet making - landscape and materials of that landscape, tradtional carpet making
- fireworks - we love them in the US; fireworks are always present in any political action
- how do we use this carpet making process to unpack some complex things? There's a lot of possibilities - need something to hang on to
- burnside bridge (?) portland - it links east to west, north & south
- protesting the death of george floyd - image looked like a carpet, so I took the creative licence to depict the protest as a carpet
- what could disarm some confronting images? when you render some of these protest images as carpet, it changes the meaning a little bit - what's going on here? can we hit pause for one second and think about our actions etc
- the carpet work is, for me, a carthartic way to look at what is happening and process it
- capitol riot - image of a guy stuck in the middle of it all, between police and rioters
- let's make a carpet about this, explore the obscurity
- made some 3D scans of the carpets
- borderline of painting and sculptures, they're soft - they're exploring these stories
- part of it is based on performance, and using the tufting gun as a musical instrument
- Next exhibition at woolstore - https://www.woolstoresproject.com/work/2021
Skye
- VIM - a tangible energy story
- "tangible interaction to create journalistic things"
- things that we can design to tell info, but encouraging participation in social issues
- how does journalism adapt to those forms and that technology, storytelling shapes that emerge from that
- how might we make an internet connected journalistic thing - what would it do, where could we put it, how can we make meaningful interactions
- VIM - an energy story. prototype tangible story about energy futures
- how might a story about energy policy be designed for interaction and participation
- storytelling about energy falls into two categories - technology will fix it, or we need to find another way to live
- you make selections on VIM, and you get a story "brief" based on past, present and future
- "VIM energy news"
- time is a contraint, no one has time for innovation - we wanted to push back against time
- you get your stories, you are then asked a question, and you reply and put it back into the story machine
- physical inputs, buttons and switches, you also participate in energy prodcution. it's powered by solar, or you can donate energy by cranking it
- the point of the interaction - readers need to participate - it's different to passively reading a story
- the project prompts us to think about what are some of the alternative spaces of news interaction - this is in a public space. it's different to a mobile paradigm
- should journalism be designed for public action? we asked people to think about that and take some minor action with VIM
- should be news be speculative? what are the possible ways these stories could play out?
- that's quite challenging to how we do journalism now - but why not? why not ask these questions about where journalism could lead