Projects 2013 > "these pages fall like ash" > Journal
how do you demo a story?
Tomorrow is the day for 'demo-ing' our projects, and space is set aside in the studio for this, but how do you 'demo' a story, especially one that spreads out across the city.
The distribution of 'locative' projects has always been a challenge, the strengths that site-specificity can bring an experience can also be detrimental if you want to replicate the experience in other locations (and especially if you want people to support that, they need to come to the original location to experience it in the first place)
It feels like we've created a rich body of work so far on this project, and yet i'm left struggling to think how we show this tomorrow?
We will show you the proofs for the physical books that are about to go to print, but part of our project is giving you something that is 'yours', and letting you mark it and care for it, letting you make it your own . . . is it possible to 'demo' this in a shared moment.
We could show you the sections of fiction that will be stored on our offline hard-drives (we will have a hard-drive you can access), but will this be a demonstration of the experience of hunting the streets of bristol for an elusive signal on your phone, of reading a text about a fictional city while you stand in the middle of the one you know?
In all I feel a little unprepared for tomorrow as we've been focusing so much on the narrative experience recently and not much on showcasing . . (and Tom's had some other things to focus on too, congratulate him when you see him ;) )
but these questions seem more and more relevant with the thought that we want to take this work to book fairs and publishers, and we want to somehow give them a taste of a site-specific experiential work, without them being there or experiencing it?
I feel like this problem crops up repeatedly in pervasive and sited work, and i've yet to hear of a good solution (answers on a postcard please if you have them . .or in the comments box!!)
There is always what i call the 'shiny video' approach, where a video is made which highlights the novelty of a form or a concept, or the making-of, in an attempt to get people interested enough to find out more. While there's nothing that wrong with this it creates problems if you're working in a similar field to what's been done before, and you're just trying to sell the refinement of content you've worked on.
(aside: there's a new james blake album coming out soon, i've been catching various promotional material that generally involves just putting out a track or two from the album, I'm not watching videos talking about anything innovative or novel he's done with the record, i'm just actually 'experiencing' parts of it and thinking, 'this sounds good, i'm going to buy this)
More often than not we rely on a word of mouth type model from people/writers that we trust, as makers we become dependent on these peers experiencing the work, so that even without a way to distribute extracts of the experience itself, their enthusiasm can convince other people to support/distribute it.
As a caveat to that last thought: I often field questions from researchers and phd students who are writing about 'subtlemobs' (another type of work I make) yet have never taken part in one, it worries me that they feel they can write about an essentially experiential work without ever having experienced it (though I've always been amazed by how many people talk to me about Blast Theory's seminal 'can you see me now' but have never actually experienced it as an audience member.)
The worry for me is that this begins to dilute the trust in the peer/audience/reviewer network I mentioned above . . but then I worry too much, everyone knows that, there's probably a shiny video about it . . .