A few thoughts on storytelling

In my field I hear the word storytelling a lot. What is it exactly? Storytelling is a verbal journey that a companion or complete stranger is able to lead us on. It's a tool to connect us all - regardless of creed, color or background - on a human level. The deepest level. It makes us realize that we're not all so different.

In November I was working on a brand redesign and thought that the identity would be so much stronger if the founders of the business would tell their story. How did the business develop, what is their inspiration and what were the challenges they faced? Every business in the world should be this transparent if they want to reach their potential customers on the deepest level. Stories stick with us, effect us, and change our behavior.

I'm fascinated by the way my experience of places changes once I know the story behind the walls. I want to create a platform for people of Madrid to be able to share their stories, and I'm sure they have lots of them. The site will be place-based and, ideally, it will point out that our surroundings are more connected to our life stories than we may realize.

There are a few precedents that I enjoy very much for different reasons. I've written about Jonathan Harris' creation, Cowbird, here, and here is the story that I contributed to the site a few days ago. The 'saga' is the defining principle of Cowbird, which for now the only one being Occupy Wall Street. Further down in the site hierarchy there are many other defining principles; people, relationships, subject tags, loved, etc. This is a layered and complex site, but SO beautiful and easy to navigate.

The stories are gorgeous and touching. Harris has given artists, poets and journalists a safe space to express their otherwise private moments. The website is turning into a smorgasborg of love, pain, longing and curiosity. There is this great capability of adding sound to the story as well. Something that this author has done really well. I feel so comfortable contributing to the site because I know that the most important thing is that my contribution comes from my heart.

Before I moved to Madrid, over the past year or so I noticed this 'pod' outside of City Hall ('pod' being a term from one of my architecture-ish classes).

Designed by Local Projects, a design studio in NYC, Storycorps booths give people the opportunity to sit down and record their life story in forty minutes. Especially significant because of the ten year anniversary of 9/11, many of the stories were from family of the victims who used the opportunity to connect others with the memory of their loved one.

Local Projects works on a plethora of storytelling projects, including this video for Stone Barns and this platform for people to tell tales of their center of town. As long as it's called "Main Street" people can submit photos, audio and written accounts of what happens on their Main Street. Local Projects is a studio of master storytellers with the ability to create meaning from a conversation, and to turn a conversation into an event. They call these projects collaborative storytelling, and it's very interesting to me that the most important aspect of their success lies with other people's ability to listen.

New York Writes Itself is a 'production' about New York by the people of New York. As they say, you can't make this shit up. The 'script' is an running Twitter-ish feed of random contributions from people all around New York City. I like the brief format with a steady stream of updates, and love the tone of the site (I mean, just check out the chairman), but I wish there was more imagery - there would be some really good photos to complement the anecdotes of the city. This site definitely has the cool-factor, and the theme capitalizes on NYC being the film-making capital of the world. I also enjoyed seeing the recent collaboration with letterpress artists recently shown at the Art Director's Club.

So what is all this? It's not about advertising, branding or selling products. It's about finding what is most important in each of our individual lives, maybe understanding each other and our environments a little better, and possibly restoring some of our faith in humanity.

City Projects and Platforms for Social Interaction

Wierd. I'm finally using the new format for blogger and it's really different. I feel like I'm typing into an open void. Well...

Anyways, I'm having a few ideas flying around in my head and I'd like to pin them down on the page. So I mentioned a few days ago that I have this idea. It's an idea for a platform for people in Madrid to share their stories about the city. I'm fascinated by public spaces in the city and projects or artworks that can change our viewpoint, ideas or experience and an online public space can offer a similar transformation. It's a catalog of the human experience in the city, documenting places, streets, people, and events real and mythological. With a tapestry of contributions it will feel like the city is speaking through the cracks in the sidewalks.

Some existing projects that inspire:
Jeremy Dalmas: I've posted this before but it's a wonderful audio journey through the mythological undercurrents of lower Manhattan.

Side note on mythology: I'm reading Roland Barthes' Mythologies, which is an in-depth analysis of every popular belief structure on everything from everyday items to overarching concepts. For example, the chapter I just read was on the strip-tease - its origins and meanings. The book was written in 1957 so some of his references are dated, but it makes you look very closely at our world and the beliefs we take for granted. Many of the assumptions we make about our surroundings, rituals and objects are in fact a product of our society and upbringing. He has an enjoyable way of dissecting what people experience on a daily basis, and offering fascinating new meanings for many things that surrounds us.

Carolina Melis: A motion designer who has been commissioned to create an animated video to tell the story of the Ham House garden near the Thames in Richmond, UK. She will work with a historian and offer workshops on the property for people who are interested in the innovative garden design, created by Elisabeth Dysart in the 17th Century. The film will premiere on animateprojects.org in April 2012, accompanied by site-specific installations and a program of events to educate and shift perception on this historic place.

Here is one of Melis' recent videos on weavers in Sardinia, her home country.




The Art and Public Space research group at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam: This is a group that conducts research, organizes events and creates work and publications on the subject of the interaction of art and public space. They have done a lot of work in the Zuidas area of Amsterdam, which is the generic office park on the outskirts of the city that, like so many commercial developments, created massive empty and unused public spaces.

Media Lab Prado: in Madrid. This group studies the space where the digital, technological and social worlds intersect. There are some really confusing but interesting-looking projects on their program, and I plan on connecting with them once I have a firm grasp on the Spanish language (which is improving every day I'm happy to report).

THEN! Yesterday I discovered Jonathan Harris' latest project. He wants to create a catalog of human experience through the contribution of various authors on his site, Cowbird. Omg if this site isn't similar to the format I had in my head for my Madrid diary. I feel psychic. He's been developing the site for two years, working at various residencies and locations around the world. He used Indie Maps, which is a great discovery except that they're closed until next year. #*$@^!

COWBIRD.COM

Things I love about this website. The EXTRA focus on imagery, for one. Another cool detail is that the images drift slightly as you scroll down to read the story. There are capabilities to add audio with the story, here is a really interesting example of that. The stories are predominantly a kind of poetry, whether in prose form or in shortened stanzas. I can't wait to see how this site develops. The first "saga" being recorded are the Occupy movements around the world. Ok, but how can you beat that? This may color the site a little too strongly/specifically for many contributors, but as more and more people contribute different content, I'm sure there will be greater variety of saga.

Harris worked at two locations in Iceland while he built the website, which is where the concept of the saga originated. When I visited Iceland earlier this year, I learned about the epic saga about Egil Skallagrímsson, Egil's Saga. The tale develops over the course of Egil's long life, covering various tales of battle, revenge, adventure and friendship. It's considered one of the best Icelandic sagas.

So it's quite fitting that Harris chooses to develop "sagas" with a patchwork strategy of various contributors from all corners of the globe. The sagas are accessed on the site through an easy-to-use tagging system. There are various ways to organize the info on the site actually. By diary (each writer gets a diary where all of their stories are housed), by character, by location, and then there are many individual meta tags for each story. The stories are also organized by most loved, most viewed, and other categories.

It's a very ambitious project and has great potential. This is Harris' first project that I know of which engages people on this universal level. Many of his other projects were artworks based on humans, more of an exploration of human experience from the objective view of the artist. This is a huge collaboration with people from all over the globe, and an opportunity for many story-tellers. Most of the social platforms that we have (Facebook, Twitter, etc) provide a space to contribute a short status update but beyond the individual blog there isn't anything like this. Fast Company describes Cowbird as the "anti-Facebook". The focus on slower storytelling, the unfolding of personal narratives, rather than quick updates on what's happening in the moment certainly makes you stop and think about the current hurried state of the social space.