Abstract

RENATI: recontextualizing narratives for tangible interfaces

Ayoka Chenzira, Yanfeng Chen, Ali Mazalek

RENATI is an acronym that we have created for Recontextualizing Narratives for Tangible Interfaces. It serves as an umbrella term for our art/research experiments with combining non-generative and immersive art with oral, digital, physical and tangible narratives using particular artistic and cultural motivations.

RENATI consists of three projects, the first, presented here, is our working prototype entitled Flying Over Purgatory. We use off the shelf and customized sensing technologies, a custom-built mannequin sculpture, and small monitors to assist in the interaction and interplay of reconstructed oral narratives of people who testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa.

Worldwide, personal experience narratives have increasingly become a means by which to record reactions, interpretations and subjective feelings about historical and contemporary events. Communities that feel marginalized frequently use autoethnographic narratives, i.e. narratives from personal and communal experiences, documented with audio and video devices. These narratives commonly provide counter narratives that question mainstream hegemony. Flying Over interconnects four story environments: oral narratives, specifically personal experience narratives, digital narratives, physical narratives, and what we are calling tangible narratives.

Our recontextualization process is explored on several levels in our prototype:

• the narratives were constructed from researching thousands of pages of transcripts from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa
• new narratives were developed which were distilled from the transcripts and written for our basic themes
• the new narratives are presented by actors and recorded using digital video or P2 cards
• the new narratives are played back on monitors, inserted into our sculpture and viewed within a new spatial relationship through tangible access.
In this paper we introduce a way of building tangible narratives within a hybrid environments and consider how our work might allow us to make a contribution to oral as well as tangible traditions.