This article is more than 5 years old.

Future of StoryTelling

Prominent New York City festival launches pop-up with groundbreaking technology-driven story experiences.

Future of StoryTelling has established a name for itself as a premiere showcase of the most cutting-edge stories each year at its flagship festival — as well as collaborations like last December’s The New Storytellers with the Phi Centre in Montreal. Now, FoST has brought a new pop-up to New York City that features 8 of the most daring experiences at the intersection of storytelling, art, and technology.

Running from Feb. 23 – Mar. 24, the pop-up’s 8 experiences are:

  • Algorithmic Perfumery (Frederik Duerinck): an AI/robotic experience wherein users fill out a questionnaire that lead an algorithm to produce a perfume/cologne unique to you.

Future of StoryTelling

Aaron Sims Creative

  • Cosmic Sleep (Marcel Van Brakel, Frederik Duerinck): an immersive audio, haptic, and olfactory experience, where participants journey through the solar system underneath a thermal-haptic blanket

Karolina Manko

  • I Am a Man (Derek Ham via Oculus Launch Pad): a VR documentary that literally puts users in the shoes of Civil Rights protesters
  • Jurassic Flight (Birdly from SOMNIACS): a full-body VR experience that uses a robotic platform to give users a real sense of flight in a prehistoric world

Future of StoryTelling

Future of StoryTelling

  • Traveling While Black (Roger Ross Williams, Felix & Paul, and The New York Times): a VR video that documents the historic restriction of African American travelers, notably in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s
  • Wolves in the Walls (Fable): an interactive VR experience where you become the imaginary friend to Lucy, a girl who believes she hears wolves in the walls of her house — read the author’s Forbes review here

Fable

In addition, a ticket earns users access to The Lounge, which showcases augmented reality art powered by Artivive.

“Each one of these pieces was intentionally chosen because it represents some piece of this idea of the next generation of storytelling,” Future of StoryTelling Founder and Director Charles Melcher said in an interview with the author. “Where it’s multi-sensorial and participatory and personalized, where it’s social and deeply immersive, where you’re no longer the passive observer, but you’re the active participant in the story. You have agency, you have the ability to have some co-authorship to be a hero in your own adventure.”

Melcher explained that the Story Arcade is more than just an entertaining way to spend an afternoon; it’s a flag in the ground of a paradigm shift that’s occurring in all of storytelling — what this author refers to as the “Builder-Participator Paradigm.”

“We’re moving to an era where stories are things you can live and experience,” Melcher said. “It makes them an order of magnitude more powerful and memorable — the ability to feel greater empathy or be more moved because of it.”

Each of these pieces was selected to represent a different emerging realm of technology-driven narrative experience.

“They represent different points on the continuum,” Melcher said. “From things that are powerful storytelling, immersion, multisensory experience, and using new technologies – those are the three filters we’re using in choosing these, as well as celebrating some of our favorite creators.”

Future of StoryTelling

At one end of this spectrum, you find something like the Felix & Paul-produced Traveling While Black, a 360 documentary directed by Roger Ross Williams, the first African American Director to win an Academy Award, which debuted at Sundance Film Festival in January. At the Story Arcade, there’s also a physical installation of Ben’s Chili Bowl, the setting for the documentary. Then there’s Wolves in the Walls, which negotiates the relationship between linear storytelling and participant agency to produce an experience that feels uniquely powerful as a VR experience. Then there are the experiences that tap robotics: Jurassic Flight, Algorithmic Perfumery, and Cosmic Sleep.

“[They all] leave you with this sense of powerful humanity,” Melcher said. ”Whether it’s the childhood thrill of flying or incredible empathy for others that brings you to tears.”

These aren’t experiences you encounter every day; Melcher wanted to ensure that each one merited its place in a Pop-Up of this nature.

“Most of these are at a level of complexity and technology that you can’t have at home right now,” Melcher said. ”One thing this next evolution of storytelling is about is to get people out of sitting in front of their computers or staring down into their phones and get them into experiences that are embodied, and remind them that they are a physical animal, that they need to move and smell and react and be alive. I’m really excited by these pieces because I think after so many years of seeing technology disembody us and disconnect us from ourselves and others, we’re moving into an era where these technologies are letting us have 3D, mutlisensory experiences — and that is much more human, much more organic to us as a species.”

Future of StoryTelling

That’s maybe truest with Chained, an experience that is more rightfully referred to as immersive theatre that uses VR than the other way around. In it, participants go through one-at-a-time and “become” the central character of an adaptation of A Christmas Carol. But you’re not Scrooge, exactly — you’re you, going through Scrooge’s progression that causes him (and now you) to take stock of your life in an unprecedented way.

Madison Wells Media

To Melcher, the Story Arcade is also about returning us to our early roots as social storytellers.

“When you go back to early tribes and pre-literate cultures, you see that whenever they had music, everybody participated,” Melcher said. “You were either playing an instrument or you were singing or dancing. And then you cut to modern day to a Classical music concert, with 500 people sitting still, just listening. What happened to that experiential art where everyone was co-creating, emobodying, participating — to a world where everybody was sitting politely, quietly, passively? What I see happening now with this next era of storytelling is [these creators are] letting us get up and dance again and experirence the story communally. It’s social and participatory; we all just want to be able to get up and dance again as part of a story.”

But make no mistake:

“Coming to the Story Arcade is going to give you a glimpse into the future,” Melcher said.

To reserve your tickets to the Future of StoryTelling Story Arcade Pop-Up, visit the official website.

For more art, technology, and media coverage, follow @JesseDamiani on Twitter.

Follow me on Twitter or LinkedInCheck out my website or some of my other work here