Interactive Narratives - Research & Digital Storytelling
As a part of the Digital Integrative Liberal Arts Center (DILAC) Lab at Georgia Tech, I was a project lead on an Augmented Reality project where the goal was to make history visible in a location-based installation. The "Pickrick" project recreates events over several months in the 1960s, which became the basis of the first lawsuit brought under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Pickrick restaurant was a short-order cafeteria-style restaurant, opened by Lester Maddox in 1947 in Atlanta, just off the Georgia Tech campus, and became the launch pad for Maddox’s political ambitions. The location has since been absorbed into the Georgia Tech campus and is now called the EcoCommons space, where the AR project occurs.
This project led me to create Black feminist technopractice, an interdisciplinary digital humanities framework for interactive narratives that deploys what we know as participatory design and speculative design, combined with art and archival practices while leveraging Black technoculture, which examines how Black people make meaning in digital spaces. Black feminist technopractice is rooted in the ideology of Black feminist thought (BFT). Black feminist ideologies seek to increase the understanding and knowledge of researchers and participants by decreasing the distance that institutional power plays in the relationship between the two. Black feminist technopractice is a theoretical framework that guides practices and essentially combines Black feminist design (researchers) and Black technoculture (participants) into a technopractice. Instead of creating a project that is supposed to induce empathy, Black feminist technopractices require empathy in the making process.
My research provided greater context to the events, the participants and institutions they were affiliated with, and out layout of what was happening in the city at the time. The video below shows some of my interventions with the project.
This video is an iteration of the project using my research and interventions based on Black Feminist Technopractice.
Phase 1 Findings: Implications for Interactive Narratives
Presentation acts as a video that progresses every 5 seconds.
Phase 1 Interventions: On-site Contextualization
After a couple of site tests, it was clear that viewers/participants needed more context to the site and what they would be seeing. In response, I created two videos in Adobe Premiere Pro introducing the audience to the site, and to the protesters. The videos were uploaded into Unity to be viewed on-site before entering the A/R experience.
The Pickrick project operates under the direction of Dr. Janet Murray.
Introduction to the Site video