The Story is Yours at Nightscape

Last Friday saw the third installment of Longwood’s Artist & Friends Speaker Series for Nightscape: A Light and Sound Experience by Klip Collective. Two new panelists joined Ricardo Rivera, founding member of Klip Collective and mastermind of Nightscape, but the group’s conversation about experience and storytelling picked up right where it left off in August. Yelena Rachitsky, Creative Producer of the Future of StoryTelling (FoST) Summit, and Lance Weiler, Founding Member and Director of the Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab, joined Rivera to discuss the intersection of human experience, technology, and narrative as it relates to Nightscape.

The abstract nature of Nightscape is the common thread weaving through the Artist & Friends Speaker Series. If Rivera and his team are sure about one thing, it is that Nightscape challenges the certainty, absolutes, and rules that tend to govern our waking lives. Instead, imagination, wonder, and curiosity serve as the viewer’s best guides throughout the installations.

Rivera repeated his creative vision for the Nightscape project: “I wanted there to be a story, but not a literal story … I didn’t want to create a literal narrative because I think it would have been contrived.” Although Rivera has worked on visual projects that required the retelling of a specific plot, he knew in the preliminary planning stages that this would not be the point of Nightscape. “My goal was to create this experience of walking through a waking dream of a magical, organic, living space that comes alive at night.” But how do you immerse yourself in a dream that is not your own? For Rivera, Rachitsky, and Weiler, storytelling is how one person makes a dream shareable and comprehensible to others, and Nightscape can serve as inspiration for infinite dreams and stories.

Weiler described how this process works in a current project at the Columbia University Digital Storytelling Lab (DSL). After describing Columbia DSL’s project of “Sherlock Holmes & the Internet of Things,” Weiler reminded the audience that Arthur Conan Doyle’s work shows his detective Holmes investigating crime scenes from unconventional perspectives. At times this requires Holmes to physically occupy a space to observe a clue better or to shift his visual perspective to take in more or less data. “When Doyle was writing initially,” said Weiler, “there were no crime labs at that time … law enforcement began to realize that this was a good idea, this idea of uncontaminated crime scenes, the study of ballistics—they were adapting those techniques from his fiction and using them … and they’ve become the cornerstones of forensics.” The “dream” of Doyle’s work inspired new practices for an entire field. For Weiler, one of the jobs of Columbia DSL is to examine stories for their ability to turn abstract imaginings into concrete realities.

Rachitsky found the example of Holmes physically occupying a space to interact and learn from it especially meaningful. For a viewer walking through Nightscape, she described how one “becomes an interactor with the theater … you walk around; you use your physical body.” For Rachitsky, a simple experience becomes exponentially more meaningful “when we can move around and play” within the experience—the dream—itself. “Sometimes we give too much attention to the intellectual part of story,” she added, “and we overlook the visceral experience of story ... There’s energy coming from the people around you too, and this only accentuates the whole experience.” Holmes became a better data collector when he moved around the crime scene while considering all the perplexing pieces it offered him. Likewise, Nightscape viewers who move through the Gardens with their companions and other guests are offered countless experiences that evoke memories, tug at emotions, and motivate physical reactions.

For Rivera, all of this culminates in the viewers’ interaction with their companions: “I see people talking to each other and commenting on things as they walk around. They describe things to each other as they leave various parts of the installations, and I love that.” Rivera emphasized that seemingly simple chatter about the projections can be a starting point for a viewer’s imagination to go to work—the dream in one’s mind takes a more concrete place in the world through the shared story. Since Rivera intentionally leaves the plot of Nightscape up to the individuals who walk through it, countless stories might unfold. Rachitsky also noted: “When you don’t hand something to someone on a silver platter and you make them work for it a little bit and come up with the ideas on their own, that’s much more impactful because their imagination starts to go, and when someone’s imagination starts to go, that’s more fun.”

Since the creators of Nightscape have resisted handing guests a linear plotline with a predictable conclusion, it could be argued that finding meaning is a potentially frustrating experience. If viewers want their Nightscape experience to have meaningful coherence, then they will have to create it for themselves; however, Rivera, Rachitsky, and Weiler’s observations and professional work indicate that this process comes very naturally to us. Immersing ourselves in dreams—our own and those of others—is a natural human tendency. While the challenge of the Nightscape story is on the viewer, the experience provides an opportunity for storytelling to feel liberating and fun.

Nightscape: A Light and Sound Experience by Klip Collective is on view at Longwood Gardens through October 31, 2015. Join us for our final Artist & Friends panel discussion on Friday, October 9, 2015.