Experiential Narrative

As part of ongoing discussions amongst some Project X Presents core members as to what direction to take with our event planned for next year, we had a fruitful discussion last night centering around experiential narratives.

Our first event in 2006 was based around a simple experiential narrative, a three part structure attempting to define the moods we were hoping to create during the course of the event – events which we have subsequently taken to defining as “omnimedia experiences”.

Our 2007 event employed a more literary or theatrically based narrative based around the Hero’s Journey – a work by Joseph Campbell which abstracts its structure from Campbells study of the great myths and legends. However, as useful as this experience was, there was a feeling that such a detailed narrative potentially took us further away from aligning with and affecting people’s actual experience during the course of one of our events, and so last night the conversation came around to looking once again at a more experiential version.

The structure “meditation, exploration, celebration” worked pretty well although one major observation was that we perhaps can’t reasonably expect to plunge people directly into a focused or meditative state directly after walking into the venue off the street (at least not in the sort of numbers we are attempting to cater for). This was something we took into account in event 2 in creating our interpretation of the opening section of Campbell’s Hero’s Journey – which we designated variously as the “market place scene” or “the village”.

Last night a few of us wrote down our own ideas about what our new experiential narrative might entail, and as you can see from this rough write up there was a fairly remarkable correlation between them all, albeit each expressed in a style unique to the individual.

I submitted two narratives:

“Welcome, Engagement, Focus, Development, Agitation, Challenge, Excitation, Ecstacy”

and

“Entry, Acclimatisation, Cohesion, Inspiration, Altercation, Realisation, Transcendence”.

It’ll be interesting to see where it all leads.

Rich
Xx