At this years Venice Biennale, the Indonesia pavilion featured an interactive narrative titled Lost Verses. The room was filled with class cases, whose tops were printed with one part of a fragmented story and a number, and contained objects inside. Each case gave possibilities for the next case for the viewer to visit.
A table near the exit of the pavilion allowed visitors to type in the numbers of the cases they visited, where they would receive a receipt with the sayings from each case they visited. This interactive narrative was an attempt to create a new experience of the biennial for visitors. Its structure also meant that each visitor likely came out with an entirely different constructed story.
Description from the Biennale’s website:
Lost Verses. There is a Minang proverb that says: “akal tak sekali datang, runding tak sekali tiba”, which tells how things come to one’s senses through enduring processes of negotiation. The constitution of one’s mind and one’s self is then perceived as reiterating. It speaks about identifying while always adapting; and assigning meanings in the brevity of time. The Indonesia Pavilion at the Biennale Arte 2019 is based on this proverb, and it reimagines it as the layered experience of living in the present globalised condition. It works as the gamification of one’s narrative absorption in time, in an increasingly broad and divergent world. It tells us how minds saturate in limbo by forever falling into its dissociated self while trying to make sense.
Narrative Design Fall 2019 