yay for humanity! Local Projects is a New York-based design business dedicated to groovy design, urban landscapes, and storytelling. They use these tools for both public and commercial projects, such as for clothing manufacturers and companies like JetBlue.
Local Projects is an award-winning design studio that seeks to tell stories in public spaces, museums, and over the internet, often simultaneously. By committing to projects that combine information design, media, and interactivity, Local Projects has made high-tech to no-tech interfaces that engage visitors in innovative and effective ways. We design interfaces, information presentations, motion graphics, physical structures, and projection systems to tell unlikely stories in unlikely places.
The image above is from their "Memory Maps" project for the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington DC. They displayed several enormous maps of New York City and allowed the visitors to add their memories of certain places directly to those locations on the map. This is the analog version of the digital storytelling projects Organic City and City of Memory: harder on the eye, and less easy to experience, but much easier to add to.
Another terrific project is "Timescapes", a three-screen video installation at the Museum of the City of New York (which I wish I had known about when I was visiting!) This 20-odd-minute video follows the history of the building of New York City using a map and various other images (above). Be sure to check out the video clip from the website.
"The Chronoscope", a piece for the Times Square Centennial exhibit, models Times Square in 3-D, and then lays famous historical photographs over their appropriate places in the model, drilling you down in that history.
Local Projects seems less interested in geography, mapping and urban planning, than they are aware of the essential importance of these in their focus, which is storytelling. Local storytelling, or perhaps more accurately, locale storytelling. Storytelling of place, or telling a place's stories.
This is an interesting trend to me on two fronts: mapping, geography and urban planning, although having a strong tradition in the Bay Area, are not necessarily the first metaphor Bay inhabitants will reach for. The Bay is not a single city, although it can be seen as a single organism, so Bay inhabitants do not think of the urban landscape as the overriding order of their lives, although it clearly is. New Yorkers, on the other hand, no matter of which borough, seem to think of themselves as New Yorkers, city inhabitants, and to be supremely conscious of the metaphor of their lives being an urban one. Thus the trendiness of noticing urban planning and geographical concerns is almost passe already in New York, while still fresh and problematic where I live. (Bottom line: it's fun to watch trend waves go from East to West, and change in meaning in the process.)
Also, this trend of putting a self-explanatory weight on the term "storytelling", as if the telling of stories were an essential virtue of our society, puzzles me. In fact storytelling is a fundamental value, although that value is not one that can be used fundamentally without examination. As an administrator in an ethnicity-based nonprofit with a strong literary program, I used the term "storytelling" myself to denote virtuous activity. I often, without thinking, used the argument that the stories we were bringing to the fore through our programming existed already, but would not otherwise be told.
Being a fiction writer, I cannot argue against the idea that our society, even our species, may be defined (in the same way that some ants may be defined as hill-builders) by its compulsion to narrate. But then to make as one's mission the facilitation of narrative where no narrative would otherwise be seems to be actually redefining our society as one where narrative is not so much an internal as an external compulsion. Simultaneous with this change from internal to external compulsion is the sensation that our casual storytelling is endangered, that it requires an external motive to get these stories told at all.
If, as with singing, there are strata of narrative (casual and formal) and a hierarchy of storytellers (trained professionals, talented amateurs, and levels of everybody else) don't these exist anyway? Aren't we going to tell our stories anyway? The storytelling of Local Projects' projects is definitely the popular, everyman variety. Why are they facilitating the telling, and the hearing, of popular storytelling, a background noise which any frequent flyer or DMV-line queuer can tell you can't be shut off?
I'm wondering if there's a connection between the contemporary city and this apparent unremarked fear that casual storytelling is somehow endangered. Is there some connection between the growing alienation of neighbor from neighbor in the contemporary city and the feeling that stories already extant in people's heads can't/won't be heard? Is it that simple?
Or is it maybe implicit in the digital formats of Organic City and City of Memory, or the limited space of an installation like "Memory Maps", that casual storytelling must be contained, stripped down to a much smaller space ... concentrated like poetry into its utmost meaning?
Or is it that we, in the city, have become such sophisticated story-hearers that we can no longer bear the amateurishness of our neighbors' storytelling, so we must provide a mechanical prop to make their stories bearable?
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