Interactive Video Art
STORYTELLING MACHINE: 9-channel video art (2016)
**Good Design Award Winner, 2018
**Premier’s Design Award WINNER, 2017
ACT Festival, Asia Culture Center, SOUTH KOREA, October-November, 2016
Geelong After Dark Festival, AUSTRALIA, May 2017
Glen Eira Storytelling Festival, AUSTRALIA, June-July 2018
THE STORYTELLING MACHINE is an interactive video that instantly transforms people’s drawings into animated characters that roam the artwork’s video worlds. This 9-channel video installation shows a randomly generated collective story created from crowd-sourced content.
People of all ages can draw characters of any shape and feed them into The Storytelling Machine. The machine instantly animates the characters and places them in artwork’s video worlds. People can also write short story texts in any language. The machine randomly displays people’s drawings and texts, this makes each exhibition experience unique.
The machine decides what characters and texts are shown. So this artwork is a huge collective story. In many ways social media has become society’s dominant narrative. Social platforms dictate how we write, publish and consume our stories. The Storytelling Machine reflects what’s happening in social media. As soon as people enter their character and text into the machine, they lose control over them. The machine controls the narrative.
The Storytelling Machine is a unique interactive video artwork created in TouchDesigner. It generates real-time graphics across a 9-channel video artwork.
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CREDITS
Betty Sargeant ~ Artist, creative director, producer
Justin Dwyer ~ Artist (projection mapping), programmer
Andrew Ogburn ~ Music Composer
Peter Walker ~ Creative Coder
The Storytelling Machine, Gwangju exhibition was co-produced under sponsorship from the Asia Culture Centre and the ACI.
SUPPORT
The development of The Storytelling Machine was supported by the City of Melbourne; the Victorian Government through Creative Victoria; the Copyright Agency Cultural Fund; and the City of Port Phillip through the Cultural Development Fund.
Thanks to: Florian ‘Floyd’ Mueller and the Exertion Games Lab, RMIT University.
Betty Sargeant lives and works on the land of the Yaluk-ut Weelam clan of the Boon Wurrung people. She pays respect to elders past and present. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal Land.
