Journey to Abadyl

Journey to Abadyl

Michael johansson, Thore Soneson, Jörgen Callesen, Marika Kajo, Jette Lund och Katrine Nielsen

In The journey to Abadyl project we will create an interactive experience in which participants are faced with different dilemmas staged through the portals and presented by a guide. This mixed reality space contains digital film footage, sound, physical objects, augmented reality, computer games, and hidden messages that are all part of a story waiting to be discovered. The interactive experience is based upon “The Anatomy of Choice” -strategies and scenarios that are structured as a matrix in which the participants are exposed to distinct choices that include both moral, ethical, and physical dilemmas and challenges. A kind of computer game in a spatial format. Depending on how the guide and participants choose to explore the room and answer the challenges, the story will evolve differently at every performance. Where the audience is confronted with the media worlds changing representation of man and his reality. As artists and designers in particular we have the culture and nurturing to explore, create, and tell stories about possible worlds. Design has its roots in the application of artistic discipline to the engineering of technology, in the form of pattern making for mass production, and as styling for product marketing. Later, design has come into its own as a creative discipline and an origin of innovations rather than something only slapped onto existing ones. Design is one activity of creating the future, not solving old problems as much as inventing new opportunities, still with strong ties to empirical science and engineering but also with the storytelling of branding and marketing. At the same time, industries and design have evolved from producing products to services, and recently to experiences, expressing basic human tenets to create and tell stories. This of course is at the core of fiction, helping us make sense of what it means to be human, how to plan and live our lives, and to find some purpose behind our journey. Science fiction expands on this in a speculative and perhaps ultimate manner, leaving our known world to verge into the fringes of the unknown and beyond.