ash write

I am constantly driven by a bookworm fear that we are losing knowledge at astounding speeds. Access to information has vastly increased, but absorption and retention—well, I’m sure you’ve read all about it, how the “kids” all speak in fragmented and poorly punctuated English, how cats imbued with the ability to speak rule our sentence structures, how you can look up any fact in a matter of seconds and yet never understand the motivation millions have shared to get through the thousand pages of The Count of Monte Christo.

There is, as far as I can see, a loss of narrative in our modern world. It’s not about a cohesive story, but more a string of facts. I don’t believe that people are any less good at arguing (I’ve been trounced plenty of times in philosophical and political discussions), but the way we are presented information encourages a need-to-know basis, rather than old-school, context-driven fact/story hoarding.

That said, I decided to embark on a winding journey to preserve some bits of the past that would be harder to stumble upon through the average person’s pointed Google and Wikipedia searches. These included a train race in England that defied an overly-taxed road system and a group of Jewish merchants who kept the Spice Route alive in Medieval Europe and Asia. I also included some more mainstream events, such as the Nobel Prize and Joan of Arc’s epic fight in France.

My hope was that by making these events something tangible and attractive, they would pique curiosity the old-fashioned way—by making the viewer want to actually engage with it. Secondly, by letting every viewer leave their mark and even muss up others’ marks, I aimed to give control and a stake back to the real owners of history: everyone.

It was quite interesting to see people interact with the maps on the night of the show. At first, nobody wanted to touch anything. I had to assure them that they could draw or play however they wanted, even if it was not how I intended. However, as the night went on, the maps started gathering some interesting data, as well as bringing people to look at the descriptions and growing results and talking about them.

For instance, when asked to respond to the Nobel Prize map, someone circled the first Asian winner of a Nobel prize and wrote “sad”, assumedly speaking to the overpowering number of European awards. Another person later responded to that statement with pride, writing, “not so anymore!” and a laundry list of Asian countries. On the Radhanite map, where viewers could vote for items they would want in the Middle Ages, a strange pile of tiles grew over “India” and “Islam”.

At the end of this project, I have hopes that people are interested, albeit absentminded.

Thoughts?