Portals: A Narrative Soundwalk

A story's power is in its ability to not only deliver us to the world of the speaker, but to old and new worlds within ourselves. Listen intimately to be transported.

Portals is an exercise in the storytelling potential of AR and serves to encourage resonant connections within ourselves and with others. The artwork was inspired by the performances and community fabric works of Women Connected (WOCO), a performance collective in Rotterdam, and explores potentials for connectivity through embodied practices as well as the generative possibilities of the art of storytelling and the radical act of listening.

In Portals, visitors are guided through a series of poems and reflections in an altered reality populated by abstracted silhouettes of WOCO members and textile objects composed of iridescent and reflective materials. Shimmering digital threads flow from and within the figures, weaving mappings of relations. A meditative binaural soundscape transports the visitor to a space shared between the real and virtual environment.

The work considers the many manifestations of portals - from object, to tradition, movement, to memory. As the story progresses, the position of the narrator is subverted and the visitor is invited to imagine their own portal and to reflect on its power to stitch the past to the present, to creatively envisage futures, and to reveal intimate interlacings.

This project was co-produced by Robin Rutenberg, V2_ Lab for the Unstable Media, and Women Connected as part of the Digital Flying Carpet residencies.

By: Robin Rutenberg Additional Programming Support: Jasper Meiners Script Editor: Ruty Rutenberg