1.2 Fast Rewind: The Conversationalist

I find the conversationalist by David Antin a fascinating work. The installation is simple. A person enters a room and will hear a word through the speakers, and the instruction that they may tell a story using that word. After they have finished telling, they will hear the stories of the previous participants, and finally their own.

               Since storytelling is one of my main interests, I have thought a great deal about how to create an interactive collective story told by multiple people, without it being too scripted. However, the problem usually is that the more open the interactive experience is, the higher the chance that the narrative will be inconsistent, or worse: plain boring.

               I find the way Antin did the setup fascinating. The only truly ‘technical’ part is the microphone that is able to ignore long silences. Therefore, as Antin explains himself, there is a form of consent and calmness in the participants stories. You do not need to speak if you do not want to, and you can think and hesitate and collect the right words for as long as you may like. This is a privilege one normally does not have when speaking into a microphone in order to deliver a story.

               There certainly is relevance in this piece, even today. Firstly from the lens of collective storytelling. In improvisation theater, the actors work so well together because they can see each other and interpret each other’s body langue, it is a true interactive dialogue in which both parties participate. However, when creating a story online for example in massive multiplayers online (MMOs) or larger or smaller online role playing games (MMORPGs, RPGs) one does not have this privilege. Especially the last category has been gaining popularity over the last few years, for example Dungeons and Dragons.

               Works like this give me hope (and perhaps also demonstrate), be it with a little guidance from the artist or a game master, people who are not necessarily trained storytellers can collectively tell a captivating and semi-coherent story. Even if they are apart and do not know what direction the story is going to take. On the one hand parts of stories are individually uttered through a microphone, on the other hand it melts into and forms a larger dialogue by affecting what the following people will say. The tension between monologue and dialogue is very exciting here.