Round 2: Shamanism & Sacrifice (Connie)

The Shamanic Ritual concept examines the ritual of accessing information beyond one's immediate grasp. Requesting answers in the past was a significant ordeal: an invoking sacrifice, fasting or hallucinogens to attain visions, or significant group effort facilitated by the "chosen." With information today so easily at one's hand (or pocket), the humbling restriction of not knowing or remembering is lost.

While enlightenment will always be phenomenological, what AR can bring to this new interpretation is a uniform "vision" to be interpreted by a group.

The direction is to induce an immersive, storytelling and role-playing experience for group access of the archive. A signature interaction from the past would be carried through, perhaps a "modern sacrifice." The initial vision is for this to take place either on-site at Beeld & Geluid, or at a special event.

Instead of forcing this interaction on all queries, perhaps it would be an interesting exercise to come up with questions that would merit this modern sacrifice. A fun idea a friend and I did once was to ask only other people for answers that would typically be asked of Google, and on the flip side, to ask Google fuzzy, ambiguous questions (ex: "What do you think of my love life?").