Lotus World Music & Arts Festival: Big Tent

I worked with the creators of The Big Tent, a 360° video and audio projection installation/venue (part of the Bloomington Lotus Festival), to leverage immersive technology in creating a unique, communal viewing experience. In this age of individual hand-held screens, The Big Tent creates opportunities for people to interact and share a transformative multimedia experience.

Credits:

Wishes + Fractured Vision
Sarah Edmands Martin, Animation, Design & Soundtrack
Benjamin Sunderlin, Voice of Narrator

Wishes + Fractured Vision explores a kind of dark storytelling that eschews formulaic children’s narratives in order to promote self-efficacy, learning, and participation. The medium of fairytale offers a safe space outside our normal expectations as an axiom where assumptions can be manipulated, ultimately prompting us to ask a different set of questions. I am interested in dispelling the “happily ever after” privilege and complacency that can occur in young readers who consume too many derivative regurgitations of narrative. This works seeks to reclaim the wondrous and inexplicable that becomes lost in cookie-cutter stories that are designed to sell and re-sell. This work navigates difficult themes such as identity, heritage, greed, and failure, while also helping a viewer accept that bad things happen to everyone.