"How can we build a future together when we resist being in the same room?"
The Middle is a prototype platform for communities to come together and archive their ideas, hopes and dreams through collage, storytelling, pen drawings, and audio recordings, all experienced in a game environment navigated at your own pace. In this version of the project, scenes were developed through worldbuilding sessions in a rural town in Nebraska-both online and offline-where populations are dispersed, and substance use disorder carries a stigma. The project engaged individuals affected by Substance Use Disorder as well as members of after school robotics clubs, healthcare workers, and local business owners. Participants have included a range of people of different ages, ethnicities, races, and mental and physical health statuses. Over the course of a series of workshops, participants use the tools of worldbuilding and immersive digital storytelling to ask, and propose both creative and applied answers to questions regarding community health and wellbeing.
In the scenes presented here, art and design materials created during these sessions are collaged together to create imaginative scenes and audio-visual narratives about collective futures of communal support, empathy and communication among members of the participating communities. Designed to bridge the physical and digital while addressing conflict, future versions of the platform will serve any community or collective, and invite the audience to collect, upvote, and expand ideas, creating a living repository through voice memos, stories, and speculative designs to reimagine collective futures in complex realities.
Co-created with community contributions and Ash Eliza Smith, Sam Bendix, Daniel Lichtman, Alex Gee, Sam Lawton, Julia McQuillan, and Lisa Pytlik-Zillig, with support from the Speculative Devices Lab within the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts. Funded by the Rural Drug Addiction Research Center at UNL.
Instructions:Click on each window to open a scene in a new browser tab. Close the tab to return to the map. Some scenes take several minutes to load. Works best in the Chrome browser on a laptop/desktop.
