Belonging, not control
There is a difference between having control and playing a role. What if, for a while, participants could enter the logic of a cloud?
A question that reshaped the project: how do you make people feel they belong, rather than feel that they control?
Interactive installations tend to reward control: you move, the thing responds. But belonging is not the same as authorship. We wrote in our notes that there is a difference between having control and playing a role. Maybe nature is something you interact with. Maybe one of the participants “breathes” as nature. Maybe existing natural patterns carry the rhythm.
It would be great if they could feel like a cloud for a while, and enter the logic of the cloud.
Interbeing or belonging?
We held the two words side by side. Interbeing, Thich Nhat Hanh’s term, never really goes away: a cloud doesn’t die, it continues as rain, as river, as tea. It is a continued sense of being through time, and a connection through that. Belonging is warmer and more social, and more fragile. The project lives between the two.
Water, night and day
- Could we play with the forms of water: vapour, liquid, ice?
- Impermanence cuts both ways. Hard things pass, and so do good ones, which is a reason for gratitude.
- A night that ends in daylight gives the experience its arc. Daylight is the end of the experience.
- Stars? We weren’t sure yet.