Assemble
Assemble is a guerrilla, choose-your-own-adventure performance that transforms the mundane spaces of a well-known store into a series of worlds, fantasies and meditations.
Participants download an app to their phones and are invited to join Jane as she considers life at 40.
Participants are prompted to navigate and interact with the store through a series of choices and tasks. The resulting experience is part immersive theatre, part audio tour and an entirely unique experience for each person.
In January 2020, ASSEMBLE was presented in Brooklyn as part of the Exponential Festival. The team included: Talya Chalef, Jess Kaufman, David Blackman, Johanna Kasimow and Christopher Ross-Ewart
Assemble was remounted with a revised script and new visual design in 2022 after the team felt comfortable with the covid safety of encouraging participants to visit an indoor space.
Photos
Screen Recording Storytelling
I developed a series of immersive iphone screen recordings for Assemble. Players watched these as part of the narrative. We found that these were strangely intimate moments, learning about someone's story through not just what they do on their phone, but even the speed of their scrolling and style of their 'liking'.
Press
No Proscenium (Jan 26, 2020) - “Guerrilla Audio Experience Lets You ‘Assemble’ Your American Dream (Review)” by Asya Gorovits
Off Off Online (Jan 26, 2020) - “Assemble” review by Yani Perez
TimeOut New York (Jan 24, 2020) - “An interactive performance is secretly taking place inside this famous furniture store” by Howard Halle
New York Magazine / Vulture (Jan 20, 2020) - “17 Great Things To Do In New York”
Brooklyn Paper (Jan 23, 2020) - “Assembly Required: Exciting New Show Turns a Furniture Store Into a Stage”
New York Times (Jan 2, 2020) - “17 Plays and Musicals to Go to in N.Y.C. This Weekend”
Untapped Cities (Dec 23, 2019) - “Project Assemble, A Secret Guerrilla Choose Your Own Adventure”
Gothamist (Dec 30, 2019) - “The Best Things To Do In N.Y.C. This Week, A Mostly NYE Edition”
Artifacts
Drawing
2019 Drawings
2021GoJaneNo
2021Kitchen7
Photos
2019 Day At The Office Before Photo
This interactive occurs on a player's first day at a soul crushing new job. An effusive IKEA-announcer directs them to gather items for their desk to make them feel at home, and, more importantly, for an instagram photo. They have a video-game-like sixty second countdown and fast-paced music to heighten the tension.
2021 Day At The Office Before Photo
This interactive occurs on a player's first day at a soul crushing new job. An effusive IKEA-announcer directs them to gather items for their desk to make them feel at home, and, more importantly, for an instagram photo. They have a video-game-like sixty second countdown and fast-paced music to heighten the tension.
2019StudioGo
This interactive occurs after the player hears an argument between a couple and then closely follows the partner who said she needed to leave the apartment to clear her head. We ask the player to sit on a couch and take a photo of a framed IKEA print that says "Escape."
2021MonetGoBeforePhoto
After embodying the repetitive actions of a person with Alzheimer's disease, we asked players to sit on a couch, take a few deep breaths, and photograph a detail of a stretched canvas reproduction of Monet's waterlilies (yours for only $49.99).
Technology
The core logic is a Twine game, which was chosen because it provides a separation between the game logic and the wrapper around it, allows for easy extension via javascript and provides a visualization of the choices in the game.
The Twine app uses a few thousand lines of custom javascript for the interactives, along with a custom twine macro for the "timed audio" that is at the heart of the game - a scene starts, audio starts playing, basic player controls are shown, at various times within the audio new text might appear, and at a specified time before the audio is over, some button choices appear. On top of this, there's a custom build process to validate that all the audio files are used correctly.
The twine app is published in the iOS and android app stores, bundled with all the audio and video (because we can't guarantee high quality internet access in the store), with the capability to download a new script as well as new binary files on start. The native app wrapper is Apache Cordova which is a cross-platform mobile app wrapper specifically for wrapping an html webview combined with a number of extensions to be able to hook into native controls (like vibration, audio and low-power checking) via javascript.