A Flock of (Digital) Swans

CLICK HERE TO EXPLORE THE WILD SWANS COMMUNITY MEMOIR!

As we pretty much all know, there’s a trend in new media toward a more user-driven, participatory experience— anyone with a camera and a good story (or, for that matter, a not-so-good story) can tell it on YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, etc.

In the spirit of the age, we at the A.R.T. are developing an online, community-based storytelling experience inspired by Jung Chang’s real life experiences, dramatized in her memoir Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China. We have interviewed a number of people living in Greater Boston about their diverse relationships to and perspectives on China; from undergraduates who grew up in China and moved here for school, to families who adopt from China, to people living and working in Boston’s Chinatown, among others.  The diversity of stories and experiences in our neighborhood is immense, so we’ve decided that an organic, open source approach to this project will allow it to be truly community-based (and able to grow beyond the A.R.T.).

We’re working with the extremely cool metaLAB at Harvard, a self-described “research and teaching collaborative dedicated to exploring the frontiers and overlooked histories of networked culture in the arts and humanities.” All of the interviews we take (a combo of audio, video and photographs) are being uploaded to the metLAB’s open source documentary platform, Zeega, which allows for an interactive, user friendly interface for exploring all this great content.  If you are inspired by the stories that our neighbors have told as part of the project, you can contribute, too.

Upload your story related to China or Chinese culture to YouTube or Vimeo, or record audio of yourself on Soundcloud, and email us(link sends e-mail) the link.  We’ll upload it to the project.

If you’d like more information, or be interviewed formally by A.R.T. staff, you can also email us(link sends e-mail).

Check back on our website for updates on the Wild Swans Digital Storytelling Project.  It will go live when Wild Swans premieres in mid-February!