Sense of connection
Interactive web project to transport people to faraway places
MONTREAL - The timing is uncanny.
As people struggle with isolation, lockdowns, social distancing and the safety of home versus the threat of the outside world in the face of a deadly pandemic, a team of Montrealers has launched an interactive web project to transport us to faraway places — from the unexplored creative depths of our mobile phones.
It’s called Motto. The Nfbproduced, six-part series is available for free at motto.io, and takes about 90 minutes in total — though you can stop and start at will — during which users are told a story. They are also invited to partake in the creative process by shooting short videos of the world around them, which are then integrated into the narrative, by Montreal author Sean Michaels, alongside images from other users.
“The state you’re in when you’re doing it is not the same as when you watch a series or read a book,” said Motto co-creator Vincent Morisset, who has collaborated with Arcade Fire, Sigur Rós, Skrillex, dancer Louise Lecavalier and Google.
“This is like a treasure hunt, where people are sharing bits of themselves and it becomes like a gift exchange — you give something and you don’t know what you’ll get in return. It brings you to a pretty special place.”
Morisset spent three years on the project, which he dreamed up with Caroline Robert, his life and work partner, and Édouard Lanctôt-benoit, creative developer at Morisset’s company AATOAA.
They wanted to find a way to get people to participate in a project that would capture fragments of their lives, and combine it with the experiences of others.
“The challenge at first was to put ourselves in the skin of many different people, saying: ‘This project has to work everywhere, be it in Montreal, Denver, Buenos Aires or London, or in the countryside.’ We’re asking people to reflect on the universality of things,” Morisset said.
They began thinking of what people from disparate environments might have in common. Following a year of brainstorming and trial and error, they brought in Michaels, who they hoped would be able to corral their scattered ideas into some sort of narrative, while maintaining the project’s playful spirit.
“Sean is an extraordinary author,” Morisset said. “He’s (also) a music blogger, so he has the ability to put the intangible into words that are at once visual and sensorial. There’s something very contemporary in the way he writes, but also timeless.”
I tried out Motto on Monday afternoon, and soon found myself falling under its spell. I was charmed by the funny, philosophical banter of the text, which, with an impressive economy of words, nudges you to consider everything from your immediate environment to inner truths, the reliability of memory and the meaning of life.
And I was intrigued by the images that accompany it, many of them collected by Morisset and his collaborators. When asked to shoot images of myself or the things around me, I felt initial hesitation, in ways the creators anticipated and shrewdly circumvented. The effect was both intimate and exhilarating.
“When people think of interactivity in fictional storytelling, it often means ‘choose your own adventure,’ ” Michaels noted. “Although there is some of that in Motto, it’s not what it’s about. It starts with the way we call on users, or participants, to shoot little videos and take their own images.
“What I found really stunning is how it changes a story when the reader literally becomes implicated in the story. The images you take become sewn into the story in front of you. You’re called into action — you have to do it, so there’s a different emotional attachment to the story being told than with the more passive reader of a book.”
Michaels spent hours, days, weeks trying and tossing things out before he came upon a narrative as mysterious as it was enticing. It’s the story of September, a dear yet elusive friend whom the narrator has lost from sight. (September is randomly described as male or female for different users.)
“The day I wrote the sentence — “My friend is a ghost; she can walk through walls” — it felt like a bolt from the blue.”
Suddenly everything came together. With that simple thread, Michaels found a device that could connect all the little bits and pieces, images and interior worlds of people everywhere.
“I discovered I could be really specific, and talk about how I remember seeing that dog at a party on a trip to Chile, even if the (accompanying) videos weren’t literally that. The reader, viewer, participant or user makes sense out of these crowd-sourced, motley collections of images in their mind and logic, and it works.”