Vergeet me niet tent - Vincent's account

The second workshop took place last week. We ended up doing an awesome event on the Gouda market: the Vergeet Me Niet Tent!

First day of the workshop - Tuesday 19th of February

Anne, unfortunately, was sick and stayed at home but was able to give a presentation over skype. She gave us some important pointers on how to transition from theory to practice. After that Kristina gave a presentation on experience prototyping, placebo design, play and some of her projects.
We also did some mind mapping about what is present in Gouda and what isn’t. A summarization of ideas and theory of the last months.
At the end of the day we were told what we would be doing the rest of the workshop: create an experience for the people in Gouda and present it on the town square on Thursday, which is market-day. We started working on concepts and ideas on what to do.

Second day of the workshop - Wednesday 20th of February

Our first idea was to do a media divination, based on an existing project by Nancy. Halfway the day we found out we weren’t able to change the divination to dutch and that we couldn’t localize it to Gouda events so we had to think of a new experience.

The second idea was the ‘vergeet me niet tent’. The idea was to set up a tent on the market and lure people in by handing out flyers and giving them free coffee and mint tea. We asked people whether they had a memory that took place in Gouda and that they didn’t want to forget. To help them remember we recorded the memory in three ways, by making a portrait of the person while he/she is thinking about the memory, by marking the location on a giant map of Gouda and last by describing the memory in one or two sentences in the memory machine. This project was inspired by the Supernatural Drama film Afterlife (Wandafuru raifu or Wonderful Life - Japan, 2001).

Third and final day of the workshop - thursday 21th of February, market day!

We got out of bed really early to do some last preparations and to set up the tent in the market. Nancy wrote a report which you can read here: http://www.sistero.org/cultuurl/report/index.html

To see the portraits and read the memories go here: http://cultuurlokaal.patchingzone.net/vergeetmeniet/