Mahecha Arango et al., 2024 · the central concept of A Fair Game? (TEI ‘24)
What it says
Take something abstract — migration statistics, inequality — and build it into an interactive story in which the visitor is the protagonist rather than the reader. You do not look at the data; you act it out, and your body delivers the argument that a chart would have had to state.
In A Fair Game? the passport you are given determines how fast your horse climbs. Nobody explains unfairness. You feel it in your arms.
Does it hold for my work
Conditional on one decision I have not made: whether the thesis installation carries a social subject at all.
If it does, this is the most directly transferable concept I have collected — a worked example, with interviews, of exactly the move I would be making.
If it does not, the concept partly survives anyway. Strip out the data and what is left is the audience performs the meaning instead of receiving it, which is close to v4’s question about how strangers construct narrative meaning through play.
The caution
Its parents are data physicalization and sensification, and both assume there is a dataset. Mine may have no data in it at all. If I cite this, I have to be honest that I am taking the narrative half and leaving the data half behind.