The Art of Saving Yourself

The Art of Saving Yourself (TAOSY) is an interactive, visual, and sonic experience that aims to challenge the boundaries of traditional storytelling by making the audience part of the journey and giving them agency in determining the direction in which the story unfolds. The narrative deals with the morality and complexity of the endless cycle of generational trauma presented abstractly as a physical manifestation of a young woman’s mind. The fourth wall is broken and the audience is invited to be her imaginary confidant who help her self reflect on the invisible ties that bind her reality. A deeply emotional journey of self-discovery that takes the audience on a metaphorical train, following her life story backwards.

Details

This project was made mainly out of typescript react code supported with a locally hosted supabase. The experiences were being held underground in the showroom of the FH Salzburg so out of fear for connection issues when loading the video sources I made the choice to host everything on a local machine.

The server was talking via events and sockets with the nano Arduino micro controller that was responsible for the leaver hardware that was built for the users to make choices with, and the frontend and backend of the code.

Lever Mechanism

The heart of TAOSY’s interactivity is the lever mechanism that enables users to engage with the installation. This required precise engineering, materials, and installation costs. A significant portion of the budget was allocated to arduinos, materials, and installation.

The project included a player to play the manifest of the event and its videos, and an admin panel and editor to create it.

A ghost version of the admin page is still living on vercel: https://xpr.vercel.app/admin/programs which you can mess around with a bit if you wish too. but its probably broken by the time you are using it since there is no backend to it running.

Details

Lever Mechanism

Screenshots

Images from the event

Latest

kokofy.io (soon)

Plexy

Cropper