OPERATIVE
STORYTELLING
+
We are focused upon the experience and implications of rapidly shifting technologies and urban environments, and we aim to build worlds that propose and provoke, investigating problems and opportunities on our shared technological, cultural and environmental horizons. There are stories that could, so we believe, reveal hidden casualties, introduce new ideas or challenge existing assumptions. These are the stories we seek to operationalise.
Inferstudio is a design and media practice that reveals and crafts narratives of human societies through a diverse range of time based media and 3D environments.
//
SPECULATIONS
We operate under the conviction that rich and frequent thought-experiments can work as testing grounds for new or imminent realities; equipping those who venture out to shape the future. Designers, policy-makers, forecasters, inventors, and artists - alike, we face increasingly uncertain horizons in a world that is both better controlled, and more immediately in peril than ever before.
We bring to any speculation, thought-experiment, or proposal, a uniquely inter-disciplinary lens. With experience in Architecture, Anthropology, International Development, Cyber Security, Augmented Reality, and Film-making - we can speak through and across disciplines, and have many tools, of strategy and representation, at our disposal.
The Anthropocene has brought with it an abundance of media artifacts, recordings of our collective fears, ambitions, desires and habits. From these, we attempt to infer cultural priorities, trends and inter-dependencies. We then build worlds, environments, and scenarios that present our findings and speculations, representing these through time-based media.
Please contact us to discuss speculations, proposals, or trends that you are interested in further interrogating.
REPRESENTATIONS
We use storytelling as a technology; of influence and production. Working through film, animation, 3D environments, and scripting, we create content that embraces both visual spectacle and techno-cultural critique, meaning that your story has impact, and is remembered.
Whether it’s a project that needs to be built, or a service that needs to be shared, a show or film or exhibition that will change its audience (and the world) in ways big or small, a personal tale, a campaign - they all have a story to tell.
Whether for real-world or speculative projects, we approach everything with a focus on world-building and narrative, developing specialised imagery, strategies, and storylines.
Please contact us to discuss visualisation projects and communication campaigns.
++
FUTURE PROJECTS
We see culture as a narrative ecosystem, interlocking sets of assumptions and priorities that are shared or contested by different groups living side by side. Storytelling, whether through entertainment, education, law, or policy, is a means to engage with culture - to perpetrate or change it. This is what we mean by operative storytelling.
The stories that Inferstudio are particularly drawn to are those around the technologies and culture of cities. Cities are hotbeds for human interaction and evolution and in an increasingly urbanised world, speculation around the future development of cities becomes a proxy for speculation on the future state of human society. This development is shaped by technological innovation, with certain innovations - machine-learning, artificial intelligence, wearable AR and VR technologies - suggestive of radical shifts in the experience and even definition of human life.
As visual storytellers, we are also driven to constantly explore and innovate with advances in technologies for representation and design.
We present here projects that capture this combination of operative storytelling and visual spectacle. They are projects that we believe could challenge or contribute to cultural narratives of our time. We seek collaborators and supporters to make these projects a reality.
Could this be you?
CULTURAL CARTOGRAPHIES
We seek to map the overlapping and conflicting realities across the land we now call Australia, engaging with time-based and digital media to prepare a multi-media exhibition. We are seeking to engage with ethnographers, website developers, and financial partners. Contact us for more information.
UNTITLED SPECULATIVE FILM
In a near-future Europe, immigrant and refugee families are assisted on their journey to cultural integration by personalised AI assistants, provided by the state. This film tells the story of one such family and their long-term relationship with their AI assistant; guide, friend, spy..and accomplice? Contact us for more information.