Childhood narratives : a twofold narrative guiding the viewer into the subjective perspective of twins on their childhood and their identity

Abstract

This study aims to create a narrative which guides the viewer into past childhood experiences and their impact on the identity of twins through illustrations, animations and sound. The project strives to visually represent the subjective perspectives of two individuals of the same age, who were subject to the same upbringing and childhood experiences via a website. In order to understand how this narrative could be designed, research was composed of three distinctive areas: the view of individuality and identity through history and how it was represented in the arts within Modernism, Postmodernism and Hypermodernism: memories, nostalgia and the conceptual self; and lastly, art reflecting identit6y construction, memories influencing the current perspective of one’s identity, national identity and identity within the family. This enabled the construction of a qualitative research methodology of in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted with a set of twins. Conceptual illustrations and animation were created to reflect the delicate topics within the emerging themes. These intend to create dissociation with reality and to evoke a sense of mystery, making one look deeper into the artwork while leaving it to the subjective interpretation of the viewer. This study provides insight for future research on how to provide the viewer with an immersive experience by delving into the unconscious. This was done by adopting an interdisciplinary approach amongst the area of digital arts and the cognitive sciences in utilizing electroencephalography (EEG) technology, to monitor their brain activity during their initial interview, and an eye tracker to track the fixation points of their eye movement along their original childhood photos. The resulting data was used to create soundtracks from the brainwave data to accompany all the illustrations and animations, and illustrations with superimposed paths of eye movement, respectively. Lastly, online structured questionnaires with creative and non-creative individuals were distributed to test the effectiveness of the initial set of artworks.