In order for people to deal with societal and cultural complexity, it’s important to raise awareness and regard for coexisting but divergent narratives. As a response to this need, the Small Fiction Collider is a virtual platform for would-be authors to improvisationally weave intersecting fictions together. The Collider requires authors to accept and navigate each other’s creative assertions, which is made easier through a broadly accessible – and therefore multivalent – visual language based in existing pictographic and symbolic cultures.
Authors may produce visual compound statements to weave fictions, poetry or complex statements space by space across a surface shared by up to eight people, each represented by a different color. This surface is periodic – cyclical – in all directions in order to encourage their stories to collide, which either causes a compound statement of one story to become the subtext of another, or causes the compound statements of both to be combined equally.
The collider was exhibited and presented at the Lightbox Gallery in the Fogg Museum of Art at Harvard for the Cambridge Science Festival in 2015, where it was used by number of patrons, especially kids.