The Wondrous Storycatching Machine
OUTHOUSE
Long Drop. Dunny. Biffy. Thunderbox. These are all Australian terms for the place where some of our best thinking is done- in the Outhouse. An participatory research tool & interactive installation, Outhouse turns the old style photo booth on its head by replacing it with custom built digital media technology.
Once inside users are presented with six open questions which act as prompts. Each one is in an ornate picture frame. On the reverse side of each frame is a follow up question designed to unpack the response from the first question.
The user is then presented with two choices- push the red button to record a private testimonial, but pushing the green button risks comfort & anonymity by triggering a live public broadcast. The feed is sent to a projector which is trained on the largest building or wall in the vicinity. Although no one can see you, you are being watched.
What began as a bit of a curiosity has all of the sudden revealed the human face behind the status update, a public testimonial, a soapbox, a confessional. How has our risk-averse culture gorged itself on safety & control? How has public anxiety compromised our social flexibility? When do we front up? This is a foray into putting the two worlds of safety & risk back to back. Outhouse is where the accidental pedestrian can close the door to the outside world, whilst sitting in the midst of it.
Where it came from.
The Outhouse was born eight months ago out of a multi-arts project by TRAX in partnership with Outback Theatre for Young People, in the socially isolated town of Ivanhoe in outback Australia. It is a community of under 200 people where the nearest shopping centre is 200km away. We wanted to find a way to take the researcher out of the research and for residents to be participants in measuring their local cultural assets. We aimed to design an unmediated way of gathering data which was simple, but not simplistic.
The Outhouse is designed to flirt with notions of intimacy & exposure, but it’s content is ultimately determined by the context it is in. It does not predispose a response from the user, instead it functions as a tool to engage communities through open narrative. From this there are many possibilities for concrete outcomes; the seeds of great artworks can be collaboratively generated, or qualitative data can be used to affect planning & policy.
Currently TRAX is partnered with CAMRA (Cultural Asset Mapping in Regional Australia), a major Australian Research Council and industry funded project running from 2008 to 2013 as a partnership between seventeen organisations, including four universities.
CAMRA aims to provide planners, policy-makers and communities with the knowledge they need to make better informed planning decisions for more effective development of their local arts and cultural industries. The Outhouse is a key research tool being deployed in rural Australia.
