The Seance

Concept Statement 

The Séance is a walking simulator that combines speculative storytelling with gamification to tell the hidden stories of Vietnamese women’s experience with intergenerational trauma caused by wars, violence, and social upheaval in Vietnam in the 20^th century. Users are invited to play the role of a Vietnamese person in a distant future who found the digitized consciousness of one of their ancestors in a machine with all their memories and buried family secrets.

Goals

By telling the stories of women in my own family, I hope to help myself and young Vietnamese people of my generation understand the lived experience of our foremothers in a more empathetic way.

By experimenting with speculative storytelling, I also want the audience to think about the legacy that could be lost to time as women continue to be left outside of the archive, and their voices are silenced.

Historical and cultural context

• A lot of the stories of women who lived through the Indochina War and Vietnam War were not recorded in history textbooks in Vietnam.
• Stories of women who lived through wars survived in the stories that they tell their children and grandchildren. 
• Those stories need to be preserved and told to future generations, or they will be lost to time.
• Hau Dong, a spirit summoning ritual in the worshipping of mother goddesses, is a way to communicate with deities, the spirits of ancestors.
• It is often used by families to look for people who died far away from home.
• There is no religious text. The tradition is preserved through songs and dance.

Credit:

This project used both my own 3D assets and stock assets that have been licensed for this project.

Waterfall and water portal model and shader created by Zhicun Wang.

This project used PoseCore for body movement tracking with webcam. PoseCore was created by Mikael Thorman. (https://github.com/miman/posecore-srv-electron)

The story was written by me, using materials from stories that I have collected during the research phase of my thesis.