Projects

The Project

Directors: Dr. Erika Hughes & Boyd Branch

Media Design: Boyd Branch

Producers: ASU Office of Veteran Academic Affairs, Pat Tillman Center, ASU School of Film Dance and Theatre

Summary:  The Veterans Project synthesizes oral history and storytelling in a live event that takes place annually at ASU and is toured throughout the year to other museums and theatres. The veterans featured in the project have included men & women deployed in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and both wars in Iraq, sometimes serving multiple tours abroad. In addition to stories about deployment and combat, the project encourages participants to speak about the moments and rituals of the everyday, such as mealtimes, formations, leisure time, and writing and receiving emails/letters/video from home.

The System

Recollect/Repeat: a digital tool for the theatrical performance of history is a multi-tiered digital capture and cataloging and playback system for the collection of oral histories presented through live performance. As part of The Veterans Project, the system enables veterans’ stories to live on in their communities. The system is built in Touch Designer and can serve up to 6 video surfaces and capture up to four different live camera feeds. A Touch OSC interface is loaded onto iPads that allow participants to trigger, pause, scroll, or reject random videos from social media sites. The system can load content from banks of selected videos or pull directly from sites online.

The Vet Project

by Erika Hughes & Boyd Branch

Video sample

Stills