Ashes to Ashes was intended for performance in a six sided cave located at Iowa State University’s Virtual Reality Applications Center (with Lead PI Carolina Cruz-Neira) in which images appear on the floor and ceiling, creating a fully immersive experience.

The first performance of the prototype for Ashes to Ashes was held at the 2002 International Super Computing Conference with a subsequent installation at 2004 Mundo Internet Conference in Madrid Spain.  A portable virtual reality system consisting of four self-contained display modules was used at the conferences. Using four modules, the system can be made into a CAVE-like device with four walls or a single 32-foot long display.

DIGIVATIONS co-founders Steven Lee Berman and Anne Deane Berman with Dawn Haines interviewed first responders and survivors in February 2002.  This source material collected in New York City - witness stories – was transformed into music, a kind of animated poetry that provided the content for the installation. Larry Tuch, Head Writer and Creative Consultant for the Paramount Simulation Group, collaborated with me in the narrative design from the source interviews.

A participant can choose to take the fastest, most linear route through the narrative, thereby experiencing the basic, fundamental story being told about 9/11.  Or, if they choose, at any particular scene, they can pick more stories from other witnesses who are talking about their experience of that particular time in the larger story.

Additionally, in making the piece, we wanted to give the viewer control over how many stories they heard in certain acts so that viewers wouldn’t feel emotionally trapped since the material was so intense as told in the immersive context. The interaction time to move from story to story, gives the viewer time to reflection offering some distance from the material.  Alternately, some stories are mandatory; giving the piece it’s dramatic shape. 

The interactive narrative design of Ashes to Ashes can be compared to a tree, with a basic structural trunk being represented by the basic 9/11 story as told by “Billy.” Billy was the sole survivor from his company of firemen from Engine 6 who responded to the first tower after it was hit by the plane.  A participant could experience the piece, only hearing from Billy. 

This would give the basic, dramatic story which, by itself is astonishing.  However, the interactivity of the work enables the participant to make additional choices within each Act allowing them, if they choose, to listen to several of the other witnesses with varying points of view.

These secondary stories act as the branches of the tree, i.e. horizontal stories giving a richer picture of the scene, since multiple witness stories have different perspectives of the same event.

For instance, after hearing Billy describe his experience walking up the stairs into the first tower, getting to the 36^th floor before the 2^nd tower collapsed and he was ordered to evacuate, the participant could choose to hear from some of the survivors, those evacuees who met the firemen on the stairs as they were coming down.

Since all the stories are told by the actual witnesses in the first person, the viewer is able to become “Billy” and then, to imagine what it might have been like to be one of the survivors, as they evacuated.

These secondary stories are by no means less significant then Billy’s story, and in fact, are sometimes more poignant in their dramatic impact. The people coming down the stairs speak about the grim faces of the exhausted firemen as they trudged up the stairs carrying hundreds of pounds of fire hoses and equipment on their backs.  The survivors also speak about how they allowed the burn victims from higher floors to go past them on the stairs, unable to tell the race of the victims, only seeing their eyes.  

These perspectives enlarge Billy’s account, just as a tree’s branches give the tree it’s distinction. In creating spaces filled with sonic events, with many different narrative paths, participants decide how the piece will be told, actuating the unfolding of the piece.  In other words, each different viewer experiences their own unique version of the work, depending on how many and which branches of the narrative they choose.

Once the stories and ordering were identified, I experimented with various sound processing methods to build various new “instruments.” I combined these instruments to create musical excerpts that enhance the emotional aspects of the stories.  By coloring the bare voices in an interplay of sound images, the listener is encouraged to focus on poignant aspects of the stories. 

The piece can be implemented using two kinds of visual display devices including stereo glasses and a head-mounted display. The person who drives the piece wears a wireless headmounted tracker.  This magnetic tracker is used to monitor the driver’s position and orientation.

This maintains the driver’s correct perspective which is used to calculate a true stereoscopic view as one moves into and around objects that appear within the virtual space. The system also tracks the location of various input devices, such as wands and gloves. 

The first prototype implemented a hand-held wand allowing the driver to pick from various stories by selecting from different spheres floating above a virtual platform. The on-lookers witness the piece using light-weight stereo glasses.

-excerpt from Immersive Sonic Environments, ICMC 2005, Anne Deane Berman