4 Days with Zed — An experimental narrative
Today everyone spends most of their time on their cellphones from texting to checking social media apps to taking and sending pictures. Each and every person has a certain story for his/her daily cell phone routine, which is a combination of all the different habits mentioned above. I wanted to experiment and see what could happen if different stories meet and get converged into one. Would there be a new story that can be told?
Hence the idea behind this project was to collect three listed elements from a set of random people. Those elements, along with a note explaining the purpose of the project, were printed on a small piece of paper and spread throughout the whole academy of St. Joost. The three listed elements that needed to be sent were the following: the last picture on their phone, a screenshot of the last text they were writing or receiving and the last note.
After receiving a lot of emails from unknown people, the process was to print all the content (notes, text screenshots, pictures) as square images, lay them down on a table, and try to orchestrate a whole new story out of them. No additional text was added in the narrative except transitional words to link the sentences. And all the added images in the book are linked to the text. As a result, the story ‘4 days with Zed’ was created, which talks about the routines, activities and obstacles that Zed, the main character, lives and encounters in 4 specific days.
