Kachinas of Decline is a modern dynamic interactive Mural driven by real time Twitter and stock exchange data. In the Pueblo and Hopi culture Kachina is a kind of spirit who operates in the natural world as well in the cosmos. In our project we have created Kachinas of our time that have a similar function to the ancient ones.

The sequences of animated narrative Kachina units are displayed in the web and in a form of projection either indoor or outdoor. The collage like scenes are fed by the permanent flow of Twitter statements regarding critical events like for example natural catastrophes, ecological disasters, financial crisis, health damages or poverty relating to local (New Mexico) and more global (USA) happenings of our time.

The user has the opportunity to eliminate any disaster or to generate more of them by using simple shooting interface. In that sense the actor will metaphorically either save the world from critical occurrence or she will trigger more of them by her action. The participator has the illusion that she has a control over her actions. She doesn’t know that in fact the result of her action is decided by actual changes of international stock exchange data. The user has no control over anything at all in the same way as anybody has no control over almost anything in the real world. The Kachinas of Decline is an innovative narrative format that could be defined as Data Driven Narrative Game as well as Real Time Generated Interactive Movie. Beside the user and the machine, there are two additional story generators or narrators coming from the live world of Twitter and stock exchange.

The work problematizes the relationship between the individual and global events. Kachinas of Decline function as an allegory of the impotence of the citizen when confronted with superordinate facts, which have reached such a degree of abstraction that they are not comprehensible or modifiable anymore, although they are real and determine everybody’s life.

Enter The Garden
Created by Michael Bielicky & Kamilla B. Richter in collaboration with Michael Dinkelaker & Lorenz SchwarzContact
"Everybody lives in his own hallucination fed by the collective illusion."
— Michael Bielicky