Part of the Series — Reality Watches Back
Make it Real
What was intended, what occurred and what people experienced each need room in the account.
Written By Bek Wa Goro,
Architect of Immersive Storytelling
In an imagined performance, you choose one of two sealed envelopes. A system records a change in allegiance, and a performer later accuses you of betrayal. You think the accusation is a test and laugh. The performer hears cruelty in the laugh and changes the tone of the exchange. You leave believing the conversation caused the hostility, without understanding that the envelope had already prompted a cue.
This article was developed as part of the essay series — Reality Watches Back.
The production, the performer and the visitor now have different accounts available. One describes a prepared relation between an object and a scene. Another concerns the sequence that occurred. Another locates significance in the moment the relationship seemed to turn. Understanding the encounter requires more than choosing whichever account is easiest to record.
Lived Narrative Experiences framework connects those perspectives while preserving their differences. What was intended? What can the available evidence establish about what happened? What did people perceive, interpret and remember? Making an event intelligible means allowing each question its own answer.
The production account
The production account describes how the work was arranged. The blue envelope might be associated with a particular fictional disclosure. A cue might tell the performer to treat the relationship as changed. Rehearsal agreements might establish how much freedom remains in the resulting conversation.
Those materials help explain the intended encounter and its practical conditions. They belong within Production Architecture. A script or configuration is not, however, proof that the scene occurred exactly as planned or that the visitor understood the relation.
The distinction matters when a design is evaluated. The work may have made an invitation clear to its makers while leaving it ambiguous to someone entering for the first time. The production account is a necessary source of context, not the authoritative account of everybody’s experience.
The event account
The event account concerns what occurred, where there is evidence. A log might show that a value changed. A recording might show which envelope was taken and when the performer spoke. An observer might document the laugh and the people’s positions.
Each source has a perspective and a limit. A camera may miss a gesture behind a wall. A technical record may omit an improvised line. An observer may hear a conversation differently from someone standing closer. Putting these materials together should make their coverage clearer, not create an impression of total access.
The event account can challenge the production’s intention. Perhaps the cue arrived late or the intended disclosure was never spoken. That is useful information. It still does not settle what the visitor experienced through the sequence that did occur.
The experiential account
The visitor remembers the laugh as the turning point. The performer remembers trying to make a cue emotionally plausible and finding an opening in that response. They occupy the same encounter differently.
The visitor’s account can tell us what they believed the accusation meant. It cannot, by itself, establish why the system issued the cue. The performer’s reflection can describe a judgement within the scene. It does not automatically establish how that judgement was received.
This is not a hierarchy with technical facts at the top and interpretation below. The accounts answer different questions. A precise record of the envelope can coexist with uncertainty about the relationship the person experienced. That uncertainty is part of the inquiry rather than a reason to replace the account with a variable.
Fiction is another relation within the accounts
The represented world may establish the envelope’s contents as a betrayal. A character may believe something false or speak misleadingly. Those fictional claims need to remain distinguishable from the production’s operation and from what the visitor believes.
If the character lies, the visitor’s uncertainty may be intended. If the production unintentionally withholds essential information, a similar uncertainty may indicate a problem. The same apparent misunderstanding can serve different artistic purposes.
The new framework’s three accounts — production, event and experience — provide a way to examine these relations. The framework does not assume that fictional fact, technical state and lived meaning can be made identical by giving them one label.
Significance depends on a standpoint
Peter Hühn’s discussion of event and eventfulness remains a useful reference for the difference between a change of state and the judgement that a change matters. A transition can be operationally clear while being ordinary, unseen or differently interpreted from another standpoint.
The envelope can therefore be a major transition in the production model and a barely remembered choice for the visitor. The laugh can be central to the visitor’s account even if no system records it as a separate event. The mismatch is something to understand, not noise to remove before the analysis begins.
The same care applies to stillness. A visitor who says little may find a scene deeply significant. Another who performs every expected action may remain uncertain about its meaning. Participation records help describe the encounter, but they cannot decide its lived importance.
A compact record
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The working document proposes a modest way to hold the material together. Record what was intended, what occurred, what the person reported, what other evidence is available and what should change next. Those questions keep the link between making and experiencing visible without requiring a new vocabulary for every detail.
For the envelope scene, the intention might be to make the consequence of choosing one message recognisable. The event evidence might show that the choice and cue occurred. The visitor might report that they understood the accusation as a test unrelated to the envelope. The performer might describe an improvised emphasis on the laugh.
The next production decision could then be specific. Does the work need the envelope’s meaning to be clearer, or is delayed understanding part of the intended experience? The answer belongs to the work’s purpose. The record helps the team ask rather than pretending to supply an automatic judgement.
Comparing versions carefully
Imagine the production adds one line explaining the envelope before the choice. In a later rehearsal, a visitor connects the accusation to it. That is relevant evidence, but it does not prove that the added line alone caused the difference.
The people, timing, performance or surrounding scenes may also have changed. A comparison needs to identify those conditions and decide what claims its method can support. The framework does not turn a plausible improvement into a demonstrated general result.
A practice-led programme can connect prototypes, rehearsal documentation, situated observation, practitioner reflection and participant interviews. Those are proposed possibilities in the supplied formulation, not completed studies. Sampling, analysis and comparison need to be specified before the research reports outcomes.
The people who take another route
Suppose someone declines to choose either envelope and listens instead. Their account belongs in the research if it is collected under the appropriate agreement. It may reveal an unclear invitation, a preferred observational role or a different relation to the fiction.
Excluding that person because they did not complete the expected action would make the research narrower than the experience it claims to understand. The same applies to people using an alternative access mode. Their route may offer meaningful participation through another form.
The inquiry should not assume that observation, refusal or an access alternative indicates a weaker experience. Nor should it assume that each is successful. It asks how the arrangement was lived, while keeping practical access and the person’s interpretation distinct enough to examine their relationship.
Memory is part of the material
A later revelation can change the visitor’s account of the betrayal. A conversation with another participant may make the envelope seem more important. Tomorrow, the laugh might occupy a different place in the story they tell.
That does not make recollection useless. It makes the timing and framing of the account important. What someone believed during the encounter is a different question from what they now understand it to mean. Both can matter to a framework concerned with how stories continue through memory and discussion.
A later account should therefore be described as interpretation and reconstruction, not as a perfect replay. The research can preserve changes in understanding without treating the latest version as proof that the earlier experience never existed.
Evidence has ethical conditions
The fact that a technical system records something does not make the record automatically available for research. Consent to an artwork and consent to a study are separate matters. Interviews, observations and any technical material need a proportionate, approved protocol.
The supplied formulation is clear about that separation. It also places limits on inference. A production record is not a substitute for a participant’s account, and a participant’s account does not establish an unseen mechanism. The ethical and evidential boundaries support one another by keeping claims tied to the material that can responsibly inform them.
Sometimes that material will remain incomplete. An observation may miss the decisive moment or a person may prefer not to discuss it. A credible account should be able to state that limit rather than fill the gap with a persuasive explanation.
The envelope returns
At the end of the scene, the performer places the envelope on the table and explains why it mattered to the character. You understand the accusation differently. The event has not been undone. Its place in your account has changed.
The production can describe the disclosure it intended. The event record can establish that the conversation occurred. You can describe what became clearer. The performer may have another account of how the explanation was received. Each adds something the others cannot provide alone.
That is what I mean here by making it real — connecting the arranged work, the available evidence and the experiences people report, rather than forcing every perspective into one version. The story becomes more intelligible when its differences are allowed to remain visible.
Author’s Note
I am interested in accounts that can disagree without immediately cancelling one another. When has a story looked different to you after hearing how a performer experienced it? Which part of your own encounter remained important even after learning something about the mechanism behind it?
A careful record should help us locate those differences, including what we cannot responsibly know. I want the framework to support better questions and better revisions, rather than produce a smooth account that becomes more certain than its evidence.
My work moves between storytelling, film, music, spatial practice and research into how experiences are made and carried forward. My doctoral research in Architectural Space and Computation at The Bartlett, University College London, connects these concerns to the relations between the medium, production practice and the ways people live through stories.
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