Visual Storytelling Exercise Material

Using Marcos Alvarez' 'Chairs' concept art as a source. Develop a fictional narrative to drive the creation of a set of evolving environment assets.

Part of a class exercise exploring how a fictional storyline can deliver imagined authenticity to an artificial world.

CHAIR ONE:
- Manufactured by CAR Katwijk, Holland in the 1980’s. Metal frame with teal lacquered beech wood seat and back. Designed for easy stacking.

- Part of an order delivered to the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee 1983 for use in the X-10 research facility conducting experiments in climate simulation.

CHAIR TWO:
- Sale of 244 1980’s ORNL CAR Katwijk industrial chairs to the Oak Ridge City Council in May 1990, which added teal-lacquered plywood side desk extensions before their use in Oak Ridge High School classrooms. Desks in use from Fall 1991 to Summer 2003 when they were sold as scrap.

- Side note; in 2003 it was discovered that the desks had an unusually high radioactive emanation, presumably from the chairs’ time at the ORNL.

CHAIRS THREE:
- Intact metal chair frames donated to the Oak Ridge Arts Center in 2005 for their stage production of DW Gregory’s ‘Radium Girls’. Distressed wood was bolted to the chair frames to match the play’s visual design of a world in decay.

- Side note; the ‘Sloth Panda’ sticker was applied to one of the chairs after the production had closed in 2007 by a volunteer stagehand who complained that the chair gave them headaches.

- In 2011 one of the Radium Girls chairs was repurposed by the Oak Ridge Arts Committee for use as a dungeon stage prop in Qui Nguyen’s ‘She Kills Monsters’ drama-comedy production.

- The new chair incarnation was to be a realistic torture chair per the production’s artistic visual design.

- Side note; in rehearsals it was found the presence of the chair in its current state was overpoweringly horrific and unsettling. The chair was not used in She Kills Monsters, and was instead disposed of at the local landfill where it still resides today.