You Are Here: Geolocating the Self through the Familiar in the Midst of the Unfamiliar

From digital humanist and creative storyteller ariana Farquharson comes You Are Here: Geolocating the Self Through the Familiar in the Midst of the Unfamiliar. Featuring 36 2D, 3D and animated studies of diasporic wayfields — abstract forms created with generative artificial intelligence — the exhibition gives spatial form to Origination, a Black American Slave narrative technique that engages beginnings and endings, place, time, space and orientation. Within an immersive experience, it asks: Where am I? How did I arrive? Where am I now?

The diasporic wayfield — a navigable terrain shaped by memory, rupture, material and movement — represents both manmade, shape-shifting sites of intentional disorientation and the ancestral practices of wayfinding that emerge within them. Across different forms, scales, renderings and perspectives, the wayfields ask how these strategies might inform the immersive worlds we build and navigate today. Counter to accepted immersive practice, the wayfields play with notions of (dis)placement and (dis)orientation. Some studies integrate raw and processed materials — clay, cotton, indigo and tobacco — familiar to ariana’s Carolina home, exploring how the environment can simultaneously support and complicate navigation. Others test scale and perspective: What changes when we can hold an entire terrain in our hands or encounter it at macro scale? Animations reveal a wayfield’s tendency to continually change form — at one moment recognizable, at another strangely unfamiliar.