"The Usual" A Create Your Own Adventure Story
It begins with an instance, not necessarily an exciting or extraordinary event, but a common routine that many of us experience on a daily basis, usually carried out in solitude. An instance, in which someone walks into a store, buys something, sits and eats it, and has a thought. A simple event, yes, but in that simplicity there are variations in the way in which every aspect of the experience is carried out depending on the individual. It is the variation within this routine that I am examining as each variation will be based on independent decisions and reasoning that is unique and relevant to each person.
This interest is in part due to my own curiosity of human beings and my selfish attempt to understand how others decide on things. I am interested in understanding logic in relation to the most mundane and everyday practices of people. I believe that the decisions we make on an everyday basis usually have an intricate thought process involved in them that is rarely explored.
This work revolves around various peoples' perspectives on a story about a routine everyday event told in a fragmented nature. Twenty contributors offer their perspectives on the story, with each person fulfilling the requirement to provide their own narrative for one of the five different elements: the character, the setting, the seating, an item with an action, and a thought. Each contributor reveals a specific choice within the storyline, and with five different elements and four possible variations of this sequence, four general stories are created, but there are hundreds of possible variations of the story.
The form of the work is based on the "Choose Your Own Adventure" series, a collection of children's stories where the reader determines the storyline by choosing specific turning points within the story. Consequently, the same book may be read several times, with the reader making different choices within the storyline. This book work centres on the choices that one makes, in the subject matter, in its creation as well as in the act of reading it, as each reader will have a different adventure based on the choices they make. This format allows for many different perspectives and many different forms of reasoning to be explored on a singular theme, while at the same time bringing them together as a record of collective experiences.
