"The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage" Episode 1 Press Kit

The Cyclical Nature of Racial Injustice

The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage seeks to historically contextualize the damaging effects of slavery, lynching, and other forms of racial violence and injustice on people of color and to recognize the ongoing impact of this history on the present.

There is widespread misunderstanding of the history of racial violence in the United States, and it is not broadly accepted that our past is directly linked to modern-day racial disparities in America. The cycles of oppression and violence, followed by the misinterpretation and obscuring of history, have led to a legacy of racial disparity that continues to exist today. The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage will shift the paradigm of how America’s stories need to be re-told in the context of confronting the past, healing the present and building towards the future.

We are working closely with academic scholars and seasoned VR experts to provide participants a one-of-a-kind virtual reality experience within the eras of slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and mass incarceration to better understand the United States’ history of racial violence, and to challenge participants to imagine how the cycle of violence can be transformed into an equitable future for all.

The experience engages with Afrofuturism as a theory and as an aesthetic. The participant embarks on a journey through history that presents a myriad of opportunities for critical self-reflection about our present social circumstances. Throughout the pilgrimage, we see familiar sites and faces: the Slave Warehouse that becomes a prison holding cell; enslaved people who become fleeing Marianna, Florida residents who then become prisoners. Later, these same sites and faces are re-imagined and presented again differently, this time more lively and inviting. We employ this Afrofuturist framework of nonlinear time to encourage participants to understand themselves as historical beings who are always and already engaging in history.

In doing so, participants are not only being transformed by the experience, but they are also given the opportunity to leave their imprint on the virtual world of The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage. At the offset of our common struggle towards equality and justice for all is a community that transcends time, space, and the physical limitations of the “real” world.

Moving Between Past, Present and Future

The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage is a non-linear time travel experience through 400 years of racial injustice. The Time Travel mechanic is a liminal space where fireflies and gravitational forces guide the user through significant historical events represented as deconstructed “sets”.

Time travel allows us to move through the past, present and future to contemplate the cycles of history and their strong influence on our lived experiences today. How much has really changed and how have experiences mutated? Also, how much have we internalized a refusal to question so as not to face the pain of the persistent terror today?

Time Travel

In Episode 1: “The Dilemma,” the user is introduced to our main characters, the time travel mechanic and our time travel portal the Cracker House, the starting point of a pilgrimage through our collective history.

Present

The story begins in present day Montclair, New Jersey. The user experiences a police altercation in a quiet suburb and finds themselves in jail, witness to modern mass incarceration. In this world, The Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage symbolically foreshadows elements of lynching and the Jim Crow Era.

Past

This chapter highlights the cyclical nature of history. The user finds themselves in a time warp of parallel eras: a modern jail and a slave warehouse. The juxtaposition of these two eras highlights how history has not changed, but only evolved. The user travels to the past in Episode 1: “The Dilemma” and experiences a foreshadowing of the upcoming Episode 2 and a future utopian era.