Interactive storytelling builds an emotional connection. Imagine if students were able to ask an astronaut, president or any person that has impacted the world or has lived through any historical event, any question about their life experience.

Conscience Display uses advanced interactive natural language software and speech recognition to enable the dialogue between the public and an historical figure in real time. Interviews are filmed in 360 degrees with a 110-camera array setup and 4k three-dimensional recording. Each survivor is asked up to 1,000 questions which relate to their life experience covering such topics as faith, resistance, identity, survival, life, immigration, and memory.  The organization has 15 years’ experience creating Holocaust and Genocide exhibitions, with particular emphasis on telling the story of survivors' experiences through exhibitions and content for institutions. This has become increasingly important as survivors age. Eventually, the opportunity to have such conversations with them is becoming increasingly rare and will eventually be lost forever. 

Conscience Display has produced temporary, traveling and permanent exhibitions for the USC Shoah Foundation, Aegis Trust, the United Nations, USC, The Museum of Tolerance and The UK National Holocaust Centre and is currently in partnership with USC Shoah Foundation and USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies developing New Dimensions in Testimony.

More information on their work can be found here in the NewYorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/01/22/a-holocaust-survivors-digital-doppelganger

Biographical Note

Heather Maio is the CEO of StoryFile, Board member on the USC Shoah Foundation project, Managing Director of Conscience Display and the Concept Developer & Producer on their 'Dimensions in Testimony' project.