Augmented Reality Performance at the Ashley House in Deerfield, MA!

Performance
Written By John Mills

Ashely House - Deerfield, MA

John Mills will be one of 3 actors participating in an immersive project in Western Massachusetts!

This is a performance research project funded by the National Endowment for Humanities and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It involves an international team of theatre and digital design artist, from Greece to the UK, examining decolonizing museum sites and stories through immersive heritage design to see its effectiveness. It's led by Dr. Holly Maples, actor, director and Senior Lecturer in Theatre at the University of Essex in England.

This will be an Augmented Reality tour through the historic home of Rev. Jonathan Ashley highlighting the enslaved experience of Jin Cole and her son Cato! John Mills will be playing the role of Cato, also acting as guide and narrator. John’s voice will also be playing throughout the tour in the headset of visitors. Each visitor will also be wearing AR glasses so that they can see holographic images within each room as part of the experience!

There will only be 25 showings. The intent is for this to be research into whether this innovative format is effective in telling and disseminating a broader context.

These performance will occur the last two weeks of May, but specific dates have not been set. If interested, be on the lookout! We will share specific dates and times once we have them!

John Mills

Originally from San Diego, John Mills is a technologist by trade, but an equity advocate and independent scholar by passion. The descendant of both southern and northern enslaved, John focuses on unearthing little known people and stories of this country’s history in slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. John presents research through the lens and perspective of a descendant, with intent to inspire understanding and empathy, a means to inspire good, God fearing people, now armed with information, to look into whether they may be unwittingly aligning to biases resulting from the reverberating effects of a past time. John is a member of the Connecticut Freedom Trail and a member of the Webb Deane Stevens Museum Council. John is also working with an international team funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in an effort to deliver transformational impact on digital methods in cultural institutions...a means to decolonize museums. Finally, John is working with the state of Connecticut, business leaders and scholars in Middletown, CT to honor and memorialize a former enslaved individual by the name of Prince Mortimer.

https://alexbreanne.org
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