Pawn Shop Narrative - the Talking Window and the Authored Stories of Object

The Pawnshop Narrative is a new wayof managing pawnshop items based on the stories of commodities. An object in the shop is deemed to have a limited life span and the story revolving around it also takes on different perspectives, as the ownership of the object shifts from one person to another.

Any object in the pawnshop obtains its narrative value through a database system that documents the oral history from its original owner or the business negotiation between the pawner and the pawnbroker. The oration is turned into a window advertisement and later, a more succinct story, curated by the shop owner, according to their practical need. The longer the object has been on the shelf, the shorter the story is, until it finally reduces to a product label with the name of the article and its price on it.

The video documentation below tells the story about how the system works, from the retrospective view of a anthropologists living 20 years into the future.

The Pawnshop Narrative opens up a new view the of authored writing and editing, verbalizing informal dialogue into a form of published stories and advertisement slogans. The ephemeralness and serendipity of the stories question about the meaning of authorship and writing. It seems that new media technologies will probably carry the decentralized writing/curating culture of to a more pervasive and insinuative form of storytelling.

More and more stories in the future will simultaneously write themselves and be produced in a way of automation, instead of being carefully plotted out by a minding author.