"The most compelling characters in the Jewish canon of storytelling are those who do explicitly what they are told not to do... I think I’m vicariously drawn to these stories because I live my own life too anxiously fearing consequences to break any rules." Forest Reid
"The most compelling characters in the Jewish canon of storytelling are those who do explicitly what they are told not to do... I think I’m vicariously drawn to these stories because I live my own life too anxiously fearing consequences to break any rules." Forest Reid
FOREST REID
Forest Reid is a Bay Area based sound designer, composer, and installation artist. His audio-visual work engages with Jewish mysticism, Yiddish culture, and repurposed archives. He has diverse experience with sound, including archival preservation, data sonification, and studio engineering. He has created installation work for the La Jolla Playhouse and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and has had his work featured in the Without Walls (WOW) festival in San Diego and Sukkahwood in New York.
jamesforestreid.wordpress.com
Part #2 - LABA PROJECT
Winter 2023
DREYDL: ZOL ZAYN MIT MAZEL
Game Developer: Patrick Stefaniak
3D Artist: Sebastian Strunks
Voice Actor: Jeff Raz
Fabricator: Mitch Reid
Illustrator: Hannah Pozen
slot machine
DREYDL: ZOL ZAYN MIT MAZEL is a Gematria slot machine; it speaks to the mystic, the gambler, and the Torah scholar. Beginning with a slot machine adaptation of dreydl, the interactive installation brings the player into the world of paylines and card counting combined with the Jewish mystical practice of alpha-numeric text interpretation.
Remember to cash out!
“The strange thoughts of today do not resemble the strange thoughts of tomorrow – this is evident to those who pay attention,” Ya’aqov Yosef of Polnoye.
Part #1 - Explore
Spring 2023
We are 1/3 through the year-long LABA fellowship. Tell me what you are thinking so far about the theme of TABOO and your current project idea inspired by it.
I’m currently considering two different project ideas.
Dreydl:
Dreydl is a four-vignette interactive narrative that draws from Jewish texts ranging from Yiddish theatre to the biography of Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky. Like many tales in the Jewish tradition, it will be embedded with stories within stories and full of rich citations and commentaries from Jewish mysticism. Each side of a spinning dreydl will represent a different story and each one will be influenced by the Hebrew letter whose face it corresponds with. The piece will be programmed in the game engine Unity and feature archival visuals from the Yiddish Book Center and archival audio from S. Ansky’s ethnographic field recordings.
Dial D for Dybbuk:
Ever wanted to eavesdrop on the other side? To listen to the voices you’ve been told to ignore?
Dial D for Dybbuk presents you with a rotary phone connected to a lost world haunted by evil spirits and transmigrating souls.
Dial in and open your ears to the sounds of spiritual possession.
What draws you to TABOO?
The most compelling characters in the Jewish canon of storytelling are those who do explicitly what they are told not to do.
From eating the forbidden fruit to fasting and practicing Gematria, these characters offer us insight into the neurosis and soft boundaries of the societies they emerge from. I think I’m vicariously drawn to these stories because I live my own life too anxiously fearing consequences to break any rules.
IMAGE: “Dybbuk” Ephraim Moses Lilien (1874–1925)
