The Magic Story Table

The Magic Story Table has been traveling all over the world, creating portraits of cities through the stories told by their inhabitants. Visitors ‘fly’ over a city by tilting the table and then, upon coming upon a location with an icon indicating a story, urban legend, secret find, or unknown discovery, one can ‘zoom’ into that locale by turning the table clockwise like a giant dial, whereupon a story will appear, told in the voice of the storyteller.

Artists JD Beltran and Scott Minneman have been commissioned to travel to these cities, spend time collecting stories from the inhabitants, and then create these story portraits to be experienced on The Magic Story Table. Thus far, the Magic Story Table has traveled to multiple venues in San Francisco, California, Cleveland, Ohio, St. Petersburg, Russia, and Bishkek, Krygyzstan. Future venues in the works include Sydney, Australia, Toronto, Canada, and New York, New York.

The most 2019 recent edition is featured at the Global Museum at San Francisco State University. Viewers can navigate on the world map to learn specific locations where pieces of the collection originated, and a story appears about that artifact, in the choice of five languages in written and audio form. The story relates not only how that artifact was used at the time it was made, but what the modern day parallel would be.

The Magic Story Table was recognized by ID Magazine as one of the top interactive media designs internationally for its Annual Design Review.