atmospheric

Digital Fiction Curios is a unique digital archive/interactive experience for PC and Virtual Reality.

The project houses works of electronic literature created in Flash nearly two decades ago by artists Andy Campbell and Judi Alston of Dreaming Methods, One to One Development Trust‘s award-winning in-house studio.

Dreaming Methods is responsible for some of the internet’s earliest media-rich digital fiction. Much of that work was created in Flash, a technology that will be removed from all major web browsers in 2020. Curios archives and re-purposes three of our Flash works originally made as far back as 1999 and makes it uniquely possible to explore them in VR.

From fragments of words held in glass bottles to sprawling apocalyptic dreamscapes, Curios offers an immersive glimpse into Dreaming Methods' signature world of dream-inspired narratives, living texts and lost realities. 

Inspired by British stone carver Billy Johnson who, in 2007, left a series of stone heads outside houses and public locations across the North of England, Clearance presents the user/reader with a series of barren, mouse-responsive landscapes and video sequences littered with renmants of narratives from an unexplained apocalyptic event. 

A schoolgirl who has narrowly escaped death hides and reflects beneath a roadway tunnel. Her scattered thoughts manifest against the grotty concrete walls before fading away again into nothing. Soon she realises she's been hiding herself away for days. How the hell did she end up here in the first place? Contains strong language and references to violence.

Inspired by John Christopher's The White Mountains, a children's science fiction novel, Capped is a mouse-responsive digital fiction about half-remembered childhood memories and a possible alien invasion. Created using black and white photography with embedded film clips, animations and sound. 

A mouse-responsive exploration of the final nightmarish dream of a blind old man. Contains a transient narrative and basic interactive problem solving puzzles. Created using a combination of photography and 3D animated renders.

Inspired by the author’s own dreams and experiences, The Flat presents users/readers with a challenging mouse-controlled environment in which narrative fragments left behind by an abandoned building’s previous inhabitants still linger. Through a combination of atmospheric photography, parallax scrolling techniques, snippets of written fiction, and an evocative soundtrack, the work allows various rooms in the flat to be explored by panning around with the mouse; the transient textual narratives themselves often changing and/or progressing when the rooms are revisited. To add to the feeling of tension and urgency, and to encourage the work to be revisited, a timer ticks down in the top right hand corner of the screen before the user/reader is ejected from the narrative and shown a final, enigmatic scene: a white hooded figure in the back garden.