Tales from the Towpath is an immersive story inspired by Manchester’s waterways and their ecological fate. It spans the Victorian city to an uncertain future 50 years from now. Three characters circle one another across time, with fragments of their stories found in geocaches (past), live performance (present) and augmented reality Zappar codes (future). (Source: http://talesfromthetowpath.net/)
Rider Spoke is a work for cyclists combining theatre with game play and state of the art technology. The project continues Blast Theory’s enquiry into performance in the age of personal communication. Developing from works such as Uncle Roy All Around You (2003) the piece invites the audience to cycle through the streets of the city, equipped with a handheld computer. They search for a hiding place and record a short message there. And then they search for the hiding places of others.
The piece continues Blast Theory’s fascination with how games and new communication technologies are creating new hybrid social spaces in which the private and the public are intertwined. It poses further questions about where theatre may be sited and what form it may take. It invites the public to be co-authors of the piece and a visible manifestation of it as they cycle through the city. It is precisely dependent on its local context and invites the audience to explore that context for its emotional and intellectual resonances.
In keeping with much of the group's work Rider Spoke has a high threshold for the audience: you must be willing to cycle, alone at night, through the city. And this sets the stage for a very personal and intimate form of participation. Instead of "User Generated Content", the artists' have approached the project as inviting "Publicly Created Contributions".
A description of the work
The audience can take part either either on their own bike or borrow one supplied by Blast Theory. Following a short introduction and a safety briefing you head out into the streets with a handheld computer mounted on the handlebars. You are given a question and invited to look for an appropriate hiding place where you will record your answer. The screen of the device acts primarily as a positioning system, showing where you are and whether there are any hiding places nearby. The interface employs imagery drawn from Mexican votive painting, sailor tattoos and heraldry: swallows flutter across the screen to show available hiding places, prefab houses indicate places where others have hidden.
Once you find a hiding place (a spot previously undiscovered by any other player) the device flashes an alert and the question. The question is one of a selection authored by Blast Theory that asks you - alone, in an out of the way spot - to reflect on your life. You then record your answer onto the device. Each hiding place combines two properties: the physical location and the electronic location as reported by the device and, for this reason, position itself is slippery and changeable. This is especially true as the University of Nottingham has designed and built a system that uses WiFi access points to determine the position of each rider.
The other aspect of the game is to find the hiding places of others. When you find one, the device alerts you to stop and then shows you the question that that person answered and plays you their answer. The recordings that people make are only available in this context: played to a player, alone, in the place where they were recorded.
As you roll through the streets your focus is outward, looking for good places to hide, speculating about the hiding places of others, becoming completely immersed into this overlaid world as the voices of strangers draw you into a new and unknown place.The streets may be familiar but you’ve given yourself up to the pleasure of being lost.
(Source: Blast Theory project description)
Starting with Homer’s Odyssey through R. Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet literature describes journeys, wanderings and world-explorations in which spatial realms provide the basic dispositives for the series of narrated events. While theories of literature from G. E. Lessing’s Laocoon to K. Hamburger’s Logic of Literature had conceived of literature as a particular way of perceiving time, M. M. Bakhtin’s theory of the “chronotope” made space into a central constituent affecting the perception of the models in literary scholarship.
In recent years, current electronic media have prompted wide-ranging considerations on the importance of space for socio-cultural processes (the “spatial turn”). With the application of mobile media devices such as mobile phones, GPS and PDAs and the development of mixed reality environments in museums, galleries or research labs, new combinations of physical, virtual and symbolic spaces have been realized. Metaphorically, we might even say that literature, after having passed through the needle’s eye of book culture, seems to be reverting back to the multimodal patterns of action and the forms of antiquity, of the Middle Ages, or of the Renaissance. This, however, is taking place on a completely changed media-technological level: texts, objects, bodies and spaces combine in a largely uncharted way; electronic media take “body language” to a new level since more and more often the whole body is involved in the media activity. Increasingly complex sensors (integrated into vehicles, clothes and environments) “realize”—in other words: measure—the movements of the body, its mimics and gestures. This “multimodal” body itself then also exchanges information with the “products” of this kind of technology. Such medial couplings and framings enable the cooperation of non-symbolic activities, natural language activities and algorithmic processes of computer systems.
Of special interest for the analysis of literary developments today are environmental, exterior or urban projects, the so-called “Locative Narratives” using the previously-mentioned locative media such as GPS-tools, PDAs or others, aestheticizing each of them in a quite unexpected turn that inverts the traditional processes of literarization from the “head” back to the “feet;” they adapt literary patterns like travel-, adventure-, love-, or detective narratives, returning their imaginary movements into real ones again. Among these are projects like Jean-Pierre Balpe’s Fictions d’Issy, Stefan Schemat’s Wasser, Gabe Sawhney’s [murmur], works of the collaborative artists’ group “34 North, 118 West,” narrative online journals like the Madison Avenue Journal (http://www.madisonavenuejournal.com), and also projects like Worldwatchers by Susanne Berkenheger and Gisela Müller (http://www.worldwatchers.de/) that study the growing intensification of social control via electronic systems of observation. This contribution attempts to outline an initial overview theoretically situating these projects.
(Source: Authors' abstract for ELO_AI).
With the move from personal computing to pervasive computing, electronic literature has inhabited physical sphere of ubiquitous computing. This study analyzes examples of narratives that employ mobile technologies (from cell phones to GPS receivers) to interact with site-specific electronic literature. Drawing from examples such as [murmur], PETlab’s Re:Activism project, and Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke, this paper argues for a spatio-temporal embodiment that is produced in correspondence with the mobile interface. [Murmur] is an oral history project utilizing mobile phones is currently running in 11 cities worldwide. Signs posted throughout the city prompt mobile phone users to call a specific number and record a narrative about that site. Other passersby are able to listen to the recorded narrative when the number is later called. Similarly, Re:Activism is a mobile phone story-game that has players restage scenes of contestation that occurred throughout New York City, led by SMS messages about the site. By reclaiming the social history of these locations (and chronicling it through mobile phone cameras in a scavenger hunt manner), the players revived the community history through story-game. Community narrative is also explored in Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke. This project had participants ride bicycles around the streets of London with a handheld computer along for the ride. With headphones plugged into the computer, the voice of Ju Row Farr guided participants through broadly constructed actions (such as “Find a place your father would like and record a message about it”). As participants found particular locations that corresponded to the broad directives, they would record their own narrative or description about the place and its relation to specified categories like family, taboo, and solitude.
To reconsider narrative and its relationship to new media one must look at the spatial possibilities and rich subtext already present in the cities and roads away from hypertext and screen specific data forms. The majority of work dealing with gps is emphasizing the leaving of traces, of another layer to enhance. This misses a huge area of potential. The city spaces can now be "read" in all the layers of architecture, ethnography, layers of land usage, and the narratives of people lost in time. Writing can become one of a story space constructed of fictive detail to establish story space AND the details of the steets and buildings themselves and their details (much of which is unkown to most who pass them). Juxtaposition, experiential metaphor, a sense of not V.R with one still in one world in active in another as story space, but active in both. The new writing form creates a new sense of detail and metaphor as well as of process itself, with many exciting new possibilities.
(Source: Author's abstract, Incubation3 conference, trAce Archive)
The Colonization of Memory is a procedural meditation on the way space becomes meaningful in the context of time and the way those meanings are overwritten with each new epoch. The chance operations of the procedure stood in for the aleatory path of history, while the writers played the historical subjects of those procedures.
One rainy day in Bergen, Norway, a group of writers - The Hanseatic Semiotic Traders League (a.k.a. Fiskekaker) - gathered to participate in the second Bergen exquisition to compose a story. An exquisition is an execution of a constraint-based writing project developed by Brendan Howell under the umbrella of exquisite_code. The first Norwegian exquisition was performed in 2010.
Source: project description
With University of Bergen students Amrita Kaur, Margaux Pezier, Morten Sorreime, and Martin Swartling.
"The Broadside of a Yarn: A Situationist Strategy for Spinning Sea Stories Ashore", by J. R. Carpenter, reflects upon The Broadside of a Yarn, a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with nought but a QR code reader and a hand-made print map of dubious accuracy. The Broadside of a Yarn was commissioned by ELMCIP for Remediating the Social, an exhibition which took place at Inspace, Edinburgh, 1-17 November 2012. The Broadside of a Yarn remediates the broadside, a form of networked narrative popular from 16th century onward. Like the broadside ballads of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signified that it was intended to be performed. Embedded within the cartographic space of this printed map are QR codes which link to web pages containing computer-generated narrative dialogues, performance scripts replete with stage instructions suggesting how and where these texts are intended to be read aloud. As such, these points on the physical map point to potential events, to utterances, to speech acts. The stated intention in creating this work was to use the oral story-telling tradition of the sailor’s yarn, the printed broadside and map, the digital network, and the walk-able city in concert to construct a temporary digital community connected through a performative pervasive networked narrative. Through the process of composition the focus shifted away from the temptation to lure people on walks through a city tagged with links to stories of the sea, toward a desire to compel people to collectively speak shifting sea stories ashore. This paper reflects critically upon this shift, toward an articulation of The Broadside of a Yarn as an collective assemblage of enunciation.
The purpose of this map is not to guide but rather to propose imprecise and quite possibly impossible routes of navigation through the city of Edinburgh, along the Firth of Forth, into the North Sea, into the North Atlantic and beyond into purely imaginary territories. This map was created through an engagement with the Situationist practice of dérive. [...] During a series of walks undertaken in Edinburgh in May 2012, regardless of the number of times that I set out towards the sea, dérive led me instead into museums, libraries and used and antiquarian print, map and book shops. The breadth and variety of this bookish drifting is borne out in the imprecision of the resulting map of influence. My own photographs and line drawings mingle with scans of obscure details of old maps, city plans, pamphlets,
navigational charts, coastal guides, guidebooks and other printed ephemera gleaned from intermingled map–chart, reading–walking, drifting–wandering.
Like the printed broadsides of old, the public posting of The Broadside of a Yarn signifies that it is intended to be performed. Embedded within the cartographic space of the printed map are QR codes that link to smartphone-optimized web pages containing computer-generated narrative dialogues. [...] Most, although not all of these, are intended to serve as scripts for poly-vocal performances, replete with stage instructions suggesting how and where they may be read. Thus, these QR codes constitute points on the physical map that point to potential events, to utterances, to speech acts.
A Google maps-based narrative, set in London.
This is a narrative running app, activated when you take your smart phone for a run. Players take on the person of ‘Runner 5,’ a scavenger in the app’s post-apocalyptic setting; their running playlist is sporadically interrupted by voice-recorded messages from other survivors, leading them to nearby supplies or warning them of approaching zombie hoards – so that half-hearted runners know that it’s time to pick up the pace. Narrative fragments are embedded between songs, and timed so that a story arc of 4-5 episodes will complete every twenty minutes, and that each subsquent fragment ends with a hook so the runner-reader will want to return for more. The narrative is locative but works anywhere, providing a fictional layer on top of an actual map of your surroundings where you can collect supplies and medicines, and where you must avoid zombies. The first season consists of 24 twenty minute episodes and there are plans for a second season.
Runs on iPhones, iPods and Android phones.
This is an iPhone app published by the company Six to Start. Naomi Alderman is the writer on the project.