Megan Heyward is an Australian author, media artist and academic whose creative practice and research sits at the intersection of storytelling and new technologies. For over twenty years she has explored the potentials of narrative and interactivity, working across multiple media and formats; using text, image, video, sound animation to shape interactive works for electronic literature, locative media, augmented reality, hypertext, mobile apps and other emerging formats.
Her pioneering early projects, I Am a Singer (1997) and of day, of night (2004) are interactive narrative / electronic literature works on CD-ROM that reimagine and reconfigure narrative into interactive, multimodal forms for desktop delivery. Both projects were developed through commissioning grants by the Australian Film Commission (now Screen Australia) and have been widely exhibited to diverse audiences in Australia and internationally, including Canada, USA, France, Germany, Japan and Brazil, where they received attention for their rich visual and aural landscapes, game-like interactions and strong engagement with the creative potentials of interactive narrative. These works were also been finalists or winners of national or international digital media awards, including MILIA New Talent (international competition/ France 1997), AIMIA Awards (1997/2003) and the Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature (2002). of day of night (2004) was first exhibited in 2001 and published by Eastgate Systems, Inc in 2004, the only work non-North American work included in the Eastgate catalogue.
Since the mid 2000s she has worked with emerging mobile media, location based technologies and personal devices, developing experimental, documentary and fictional interactive projects including Traces: stories written upon this town (2006), Cleanse (2010) and Notes for Walking (2013), a locative app and installation exploring the narrative and experiential potentials of mobile media, place-based storytelling and AR. Notes for Walking was exhibited throughout the Sydney Festival in January 2013 as a locative media and augmented reality smartphone app using GPS and AR technologies to deliver a location-based, experiential artwork at Middle Head National Park, Sydney. The project annotated the abandoned, colonial-era naval fort at Middle Head on Sydney Harbour with a set of video and audio ‘notes’, drawing over 5000 people to the park to experience the project as a walked, mediated public artwork, using their smartphones and a free downloadable mobile app.
In 2014 Heyward received funding from the Australia Council for the Arts Literature Board to develop an electronic literature work for iPads exploring the narrative, touchscreen and haptic affordances of digital tablets. The Secret Language of Desire (2015) was published as an interactive narrative app for iPad, exhibited at ELO Bergen 2015, and published in the Appstore. Heyward continues to explore the potentials of narrative and interactivity in locative media and augmented reality platforms through experimental prototypes for mobile platforms. She is a Senior Lecturer in Media Arts and Production at the University of Technology Sydney.