Territory as Interface
This article depicts two projects from the MDCN (Mobile Digital Commons Network, a creative team of engineers, designers and communication scholars from a number of institutions nationwide). The MDCN attempts to answer several questions concerning location based media through creative collaborative projects.
Working as a “think tank” environment, the MDCN developed a series of questions that helped shape their research:
“1) How can an awareness of environmental and social histories and local knowledge lead to an engagement with mobile devices outdoor spaces?
2) How might participatory public authoring play a meaningful role in interactive new media genres?
3) How can narrative, character development, location based play structures, gesture choreography, information architecture, and an awareness of space and place combine to structure new forms of game play?
4) What forms of content development for mobile devices are appropriate for the enhancement of outdoor experiences in urban and natural environments?”
The first project discussed within the article, Urban Archaeology: Sampling the Park, “explored the social history of a city square in Montreal using sound, image and GPS…” to engage with ideas of “memory” in relation to a “space.” Several “competing groups” (surrounding business, residential, etc) served as a platform to envision an immersive experience involving “archival study and field recordings.” Using GPS capable personal computing devices (such as PDA) sound and video could be heard/viewed when a specific coordinate within the space was reached.
The second project discussed pertains to The Haunting a “location based mobile game.” Again, Longford presents us with some excellent questions to consider when creating an immersive world within an augmented canvas:
“1) What is the sensory experience of the place and how can it feed the narrative mediated by social behaviours, technology, and physical terrain?
2) What are the impacts of humans on these environments, and in turn, how do these influence users?
3) What are the temporal implications for the space?
4) How will the space change over time?
5) How are we going to engage with the… protocols that currently govern the space?
6) Who are the people, communities, or other stakeholders involved that we need to consider and consult?”
Longford takes us through the process by which the team came to develop an immersive experience within “Parc Mount Royal in Montreal.” Treating the park like a giant “Ouija board”, the MDCN envisions the use of mobile devices as possibility for communication with “ghosts/spirits.”
In conclusion, Longford makes a few final remarks on designers of these augmented narrative experiences to “be equally accountable to the spaces and the places of use.”
I found both of the projects presented within the article to be highly interesting. Both projects also represent for me a binary within transmedia interactive narrative that I have been pondering since a comment Professor Fisher made to me in class…
We were discussing some ideas I had concerning AR tech and she said something along the lines of “Well, there are many ways in which we could use this technology to relay information, one of which is for utility purposes.”
I mulled over our discussion over the next few days and picked up on the fact that maybe I had been viewing how to use this technology with a one track mind. This is half of the binary-utility.
The other half is something else entirely. I find comfort in likening the creative process behind the other half of the binary to that of experimental filmmaking, or writing certain types of poetry.
Viewed in this context, I find Robert McKee’s advice to possibly be advantageous in an effort to understand how to further develop ideas which would break the mould for this new augmented digital mobile narrative canvas:
“Your work… must be well made within the principles that shape our art… Artists master the form.”
Now, because this new storytelling canvas best works (via Longford from McCullough and Thackara) with a “bottom-up approach that is multidisciplinary” I have to ask myself:
Question 1
-Is there a hierarchy within the different artistic forms of transmedia storytelling?
Question 2
-Out of the binary relationship considered above, which side is considered “high art”?