DSF San Francisco 2005

Situated Storytelling

The presenters were Abbe Don, Jo Reid, Hana Iverson, Nick West
You can read their biographies here.

"In our culture we have moved the stories from the place where they occur into the living room - TV Internet Video"

Creating stories in the place where they occur requires the development of mobile social software. Something called psycho geography has also been devised as a new way of exploring an urban environment

Nick West from HP Labs Bristol explained the Scape the Hood Mediascape. Stories had been gathered from the locality around KQED in San Francisco and saved them as audiofiles on an iPAQ. The file also contains the coordinates of each story's origin. The iPAQ determines the location of the user and plays out the story relevant to that space. I have used the same set up in an earlier demonstration in Bristol.

The software can be downloaded for non commercial use from the Mobile Bristol site
people attending the festival could go out with a holster slung around their body holding an iPAQ and small Bluetooth GPS receiver to experience the mediascape called Scape the Hood. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the experiment.

Jo Reid - also of HP Bristol introduced another project but this time built around one historic event - The Queens Square Riots of 1831. In this case the audio files are dramatic productions of the conversations from the riot. There's a page on the Mobile Bristol Site which explains it.
Jo also talked about applications for games, festival and event information and the use of 3D spatialised sound.

As a storytelling environment the frame work is not linear and relies on finding Magic Moments when the user/listener is surprised buy the juxtaposition of the audio and the environment triggered simply by walking into a location. They are the moments of revelation that people remember.

So how does situated storytelling for Mediascapes compare with what we know as digital storytelling?

Digital / Situated storytelling
Personal / Stimulated by environment
For PC consumption / Mobile consumption
Quiet / Noisy
Dedicated attention / Many distractions
Reflective / Seeing with eyes of others
Thoughtful / "Throw away" - work fast
/ Physical sense - smells and movement.

posted by Dawnriser @ 16:40