Diagramming a Species & Journeyer’s Guidebook

Journeryer's Guidebook
E. Whittaker & J. Brocklehurst 2016 Journeyer’s Guidebook, illustrated book accompanying the iPhone app

Diagramming a species “…one can make exact experiments upon uniform diagrams; and when one does so, one must keep a bright lookout for unintended and unexpected changes thereby brought about in the relations of different significant parts of the diagram to one another. Such operations upon diagrams, whether external or imaginary, take the place of the experiments upon real things that one performs in chemical and physical research.” (Peirce 1906: 493) [1]

Imagine picking up a pen and noting down on the back of an opened, but clean white envelope, the words ‘expanded narrative’. It’s the name I use to refer to a broad and inclusive family of storytelling practices that challenge the form and experience of the book. These types of works can be analogue or digital, multi or transdisciplinary, and range from concrete poetry through to tabletop role-playing games, from participatory theatre to “puzzle novellas” [2] and locative narrative.

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Interview with Blast Theory – narrative, interaction and performance

Interview with Blast Theory, Wellington Road, Brighton, January 2012

Blast Theory is renowned internationally as one of the most adventurous artists’ groups using interactive media.

In this interview Blast Theory – Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj – discuss a selection of projects created over the last twenty years including, Fixing Point (2011), Machine to See With (2010), Ivy4Evr (2010), Ulrike and Eamon Compliant (2009), I Like Frank (2004), Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), Desert Rain (1999) and Stampede (1994). Relationships between narrative, interaction and performance, dialogue as a structuring device, game design and methods of development are considered.

Funded by The Teaching & Learning Directorate, Plymouth University (2011-12) www.expandednarrative.org

ICIDS2015 The Lost Index: NATMUS, National Museum of Denmark & Dieselhouse Museum, Copenhagen

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The locative narrative The Lost Index: NATMUS  was featured at 8th International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling in Copenhagen.

Brocklehurst
The Lost Index: NATMUS, photo James Brocklehurst

Audio guides and games have long been staple modes of interpretation in museums. The medium of locative narrative, defined here as participatory site-specific story experiences that are heard on headphones, offers alternative modes of engagement with archives and collections where the visitor becomes a participant in an unfolding drama. The confluence of the existent world and narrative representations is an often-reported feature of “mixed reality” [1] experiences [2] [3] [4].

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