Time Travel as Wayfinding: Assembling Past and Present in Location-Based Games

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Below is a written version of the paper I presented at the Virtual Realities as Time Travel workshop hosted by the Bristol Digital Games Lab on 12th May 2023. In the text below, I have indicated where each slide should be viewed in the embedded PowerPoint above.

I’d like to thank everyone at British Digital Games Lab for making this excellent event happen, in particular Richard Cole for inviting me to participate. I'd also like to thank the other speakers and attendees for contributing to such interesting and rich discussion.     

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(Slide 1)

Hi everyone. I’m Jack Lowe, a post-doctoral research associate at the University of the West of England’s Digital Cultures Research Centre. I also design location-based games and I do narrative design for digital games and other media.

(Slide 2)

I’m here to talk about what time travel might mean in the context of location-based games – that is, games in which players’ physical locations and/or actions are incorporated into the gameplay through media interfaces. What does time travel mean in the context of these types of games?

(Slide 3)

Well, I want to start by stating the obvious: we can’t literally be transported back in time, nor can we create perfect emulations of the past through media, no matter how ‘immersive’ they supposedly are.

However, we can literally engage with elements of the historic past in the places we inhabit.

(Slide 4)

Throughout this talk, I’m going to be talking about places as assemblages. Assemblages are relationships between component parts that aren’t stable or fixed. Things can be replaced or displaced, and some things can also remain.

By thinking about places as assemblages, we can grasp how elements of the past remain in the present, but how there are always elements that are changing too – whether they’re material things, meanings or lived practices.

(Slide 5)

I’ve got this quote here from Tim Ingold, an anthropologist who talks about places in this kind of processual way. He says:

“…every place holds within it memories of previous arrivals and departures, as well as expectations of how one may reach it, or reach other places from it. Thus do places enfold the passage of time: they are neither of the past, present or future but all three rolled into one. Endlessly generated through the comings and goings of their inhabitants, they figure not as locations in space but as specific vortices in a current of movement, of innumerable journeys actually made.”

So when I look at this quote, it really makes me feel that places are sites of time travel. They have multiple time periods folded into them, produced by the journeys of the things that assemble in those places.

(Slide 6)

And what I’m here to discuss today is how our engagement with these elements from different time periods depends on how we navigate through places.

In particular, I going to use the concept of wayfinding in this presentation to discuss how we interact with different time periods in location-based games.

Wayfinding is a practice of coming to understand your whereabouts by connecting your movements with the narratives of other journeys made in that place, by you and by other people and things.

But wayfinding isn’t a clear-cut process. Not everyone finding their way through a place will make the same connections.

(Slide 7)

And this is a theme I’m going to be returning to when I talk about how we engage with the past in location-based games.

My aim is to highlight how location-based games present compelling opportunities for expanding and complicating understandings of the past and how the past connects with the present through place.

And I’m going to do this by exploring the relationships between navigation and narrative in the design and play of two games I created that directly focus on historic events.

Let me introduce them briefly.

(Slide 8)

The first is The Timekeeper’s Return. The Timekeeper’s Return is a story-based treasure hunt designed for all ages, in which players scan QR codes to discover the hidden histories of locations in Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter. The story follows the journey of a time-travelling researcher called Mia Augustina, whose time machine has malfunctioned and trapped her in the past. By interacting with role-playing local businesspeople and using the information they provide, players must find and scan all the QR code ‘triangulation markers’ in the Cathedral Quarter to recalibrate Mia’s time machine and help her return. These QR codes also communicate Mia’s research diaries, sharing the stories of what she has encountered in the past, in those same locations.

(Slide 9)

The second game is The Gates to Dreamland. The Gates to Dreamland is an interactive audiowalk set around the Dreamland Amusement Park in Margate. The player triggers audio diary extracts to be played when they find each of the 5 gates located around Dreamland’s perimeter. These diary extracts describe the journey faced by Italian scientist Galileo, as he attempted to publish his final book. Through symbolic and metaphorical connections to the landscape around Dreamland, the audiowalk explores the obstacles Galileo faced, as he lost his eyesight and his health worsened, and how his perspective on the world changed. It’s ultimately about the power of imagination in changing how you see the world, and it can be played in person or online using Google Streetview.

So now I’ve introduced the games, let’s use this idea of wayfinding to think about how we engage with the past by navigating through places in location-based games.

(Slide 10)

In location-based games, one of the features of how you navigate is that you can generally look and move in any direction that your body allows. You are in control of your body and what you choose to focus on in your surroundings.

This feature is one of the reasons that many digital games and other interactive experiences are considered different when compared to other narrative media like films or books. You have more agency to determine the perspective from which you encounter things happening in the world.

This is called ‘dynamic focalization’.

(Slide 11)

However, in digitally-rendered worlds, designers still have tactics to influence what you pay attention to. They can use visual techniques like lighting and signposting, they can use sound design or they can change the characteristics of the avatar you control. So while it still feels like you have a great deal of agency in where you direct your attention, it is still being manipulated by the designers of the digitally-rendered world.

In location-based games, you engage with a material world using a fleshy body, not an avatar, in a way that isn’t limited by what has been programmed into some software.

But this agency brings with it an awful lot of uncertainty.

(Slide 12)

I’m going to use an example from The Timekeeper’s Return to illustrate this, which was the QR code treasure hunt engaging with hidden histories of Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter.

One of Mia Augustina’s research diaries from the past, communicated through a QR code sticker, referred to the building pictured here. This building was believed to be the inspiration for the house of Mr. Wickfield in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield.

When I tested the game, some players misinterpreted that the building being described was the stone tower you can see in the image on the right. To me, it seemed obvious from the positioning of the QR code that the building people would look at would be the white building. As it turned out, players would usually end up focusing on the more intricate, striking features of the stone tower instead. So in the end, I had to change the research diary text to deliberately direct players to look across to the other side of the road, where the relevant building could be seen.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so surprised, though, because this is a common outcome when wayfinding in an unfamiliar setting. I’m sure all of us can recall moments when we’ve been following directions that describe landmarks, or when we’ve looked at the road layout on a map, yet still managed to go the wrong direction because of what we happened to notice at the time, or what we were paying attention to.

(Slide 13)

For Misha Myers, this is one of the particular qualities of mobile media storytelling: that even in a linear story with pre-determined routes, the narrative experience can be “undone by the particularities of ‘just this body in just this place’ at just this time.” Wayfinding is an embodied practice, and each body will have different capacities in different contexts.

Okay, so the embodied navigation that people do in location-based games introduces contingency to the experience, which can affect how players engage with historic elements in their environment.

(Slide 14)

But what happens if you lean into this contingency? What happens if you accept the possibility that people might not notice certain historic details, or will actively ignore information connecting to the past?

This is what I experimented with in The Gates to Dreamland, which was the locative audiowalk about the Italian scientist Galileo.

Whether you’re playing in person in Margate or using Google Streetview, when players listen to the audio diaries describing events in Galileo’s life, as a designer I had no way of knowing what players might be looking at or paying attention to at the time.

For example, one player described how, at this point in the experience, they decided to use Google Streetview to zoom in on the person pushing the pram. As you can see, that’s just one detail visible in the 360-degree view of this location.

(Slide 15)

But rather than deliberately directing players’ attention to particular things, like I did with The Timekeeper’s Return, instead I decided to write audio diary scripts that were saturated with references to all sorts of things in your surroundings. Even though Galileo was living in 17^th-century Florence, I could make connections to present-day Margate using metaphors and symbolism.

When I interviewed players about the game, they all described how what they focused on completely changed the connections they drew between Galileo’s experiences and the area of Margate they were navigating. They might only notice maybe a maximum of 40% of the references in the audio diaries, because of what they happened to be paying attention to at the time. But that’s fine, because when they did notice them, it was they themselves who had uncovered that link to the past. And often they would perceive connections I never even intended too.

This then helped them to understand the wider themes of the experience: about the power of the imagination in creating connections across different time periods and different parts of the world. Perception itself is a form of agency.

By actively drawing on the contingency of wayfinding as an embodied practice, the game demonstrated that there are no stable, unchanging understandings of the past. The past is always encountered in a present, lived context.

(Slide 16)

So we can see that the relationship between past and present isn’t a neat one.

And this is clearly shown by places. In all places, some elements of the past remain, others don’t, some are detectable, some aren’t, some we know about and some we don’t.

In location-based games that engage with the past, the aim of designers is to find forms of navigation that assemble interesting or compelling connections between the past and the present in the places people inhabit.

(Slide 17)

The Timekeeper’s Return was all about the hidden histories of Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter, and the excitement of following the journey of time-travelling researcher Mia Augustina as she encountered them.         

Some of these histories are still visible in the environment in some form – players just needed the opportunity to notice them. In this image, the stones you can see embedded in the brickwork are the last remains of the Burgate, a gate in Canterbury’s city wall that existed in various forms from the Romans until 1822. Simply through the placement of a QR code at this location, the attention of players who successfully found the sticker was drawn to this material feature.

(Slide 18)

For other histories, however, there is no obvious physical remnant for people to find. For example, while Canterbury’s Cathedral Quarter was extensively bombed during the Baedecker Raids of WW2, many of the bombed areas have since been rebuilt.

In these situations, connections with the past must be made in other ways.

One technique is to use the material features that do exist as a reference point. For example, referring to the heights and distances between things in players’ surroundings to indicate the scale of something no longer there.

For the WW2 bombing example, one of the QR code research diaries draws players’ attention to a street where the entirety of one side of the street was flattened by the bombing, while all the buildings on the other side remained intact. While the bombed side of the street has now been rebuilt, I could still use this comparison between the two sides of the street to demonstrate the extent of the destruction.

In The Timekeeper’s Return, then, wayfinding by using historic details in the story and its comparison to the present-day landscape gave players dramatic agency in how they assembled connections to the past.

(Slide 19)

But in The Gates to Dreamland, where the history being explored happened somewhere else entirely (17^th-century Florence), how could players’ navigation of the environment engage with the past in a compelling way?

The answer was to draw figurative and symbolic connections between material features in the player’s surroundings and Galileo’s situation, as described in the audio diaries.

At one of the gates to Dreamland, between the metal bars, the amusement park’s Helter Skelter is visible in the distance. The words from the scripted audio diary at this location imagine how Galileo’s first action, when returning to his villa under house arrest in 1634, was to climb straight to the highest window of the house. Here, he gazes upon the familiar view of the Torre del Gallo – a tower in Florence – but his sight problems render the view inaccessible.

Here, the listener is invited to draw a figurative connection between the inaccessibility of Dreamland’s landmarks and that of Galileo, in being house-bound and increasingly visually impaired.

Of course, there are slippages in this process. In discussing mobile media storytelling, Misha Myers describes the breakages and detours that occur when participants ‘move between the fault lines of two presents’ – one represented by the media, and one inhabited by the participant.

What’s compelling about this process of juxtaposition, however, is that it provides gaps for players to fill in.

(Slide 20)

This can lead to all sorts of unexpected impressions too.

For example, one of the people who played The Gates to Dreamland using Google Streetview decided to play with the platform’s date range feature as they were navigating. As they witnessed the Margate landscape change over time, their interpretation of the audio diaries shifted depending on the version of Margate they navigated through.        

Wayfinding is ultimately a propositional process: proposing a way through the world by finding connections between the diverse range of information you encounter, however jarring or conflicting it may be.

In these location-based games, players navigated the fault lines between present-day contexts and information from the past, and then used this to construct an understanding of place and its relationship with time.

(Slide 21)

The juxtaposition of a mediated history with an embodied encounter of a place means that the impressions of the past that players form typically aren’t simple, singular narratives. There are all sorts of influences and perspectives that shape what people perceive about these histories.

Often, players of these two games would report how their perceptions of places and their history changed as a result of playing.

For those who played The Timekeeper’s Return, probably the two most common responses to the game were that a) they became newly aware of historic features in the Cathedral Quarter that they didn’t know were there, and b) that they learnt about the history behind landmarks which they encountered on an everyday basis (as this quote shows).

(Slide 22)

In The Gates to Dreamland, which was often played remotely using Streetview during the pandemic, the experience provoked interesting relationships with memory. Galileo’s history became coloured by people’s existing knowledges and impressions of Margate, as well as the version of Margate they encountered on Streetview. Likewise, their impressions of Margate became influenced by Galileo’s story. Suddenly, Margate became seen as a place connected to many other entities across space and time. The understanding of the past that resulted was deeply hybrid; an impression that cut across many different influences.

(Slide 23)

However, there’s an interesting question about authenticity here, which ties to some of the discussions we had during the last Bristol Digital Games Lab event. Does it matter that people are engaging with Galileo’s history in a context that’s completely foreign to the one he actually lived in? Does it matter that the diaries aren’t Galileo’s own words, even though they’re based on academic research and evidence from the historic record?

(Slide 24)

This is a debate that goes far beyond the scope of this presentation, but what came out consistently from my interviews with those who played these games was a heightened awareness of the range of possible connections with the past that can be made – how multiple impressions of a place and its past can come to define a site. Players recognised that one person’s impression of Galileo’s journey, or one of the Cathedral Quarter’s histories, would be constructed completely different from somebody else’s, depending on all sorts of contextual factors. In The Timekeeper’s Return, in particular, players frequently referred to a sense of community being generated. This collective, extroverted sense of place came about as players engaged with a wide range of historic information shared by several role-playing local businesspeople in order to navigate through the game area.

Which brings me to the final point of this presentation. Wayfinding is an intersubjective practice – it unfolds through the relationships between things, rather than depending on a single person’s intentions.

And the same thing is happening with these games. Impressions of the past unfold through the continual wiring and re-wiring of connections between materials, meanings and practices that people encounter as they navigate through places.

(Slide 25)

So overall, what can we say about time travel in location-based games?

Well, location-based games as media forms are defined by relationships between navigation and narrative. They’re about the synergy between how you find a way through the world and the story of what unfolds.

In location-based games that engage with the past, different forms of navigation are curated to connect what players encounter in the present-day world with historic events.

This happens through a process of wayfinding, which I’ve argued is an embodied, propositional and intersubjective process.

It’s embodied in how players have agency in the ways they move and pay attention to the things they encounter, to feel their way through the world.

It’s propositional in how there are ‘gaps’ or ‘fault lines’ between past events and what players encounter during the game, which players have the opportunity to fill with their ideas and imaginations.

And it’s intersubjective, in how the impressions of the past players form are created by drawing relations between multiple paths and perspectives.

By arguing that time travel in location-based games is akin to wayfinding, then, I’m suggesting that players’ interaction with the past isn’t neat or uncomplicated.

Rather, location-based games present compelling opportunities for expanding and complicating understandings of the past, by demonstrating the myriad ways that past and present are continually assembled in place.

(Slide 26)

Designing Place-Based Games (Pervasive Media Studio Lunchtime Talk)

At the end of April, I gave a lunchtime talk at the Pervasive Media Studio, located in Watershed on Bristol's historic harbourside, which hosts a diverse community of artists, academics, technologists and businesses exploring creative technology and experience design.

Since July last year, I have been part of the Pervasive Media Studio community myself, as part of my post-doctoral research role at UWE's Digital Cultures Research Centre. Now thoroughly embedded in the life of the PM Studio, I wanted to use the opportunity of a lunchtime talk to share insights from my creative practice and research into designing games that engage with place.

Not only was the aim to  give some practical tips for those designing (location-based) games, but to provide something thought-provoking or inspirational for those interested in engaging with place across any kind of interactive or digitally-mediated experience.

The Pervasive Media Studio's talks take place every Friday at 1pm, both in the building and streamed live online via YouTube. You can watch the recorded stream of my talk above, which also has BSL interpretation.

           

YouTube Video: Engaging with Place through Location-Based Games

The video above was produced by me for the Digital Geographies Research Group's Work in Progress YouTube series. The series shares recent or current work being undertaken by researchers on a wide range of topics that connect geography and the digital.

This video briefly summarises findings I made from my PhD research, outlining the key ways that the development and play of location-based games engages with place (where a place, broadly speaking, is a meaningful location). I explain how location-based games are designed to tap into the close relationship between how you navigate an environment and how you perceive the 'story' of it as a place.

RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2021: Designing digital games as a geographical research method

Above is a recorded version (with subtitles) of the paper I presented in the Innovative Digital Geographies session at the Royal Geographical Society (with Institute of British Geographers) Annual International Conference on 31st August 2021. This paper discussed designing digital games as a geographical research method and considered the relationship between this method and digital geographical knowledge more broadly, particularly in terms of what we consider 'innovative'.

I'd like to thank Zoe Gardner, Stefano de Sabbata, Katy Bennett and Tess Osborne for convening this fascinating double session, and the Digital Geographies Research Group (DGRG) for sponsoring it. Thank you also to the other presenters in the two sessions for sharing such inspiring research insights and techniques.

Making The Gates to Dreamland: Future Directions

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On 25^th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.

Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.

In this series of blog posts, I’m delving into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.

More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.

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When I first agreed to get involved with A Different LENS, I was approaching my contribution as a side project to my PhD research. 

Indeed, I had only just launched Canterbury in 3 Words – a project made specifically in response to my PhD research questions – when I received the brief for A Different LENS. The latter was therefore my opportunity to keep the creative juices flowing, connect with other artists and gain experience in producing another kind of locative digital media art, alongside my PhD work.

It wasn’t until late in the development of The Gates to Dreamland when I realised that my contribution to A Different LENS had been answering those same PhD research questions all along, albeit from a different angle.   

The Gates to Dreamland was fundamentally concerned with the processes through which places become meaningful to us. And being a form of playful locative media that tells a story, I found myself making many of the same considerations as I had done for other projects during the PhD.

These included how to account for the diverse things and processes that make places what they are; how to manage the difficulties of designing for physical locations that can change without warning; and how to make interacting with places using locative and playful media something that is evocative and interesting.

The project seemed too relevant not to incorporate into my PhD research.

So once The Gates to Dreamland launched, I began considering what kinds of material I could gather and analyse to produce useful findings I could write about in my PhD thesis.                        

Fortunately, I am pretty rigorous when it comes to documenting the process behind any creative work I do. I already had numerous design documents, notes and other original files that I could use in my analysis.

But I knew it would also be valuable to discuss the work with other people, to gauge their responses to the project and its relationship with place.

I identified two groups of people who I felt could provide important insights: collaborators in A Different LENS who tackled the same design brief as me, and members of the public who were willing to test the audiowalk and give me feedback.

Opportunities to talk with some of the other contributing artists arose after the opening of A Different LENS for Margate NOW 2020. The project was featured in Sound Walk September, an annual global festival held online to celebrate audiowalks, and as a result we were invited to host a ‘café’ event with Walk Listen Create. We ran this as a ‘Long Table’, where all of the participating artists spoke about their projects as if talking at a dinner party, while attendees could openly ask questions and discuss the work with us.                 

After this more performative event, a group of us then took part in an ‘after party’, where we chatted with each other about how we found the process of taking part in A Different LENS. This allowed me to ask each contributing artist more targeted questions about their experiences in responding to the project brief.             

Alongside this group discussion, I organised a separate conversation with the project curator Elspeth Penfold, who incidentally also wanted to interview me about A Different LENS for her MA research. In the end, the 90-minute discussion we shared left us both with plenty to work with.

As for feedback from people actually trying The Gates to Dreamland, over November and December 2020 I ran a handful of tests with some really great people who volunteered to take part. Due to the pandemic, all of these people participated online using Streetview, with the A Different LENS webapp open on a separate browser tab. After completing the walk, I then interviewed the testers for 30 minutes about their experiences.

I’m pleased to say that the feedback I’ve received so far has been very positive. It was heartening to hear all the connections the testers identified between the areas around Dreamland and the events described in the audio diaries, which were based on Galileo’s life in 17^th-century Florence. They picked up on lots of the key themes and ideas I wanted to explore in the work and praised the writing for being engaging and evocative. The testers were also complimentary about my voice performances and the audio quality in general.                      

Alongside this positive feedback, I was grateful to get some constructive comments that could help to shape the future of The Gates to Dreamland.

There were some useful suggestions of small technical changes that might improve the experience for different kinds of participants, such as raising the overall volume of the audio for those without headphones. Many of these ideas were tweaks that can be made relatively easily.

However, the testers also offered some interesting thoughts on how remote participation in the walk via Streetview could be developed further.

I was fully aware before testing that the online-only version of the walk was not a seamless experience. The Gates to Dreamland was primarily designed to be completed in Margate, so simulating the walk via an internet browser was always going to be a compromise.                                          

The testers still found the format effective, though, and wondered whether there could be an opportunity to make a more bespoke online version of the walk.

This would likely involve integrating the audio diaries and navigation via Streetview into a single platform, creating a single, accessible place (e.g. website or app) where people anywhere in the world could access the walk online at any point in the future.

It was also suggested that the online version of the walk could include ambient sound and/or music. This is something I would’ve liked to do for the original version if I had more time, and is certainly a feature I’d be interested in working on for any future versions.

While writing my PhD thesis will prevent me from working further on the project over the coming months, I’ll certainly be thinking about what options are available to take these ideas further.

In the meantime, I’d still be delighted if anybody reading this wanted to try the current online version of The Gates to Dreamland.

To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading. This is the start of the walk, and the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow.

Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.

Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk in Streetview, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.

The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete.

If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.

Before I wrap up, I’m delighted to tell you about one special piece of positive feedback relating to this project.

In January, we learnt that A Different LENS received an honourable mention at the Sound Walk September 2020 Awards! In total, there were 50 different soundwalk projects that were submitted to the event, which were narrowed down to a shortlist of 13 for the awards. To not only be shortlisted but also to receive an honourable mention is a huge credit to everyone involved in the project, and it made me very proud to have contributed myself.

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To finish off this series of posts exploring how The Gates to Dreamland was made, I’d just like to thank a few people who made all of this possible.

First and foremost, Elspeth Penfold, for her sterling work in curating A Different LENS and for inviting me to contribute to the project. I’ve mentioned all the different jobs Elspeth took on in this role previously, but I can now add organising the post-launch events and chatting with me about her curation of the project to the list.

I’d like to thank the other artists who contributed to A Different LENS for their valuable advice, ideas and the numerous conversations we shared that have helped me to make – and make sense of – The Gates to Dreamland.

Thank you to Arts Council England, Margate NOW, Kent County Council and the Margate Bookie for funding and supporting A Different LENS.

And finally, many thanks to those who have tested The Gates to Dreamland and taken the time to share your impressions with me. Your contributions have been a huge help for my PhD research, and will help to shape how the project develops in the future.

Making The Gates to Dreamland: Mapping Between Worlds

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On 25^th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.

Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.

In this series of blog posts, I’m delving into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.

More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.

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The final stage in making The Gates to Dreamland was uploading all the materials for the audiowalk to the A Different LENS map, hosted on a webapp called CGeoMap.

By this point many of the other A Different LENS projects had already been uploaded, and I was able to see how their content was displayed. It was inspiring to find such a treasure trove of media types on the map, including images, audio, text, video and links to external websites, with each entry combining these in different ways to make connections between works by visually-impaired authors and places in Margate.           

I knew that I wanted my entries to remain focused on the spoken diary extracts I had recorded. But seeing the other map contributions did make me consider what might or might not be interesting to include as additional relevant information. I briefly flirted with the idea of summarising or linking to some of the materials I found during my research on Galileo’s life, which I’ve highlighted throughout this blog series.

In the end, I decided that the only content I would include alongside the audio would be a single image for each pin on the map. I wanted users to be as engaged as possible with the spoken diary extracts and their surroundings, rather than feeling the need to spend much time looking at their phone screens.

By sticking to a single iconic image for each pin, the images would help users to easily distinguish between the different entries, which are situated fairly close to each other. I was also able to use the image titles and captions to give little leads to follow, for anyone who wanted to delve deeper into the life of Galileo and the events described in the audiowalk.

The images I chose for each entry all related to an element of the subject matter described in that diary extract. For example, the opening entry includes a present-day image of Galileo’s former villa in Arcetri, Florence, to contextualise what you hear about the building. This then also guides interested listeners to the knowledge that the villa still stands today.

Another example is the portrait of Vincenzo Viviani in the entry where his character is introduced, with a caption explaining how he remained a disciple of Galileo for the rest of his life. Those who were curious could then do their own research, if they wished to find out exactly how Viviani devoted himself to his former master’s studies.

The map entry introducing Vincenzo Viviani, viewed on PC

The one entry that did contain more than just the diary audio and image was the opening entry, which needed some text to introduce the walk and provide guidance as to how my series of entries worked. Because the character limits for sections of text in CGeoMap were quite narrow, I needed to provide this scene-setting and guidance as concisely as possible, but still convey all the necessary information clearly so that anyone could understand.

Fortunately, I was able to get a couple of people who had no prior knowledge of the project to read over what I’d written, advising me on how I could make the text more understandable on first view.

The opening entry of The Gates to Dreamland, viewed on PC

In the spirit of clarity, I also decided to number each of the walk’s entries in their subtitles: ‘1 of 6’, ‘2 of 6’ etc. Unlike some of the other collections of entries on the map, my walk was linear, with the user’s agency coming from the connections they draw between the events in the story and what they observe in the appropriate locations, rather than the order they piece together the story’s events. Numbering the entries would clearly indicate which comes next, how many were left to listen to at any given point and whether an entry had been missed by the listener.

This clarity was doubly important for my walk, as only the first of my six map entries would be visible to those accessing the map via smartphone in Margate. I decided that the remaining entries should only appear on the map when the user got to within 40 metres of the correct location.

This provides a basic ‘treasure hunting’ mechanic when doing the walk in person; encouraging participants to pay closer attention to their surroundings by asking them to find Dreamland’s gates for themselves. Attention to detail is important for the broader experience of the work, as the audio diary scripts make numerous references and figurative connections to things participants encounter when navigating in Margate.

With all these decisions made, the final task was to map my entries.

To make the process of adding the A Different LENS entries to CGeoMap smoother, it was decided that project curator Elspeth Penfold would upload all the materials rather than each individual participating artist.

So once all the content for each of my map entries was finalised, I had to create a document outlining in precise detail exactly where each map pin should be situated (GPS coordinates), what content should be attached to them (titles, subtitles, images, captions, audio files and text – clearly distinguishing between modules, titles and file names) and how this content should be organised.

Elspeth was very efficient with the upload process. After a little back-and-forth to address some small formatting issues, everything was where it needed to be and looked how I wanted it to look.

The Gates to Dreamland launched publicly on 25^th September 2020, with the opening of Margate NOW Festival, for which A Different LENS was one of the featured projects.

I’ll finish this series of blogposts by talking a little bit about the public reaction to A Different LENS, the future of The Gates to Dreamland and how it connects to my PhD research on location-based games and site-specific storytelling.

----------------------------

How to try The Gates to Dreamland from home

The Gates to Dreamland is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the A Different LENS map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder by finding the rest of Dreamland's gates in person.

However, you can try a version of The Gates to Dreamland for yourself online via PC/Mac (this is the only way to access all six points of the audiowalk without being in Margate).

To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading (it is the most southerly blue pin in the main cluster). This is the start of the walk, while the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow. Read the introduction and instructions that appear when you click on the pin.

Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.

Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.

The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete. Think about the relationships between the words you hear and what you can see in Streetview.

If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.

Making The Gates to Dreamland: Recording and Editing

---------------------------

On 25^th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.

Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.

In this series of blog posts, I’m delving into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.

More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.

----------------------------

Preparation

Once the script for The Gates to Dreamland had been written, the process of recording and editing the audio diary extracts was surprisingly swift.

I was fortunate that I already owned the necessary equipment to make high-quality voice recordings from home. This simply consisted of a condenser microphone, a stand and clamp to keep the microphone steady, a pop filter to eliminate the distortion from plosive sounds in my speech, and my laptop where the files were recorded. Windows has an in-built voice recorder which is perfectly capable, and the files it generates can be imported into audio editing software.

My recording setup

For each of the six diary extracts, I decided to record three full takes. I could then use the editing software to select the best bits from each recording and merge them together into a single track to upload for each entry on the A Different LENS map.

I use Audacity for audio editing. It’s excellent, open-source software that is freely available online for all operating systems. The basics of importing/exporting files, copying/pasting, recording, cutting, zooming and playback are all very intuitive for regular PC users. Many more complex functions are also possible, with plenty of guidance available online.

However, before any recording or editing was done, one consideration I had to make was the 5MB file size limit for audio that could be uploaded to CGeoMap, the webapp which hosted the A Different LENS map entries.

From other map entries already uploaded, I could see that there were audio clips that far exceeded the length mine would be. But the limit did make a small difference when it came to the quality of the final files that would be uploaded, as I had to export my files in Audacity to MP3 at a ‘standard’ quality of 170-210 kbps to ensure they remained within the 5MB limit.

Voice acting

After the technical needs of the recording were sorted, one of the most daunting – yet ultimately rewarding – experiences in this creative process was taking on the role of a voice actor.

Originally, I had toyed with the idea of finding someone with experience in voice performing who could conceivably replicate the voice of a man in his 70s. But with the project deadline approaching ever closer, and not having the money or contacts to hire a voice actor, I decided that I’d attempt the narration myself.

I sought out as much advice and guidance as I could before I made the recordings.

A couple of the other artists contributing to A Different LENS shared their words of wisdom during our regular Zoom calls, including speaking somewhere where you can see your reflection, and over-enunciating your words.

Online, I also found plenty of tips for beginner voice actors relating to breathing, posture, warming-up exercises and practising. I found it particularly helpful to record myself when practising, so I could identify the points in the script where I’d have a tendency to mumble, or where I could afford to take breath.

I’ve mentioned previously in this series of blog posts how I drew inspiration from the video game Dear Esther, in how its narration evocatively connects distant places, times and characters. As well as learning from the game’s script-writing, I was inspired by the performance of its narrator, Nigel Carrington.

Carrington had also performed in a beautiful soundwalk called Fields Were the Essence of the Song (incidentally also made by Jessica Curry and Dan Pinchbeck, the creators of Dear Esther), which was another key touchstone for The Gates to Dreamland. It is described as a ‘site-specific soundtrack to a film which does not exist, one which is created by the ever-changing relationship of the listener, formed by their self-steered journey, around the environment’.

I listened carefully to audio from both of these works to pick out voicing techniques Carrington used.

One of the most noticeable features, I found, was how he varies the pitch in his voice throughout sections of speech; much more than anyone would in everyday conversation.

Lowering the pitch at the end of a phrase gives it the quality of a remark – an observation or expression of something inevitable. Adding a roughness to this kind of phrasing gives it the quality of a sigh. While raising the pitch perhaps indicates a sense of surprise, or that there is something notable you should pay particular attention to.               

As the speech navigates these contours of expression, the recording takes on a sort of melody that leads the listener along a thread of individual thought; drawing you into the headspace of the character being narrated.

Thinking about my voice performance in this way subsequently affected how I edited the script I wrote.

One technique I found particularly effective in Fields Were the Essence of the Song and Dear Esther was the use of short sentences with very few conjunctions. Paying close attention to the words made me acutely aware of how every moment you spend using words that don’t paint a picture, you’re gradually drawing the listener out of the world into which you’re inviting them.

Having learnt from these examples and having sought as much guidance on voice performing as possible, I finally recorded all 18 takes (three for each diary entry) over a couple of hours, in order from the first to the final diary entries.

I took plenty of sips of water throughout, and short breaks between each entry, but it still put a noticeable strain on my voice. Fortunately, my gradually thinning speech was appropriate as I moved towards narrating the later diary entries, which describe events that happened as Galileo has become older and more unwell.

 

Editing

Once all the takes were recorded, I listened back to them very carefully for each point of the walk. I created a document in which I colour-coded the script according to which take I thought sounded best for each line (sometimes even more fine-grained than that, if there were enough pauses to make a clean cut when editing).

This document then guided the editing process. Editing mostly consisted of importing the three recordings for each location side by side as separate tracks in Audacity, then cutting and pasting the relevant sections from each into a single final track.

A screenshot taken during editing of the third recorded diary entry

I was particularly attentive to the pacing of each piece of audio. I wanted to ensure I gave listeners enough time to reflect on the words they heard and their observations at each site, curating a listening experience that was mindful and atmospheric. This meant focusing on the pauses as much as the recorded speech.

I was able to easily adjust the length of pauses between each section of speech by cutting and pasting ‘silent’ sections of the track. In most cases, this involved lengthening the gaps to enhance opportunities for reflection. I also tried to ensure that pauses were of roughly equal length, to create a consistent rhythm that might help participants attune with the words of the script.

Once each final track was complete, the final stage of editing was reducing the background noise picked up in the recordings. Condenser microphones are very sensitive, meaning that even in quiet locations faint sounds will be picked up (the bulk of mine came from my laptop’s fans).

Thankfully, Audacity has a noise reduction tool that I’ve always found very effective. The way it works is that you select a ‘silent’ portion of the track (i.e. that only contains background noise) and feed it into the tool. The tool will then filter out sound from the track that matches the profile of the background noise sample, which is particularly effective when the noise in question is relatively constant, like my laptop’s fans.

You can adjust the sensitivity of the noise reduction to match your needs, as in some audio projects you may want a degree of ambient sound to remain. In my case, I wanted as little noise as possible, because I wanted the ambiance of the listening experience to come from sounds in Margate that listeners would hear in situ, rather than those from my living room.

After this stage was complete, I was left with six very clean, detailed audio tracks that effectively captured the nuances of my voice performances.

Editing was painstaking, precise work that involved a lot of tinkering and repeated listening back, but ultimately was a fairly swift process, only taking a day or two.

The next post in this series discusses the process of curating each recorded diary entry into an entry for the A Different LENS map.

----------------------------

How to try The Gates to Dreamland from home

The Gates to Dreamland is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the A Different LENS map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder by finding the rest of Dreamland's gates in person.

However, you can try a version of The Gates to Dreamland for yourself online via PC/Mac (this is the only way to access all six points of the audiowalk without being in Margate).

To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading (it is the most southerly blue pin in the main cluster). This is the start of the walk, while the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow. Read the introduction and instructions that appear when you click on the pin.

Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.

Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.

The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete. Think about the relationships between the words you hear and what you can see in Streetview.

If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.

Making The Gates to Dreamland: Script-writing and Wayfinding

---------------------------

On 25^th September, my new locative audiowalk game The Gates to Dreamland launched to the public. Created as part of the A Different LENS project in Margate, The Gates to Dreamland explores how interpreting our surroundings figuratively, through imagination and motion, can connect us to different places, times, stories and circumstances, finding resonance within our own lives.

Set around the boundaries of the Dreamland amusement park in Margate, it tells the story of Italian scientist Galileo Galilei’s journey towards publishing his final book – one that would change the study of science forever. It imagines the obstacles he faced, under house arrest with his eyesight and health failing, and the changes in perspective that entailed.

In this series of blog posts, I’m delving into how The Gates to Dreamland was made, discussing how my contribution to A Different LENS came about, how the design of the project evolved, ideas and inspirations, research and planning, writing the script, how I created the audio, and how this project connects to my other work.

More information on how you can try The Gates to Dreamland for yourself is at the bottom of this post.

----------------------------

One of the overriding resonances I detected in Galileo’s story was the feeling of enclosure and inaccessibility.

Galileo was under house arrest for the duration of his time writing Two New Sciences; an experience of confinement that recent lockdowns have only briefly exposed us to. Losing his sight at the same time ‘confined’ him further, in a different sense; altering his ability to perceive the world beyond him.

Along the route between Dreamland’s gates, I used the words of my script to draw attention to moments of enclosure in the listener’s journey through the physical environment.

At the opening gate, between the metal bars, the sight of Dreamland’s Helter Skelter is visible in the distance. The words from the first scripted diary entry imagine how Galileo’s first action, upon returning to his villa marshalled by armed guards, was to climb straight to the highest window of the house. Here, he gazes upon the familiar view of a tower on a hill (though I do not name this, it would have been the Torre del Gallo in Arcetri), but his sight problems render the view inaccessible.

Here, the listener is invited to draw a connection between the inaccessibility of Dreamland’s landmarks and that of Galileo, in being house-bound and increasingly visually impaired.

The Torre del Gallo in Arcetri, Florence

Dreamland's Helter Skelter

In this early stage of the experience, you walk along a road often busy with car traffic and lined with terraced housing. As you stand beside a seemingly unbreachable metal gate, the words in the audio diary bring attention to these elements of your surroundings that convey a sense of being squeezed in.

This continues as you descend down the hill, still confined by terraced housing but with widening space visible in front, creating the sense of being funnelled down the street towards an opening. At this point in the scripted diary entries, while Galileo is still very aware of the limitations he faces, there is a feeling of progress being made as he begins to chart his plans for writing Two New Sciences.             

As the walker’s perspective briefly widens, another key theme of the work is illuminated: the opportunities for growth, creativity and imagination that restriction can entail.

With the view opening out onto the usually busier area around Dreamland’s car park, Galileo describes the encounters he has with numerous visitors to his home. Vincenzo Viviani, who would become Galileo's student assistant, is highlighted as a key figure; and Galileo describes a clarity and order that emerges from the chaos of his cluttered and busy home life. In an ironic yet symbolic twist of fate, this is the time when Galileo loses his sight completely.

Up to this point in the work, multiple references are made to plants and weeds, which can be seen in many areas around the outskirts of Dreamland.

I was drawn to the image of his garden being gradually being overtaken by weeds as he committed himself to writing his book, while his view outside to the garden would have become increasingly obscured. There is an interesting parallel here between his intellectual growth and his body being overtaken by its own ‘weeds’ mentioned in the scripted diary extracts: his loss of eyesight and worsening arthritis.

A courtyard garden at Galileo's former home in Arcetri, Florence

Weeds near the entrance to Dreamland's car park

Aside from Galileo’s physical condition, the writing of Two New Sciences would certainly have been worrisome endeavour. All of Galileo’s publications had been banned under order of the Catholic Church, and being under house arrest with armed guards lurking meant that anything potentially illicit would have had to be kept very secretive.

Later on in the walk, you navigate a narrow back-street with tall buildings on one side and a high fence on the other; a road apparently used most often for delivering and loading goods. It’s a place evidently not designed for you to dwell in.

Here, the words in the audio diary draw comparisons between this discomfort and compression you feel when physically walking and Galileo’s own anxiety, as he prepares to release his illicit work out into the world.

In the words of the audio, ambiguous references are made to objects like CCTV cameras, back entrances, invisible onlookers and hidden doorways in the audiowalk's Margate locations, which become symbols of these themes of surveillance and secrets, ‘front stage’ and ‘backstage’.

Streetview image of Hall by the Sea Road, Margate

Ultimately, though, Galileo’s story is one of his work transcending the confined spaces and times in which he lived. As a form of epilogue to the events leading to the publication of Two New Sciences, I chose to set a sixth and final scene on Margate beach.

Here, the view over the sea to the horizon, the coastal breeze, sound of road traffic and sensation of sand under your feet are called upon in the script as symbols of this transcendence: the passing of time, movement between distant places, and the power of imagination and motion to connect everything.

Margate beach

These are just some of the intricate, enigmatic connections that the audiowalk’s script draws between the landscapes of Dreamland in the 21^st century and Galileo’s life in 17^th-century Florence.

Alongside these broader themes of enclosure, inaccessibility, creativity, growth, surveillance, secrets, motion and imagination, there are many other moments when individual details along the route of the walk are called upon to create figurative, symbolic links between events in Galileo’s life and your immediate surroundings.

I won’t name these explicitly as they are designed to be stumbled upon to achieve their effect. But hidden in the script are references to particular signage, graffiti, road markings, security infrastructure, photographs, historic wall lettering, paving, and a familiar Margate sound.

A final feature of the script worth noting is the series of dates associated with the diary entries you find. You’ll notice that no numbered days are given, only named dates such as ‘Ash Wednesday’, ‘Pentecost’ and ‘Epiphany’.

In historic records, none of the events described in Galileo's story have exact dates. Usually only years are given, and occasionally times of year.

This ambiguity gave me the licence to choose dates within a rough timescale that reflect the symbolic significance these events had within Galileo’s life. In particular, these are all important dates on the Christian calendar. This was a nod to the fact that Galileo was a Catholic, who did not see his scientific findings as incompatible with his faith.

I also figured that a 21^st-century listener would struggle to form any kind of impression from a specific date like ‘August 12^th 1635’, while these holy days still have importance today. More curious listeners might recognise this level of detail in the work and choose to investigate further, also becoming more alert to other subtle, intricate features of the work.

The next post in this series discusses how I narrated the scripted diary entries, recording the audio and editing it to upload to the A Different LENS map.

----------------------------

How to try The Gates to Dreamland from home

The Gates to Dreamland is primarily designed to be experienced by walking at the relevant sites in Margate. When you load the A Different LENS map on mobile, only the first of my six entries is visible on the map, and you must discover the remainder by finding the rest of Dreamland's gates in person.

However, you can try a version of The Gates to Dreamland for yourself online via PC/Mac (this is the only way to access all six points of the audiowalk without being in Margate).

To do this, visit the A Different LENS map here and find the blue pin titled ‘The Gates to Dreamland’, with ‘1 of 6’ as a subheading (it is the most southerly blue pin in the main cluster). This is the start of the walk, while the pink pins that lead from it show the route you need to follow. Read the introduction and instructions that appear when you click on the pin.

Then, open up the link here in a separate tab. This is the starting point for the walk in Streetview.

Each point of the audiowalk is located by one of Dreamland’s gates. When you reach the next gate on the walk, navigate back to the A Different LENS map and click on the relevant pin to play the audio for that location. Try to stay in Streetview as much as you can on the walk, but there may be times when you need to check that you’re at the correct location by switching to satellite view and comparing with the A Different LENS map.

The walk should take about 30 minutes to complete. Think about the relationships between the words you hear and what you can see in Streetview.

If you do try it and have any feedback you’d be willing to share, do send me an email using the contact information on my About page.