The artwork itself utilises a combination of pre-recorded audio, geo-locative technology and printed material to create an urban walking experience. The route is not pre-determined, but is created uniquely each time by a participating audience member in response to thematic and reflective provocations. Locations they are invited to choose while walking become part of their internal memory map of the city, while the GPS co-ordinates are stored by a mobile device.
In the second half of the experience, the walker retraces their steps, layering their own experiential memory within media triggered by the stored locations. The audio and written material in the piece was collected from regions around the world at risk of disappearing.
These include emptying Latvian villages, the sinking wetlands of Louisiana and the rising edge of the Tunisian Sahara. A particular affect of critical awareness of planetary presence is produced as an event at the interface of the spatial and temporal elements that compose it. This article argues for the importance of accounting for the different timescales produced in the mediated city, and offers an account of practice-led research that addresses questions surrounding the affordances of mixed reality artworks with an emphasis on temporality.
This work arises from a research collaboration which investigates situated reading and listening experiences as mediated though pervasive computing technologies. It discusses the production and reception of an audio walk and reading experience commissioned by a research council project. Above all, the aim of this article is to complement spatial analysis by introducing an analysis of the ways in which experiences of time can be productively and critically dislocated.
We argue that the forms of composition deployed in this work offer the opportunity for original ways to understand our experience of the Anthropocene.
