Trust no-one! A conspiracy play in the King’s

Kolding “Mixed reality, ubiquitous computing and

augmented places as format for communicating culture”

The Transformative Museum, RUC 23.-25.5. 2012 Kjetil Sandvik, associate professor, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

Project scope

• Mobile phones (smart phones) used for communicating culture

• Fiction used for communicating history

• Experiments with Augmented Reality (at low costs)

• Creating an unorthodox city walk: – instead of an exhibition about renaissance

Kolding, we let the renaissance pop up in the city space

• The audience as participants and co-creators

Format not just for the design process, but for ’the exhi- bitions’ itself

Project scope

• Mixed media: – mobile phone as ’swizz army knife’ – mash-up of variety of services: low-cost and easy to

adjust (Layar, Google Maps, Youtube and other file-sharing services)

• Ubiquitous computing: – not so much embedded in the fabric of physical

location – but accessible everywhere by ways of…

• Mobile and location sensitive media: • Over-layering locations with digital information: • Augmentation!

Augmentation

• an informational, aesthetical and/or emotional enhancement of our sense and experience of place by use of various framing strategies (e.g. Ian Rankin’s Edinburgh) and media technologies (e.g. a guided Rebus Tour).

Augmentation of places

• Construction of a kind of mixed reality

• the place has a status both as an actual location in the physical world and as a storyspace

• blend of fact and fiction

• blend of physical and mediated space

• blend of presentation and (user) performance

• ‘charged spaces’ (Valtysson)

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Split reality vs Mixed reality

• Split reality: switching between mediated space (e.g. inside the mobile phone) and physical space

• Mixed reality: blending between mediated and physical space (e.g. looking at physical space through an ‘augumented reality browser’ on the mobile phone)

• Mixed reality implies a certain way of telling stories connecting the actual and the fictional space/the physical space and the mediated space

• (this is where Hikuin’s Vendetta goes wrong – and we try to make things right)

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Kolding as augmented storyspace

• Creating a dramatic meta-story connecting different location specific narrative tableaus containing various actual historical characters and events – (e.g. the co-operation between the public executioner and the

pharmacist selling human fat and pulverized sculls for medical use)

• within the same fiction frame providing connections between the narrative tableaus – (the castle is on fire (which is an actual event), a messenger is found

murdered, a conspiracy against the King may be afoot).

• The tale is taking place in the city space and interfaces with specific locations with historical significance – (e.g. the square where executions took place, the building housing the

pharmacy)

• Thus: a mediated version of renaissance Kolding is mapped onto the physical – and present-day – version of the city.

Kolding as augmented storyspace

• Creating a dramatic meta-story connecting different location specific narrative tableaus containing various actual historical characters and events – (e.g. the co-operation between the public executioner and the

pharmacist selling human fat and crushed sculls for medical use)

• within the same fiction frame providing connections between the narrative tableaus – (the castle is on fire (which is an actual event), a messenger is found

murdered, a conspiracy against the King may be afoot).

• The tale is taking place in the city space and interfaces with specific locations with historical significance – (e.g. the square where executions took place, the building housing the

pharmacy)

• Thus: a mediated version of renaissance Kolding is mapped onto the physical – and present-day – version of the city.

Physical space as media • The physical space is to some degree

functioning as media communicating specific types of information, specific types of stories.

• the city quarters with its streets, alleys, buildings, ornamentations such as statues, gargoyles and so on function as a narrative architecture like a theme/themed park like Disneyland including buildings and landscapes known from the catalog of Disney fairytales

• Several parts of the city of Kolding used as location for the “Trust No-one!” project have these qualities of being media in themselves, as carriers of the story of Kolding.

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Physical space as media

• With the use of mobile phones equipped with navigation tools and augmented reality browsers this information residing in the very architecture and infrastructure of the city may be pulled forth and made visible, accessible and interactive from the perspective of communicating history and cultural heritage.

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Storyspace

Meta-story Narrative tableaus

Summing up

• Augmentation makes us see things in new ways:

• Buildings are not just buildings, streets are not just streets – the carry stories, they carry cultural meaning

• This meaning may be experienced through an interplay between the physical locations of the city and the ubiquitous and locative information layers provided by mobile media.

Project participants

• Kolding Libraries

• Kolding City Archive

• VIFIN – knowledge center for integration (Vejle)

• Dept. of Media, Cognition and Communication,, University of Copenhhagen

• Knowledge center for Children and Youth Culture, VIA University College

Visit the project on Facebook

• https://www.facebook.com//Stolpaaingen#!/Stolpaaingen

• Online, open-accessed development site