Output details

{in}visible Belfast: Alternate Reality Games, Re-mediation and Literature

This is a body of work comprising a 6 week alternative reality game played out across live performances, websites, theatrical productions, print publications, radio broadcasts, video content, and social media platforms. The research was developed as part of the Belfast book festival and explored how regional literature could be remediated to engage new types of audience. The project worked with advice from the author Ciaran Carson using his original text, 'The Star Factory', which was re-imagined and reinterpreted by locating it back into the spaces of the city that inspired it. The body of work consists of:

• The game, itself, which took place through a series of emails, websites and across social networks. This was designed to lead players through the narrative and help them to investigate the text and city in new ways. It engaged with new approaches to 'dispersed' storytelling and authorship, using feedback from the audience to develop the narrative and puzzles as the story unfolds

• The play The Water Clock which investigated new ways to use the audience to document and achieve networked location-based theatre and live events through crowd sourced footage (available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6uANpnwmA8)

• A live storytelling event Constellations of Belfast which facilitated live story development in collaboration with writers Ciaran Carson and Glen Patterson to close the game narrative and give authorial control to the players.

• A case study review of the development of the project in book chapter form which charts the project and elaborates the objectives of the research.