The objective of this project.

The wish is to create a living and evolving storyworld, made out of the collective memories that are carried by a given community, open to new users, alternate viewpoints and surprising stories – in short: to build up new ways of walking through memories…

Stimulating the imagination.

While “walking a movie”, the user gets only the audio part of the movie he is generating: he has to use his imagination to produce mental images. The sound is coming from the place he is going through, so there are some clues and concrete stimulations to create mental images out of the audio narration. Perhaps the voice that is telling a story about the neighborhood belongs to this women there, standing at the corner ?

It is like if the movie theater would be in your head…

Connecting and playing with our audio-visual heritage.

By using the smartphone application, it is possible to get access to the immaterial (digital) memories of a place. Once the past is coming up and floating into the present of the user, it is possible to play with the memories of the past: the fragments coming up are combined through the physical interactions of the user to produce a new perception of the time & space of the place.

It is like opening a door to the past of a place: what was there comes up again and mixes dynamically with the present to create new memories, a new story…

Crowd-creation.

It’s about being able to read AND to write in the public space. The initial memories (digital footage) are coming from multiple sources and are combined through the act of writing a trace (walking) on the territory. This written trace becomes the form of the movie: the user is not (yet) creating the content, but the form. The resulting movie is therefore a co-creation between several people and related dynamics. In a coming version of the project, the users will be able to create content: while getting a story from the collective memories of the place, they can create their own images and videos and write them in the place they are in.

It is like being able to remix and augment the collective memories of a given context, a real place.

Connecting to places.

The digital space is not an escaping infinite loop, but the starting place to dive (back) into the tangible and visible reality. Once the narration begins and the user is interacting with his movie (the user behavior defines the form of the movie), there is no more need to keep the technological device between the human and the surrounding reality. Once in a pocket, all the human senses can connect to the surrounding space and use the narrative stream as a guideline to “navigate” through that place and stimulate imagination.

It is like reduced, or better: framed reality (in opposition to augmented reality)…