Moving tales, exploring narrative strategies for scalable locative audio drama.

This paper reports on a recent collaboration between the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts at Middlesex University and the BBC Radio Drama Department, which was designed to investigate the narrative possibilities of locative media in a drama context. The locative drama Scratch is the first outcome of an ongoing research project, Locating Drama, whose aim is to investigate and develop narrative strategies that take full advantage of the current generation of GPS enabled portable computing devices for audio drama. In particular, we are exploring content and modes of interaction, which, while based on location awareness are not in any way site-specific allowing users to experience the drama in a location of their choice. We will refer to this approach as translocational as it allows the translation of locative media experiences to a wide variety of spaces. The translocational approach is of particular interest to broadcasters as it is more scalable than a site-specific paradigm, opening the possibility of downloadable location-aware podcasts featuring professionally authored content for a wide audience

Scratch.

Scratch investigated the use of physical space as a site and representation of narrative and dramatic structure. It was commissioned by and collaboratively developed with BBC Radio Drama. Boyd Davis directed the project and devised and undertook the evaluation with 40 trial listeners. It was unprecedented in being location-sensitive without being tied to any particular place, building on research undertaken for Dragons (Boyd Davis REF Output 4). It used pre-recorded audio on GPS-enabled mobile devices allowing sounds to be virtually attached to locations in an outdoor space. As participants moved, they encountered scenes forming a coherent drama; the same place behaved differently if visited more than once. This translocational approach opened novel artistic possibilities that were exploited through team expertise in narrative, sound design and advanced interaction. It was also significant for the economics of broadcast media, a more viable proposition than the many locative experiences that have been site-specific: a factor of great interest to the BBC. The public performance selected for BBC FreeThinking, September 2008 in Liverpool, that year’s European Capital of Culture, was reported in a co-written 2009 conference presentation at ISEA, Belfast (2009) and in a co-written short chapter in Spierling and Szilas (eds.), Interactive Storytelling (2008). Boyd Davis reported the findings to BBC executives (http://researchonline.rca.ac.uk/1000/), for whom an additional trial was run in London in 2009. He used mixed methods, open but capable of rigorous analysis, to feed back to the makers of the drama and to guide BBC policy. Abigail le Fleming (Producer BBC Radio Drama) confirms that ‘through this collaboration, the Radio Drama department became the first BBC unit to experiment with GPS technologies’. The work ‘brought us to tackle non-linear narratives in ways that we would not have otherwise done… invaluable in terms of the questions that it raised for radio drama.