April 6, 2009
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Site-Specific Short Stories
Over at BLDGBLOG, Nicola Twilley writes about a set of short stories just commissioned for the Royal Parks in London. How completely cool: Imagine reading a short story set in a park while walking through it. If I was writing one I’d do the scenes such that you could actually walk the story as you read it — my characters and your feet keeping pace. They’re in the Botanical Gardens. You’re in the Botanical Gardens. Walk faster! Read slower!
Better yet if this kind of work isn’t commissioned, of course; ideally, you want your site-specific fiction to be organic, to exist entirely because of the irresistible pull of a place on some writerly mind.
But, I’ll take work-for-hire in a pinch.
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Comments
Reminds me of the Mission Stencil Story - very site-specific and interactive, but not commissioned.
Have you ever had the opportunity to do one of Janet Cardiff's walks? The only one I've experienced on site is The Missing Voice: Case Study B in Whitechapel, which was pretty amazing.
The headset goes on, the story begins, and the recorded ambient sounds mix with the sounds of the present in a disconcerting way. The story's descriptions of what you see are in and out of phase with objective reality.