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In 1928, a cartoon character was born. An early Mickey Mouse made his debut in May of that year, in a silent flop called /Plane Crazy/. In November, in New York City’s Colony Theater, in the first widely distributed cartoon synchronized with sound, /Steamboat Willie/ brought to life the character that would become Mickey Mouse. Synchronized sound had been introduced to film a year earlier in the movie /The Jazz Singer/. That success led Walt Disney to copy the technique and mix sound with cartoons. No one knew whether it would work or, if it did work, whether it would win an audience. But when Disney ran a test in the summer of 1928, the results were unambiguous. As Disney describes that first experiment, “A couple of my boys could read music, and one of them could play a mouth organ. We put them in a room where they could not see the screen and arranged to pipe their sound into the room where our wives and friends were going to see the picture. “The boys worked from a music and sound-effects score. After several false starts, sound and action got off with the gun. The mouth organist played the tune, the rest of us in the sound department bammed tin pans and blew slide whistles on the beat. The synchronization was pretty close. “The effect on our little audience was nothing less than electric. They responded almost instinctively to this union of sound and motion. I thought they were kidding me. So they put me in the audience and ran the action again. It was terrible, but it was wonderful! And it was something new!”

— Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture

I’ve just started reading Free Culture (yup, on my phone), and it’s really good. If, like me, you’re very into all this CC-licensing and democratisation of content, but don’t actually know too much about the legal, historical and cultural background, you should give it a try too.

The above quote seemed startlingly appropriate to much of booktech and the wider internet’s attempts to do cool, new things and do them now. The results aren’t always pretty, but they’re often thrilling, and groundbreaking, and point the way to more exciting and new things. Of course, “terrible and wonderful” is not a good pitch to anyone corporate, which is why it’s taking the big guys a long time to turn the boat around.

But not, of course, Penguin. Head over to wetellstories.co.uk and check out the first installment of their six web-based tales, a Google Maps-based adventure from Charles Cumming. Sure, I’m not wild about aspects of the interface (the neophobes should have a field day with all the ‘reticulating splines’) but this is about as new and exciting as it gets.

Brief outline of ideas for locative storytelling (more thoughts originating from here and here).

Goal: To produce a locative storytelling experience, where strands of the story are triggered by the reader/listener’s location.

Tech requirements: GPS-enabled mobile phone, or Google Maps’ new locator function, headphones, application running on Symbian or Windows Mobile (or preferably both…).

Personnel: Writer or team of writers, developer, interface designer, voice actor.

Issues: Low GPS penetration - few handsets currently but set to change rapidly - GMaps not yet accurate enough, at least outside large towns.

Proposal: Create a downloadable application which runs on a mobile device. Each standalone app contains a story, specially created for the medium and a particular location (although it would be possible to edit stories with strong localities for this, the former offers more possibilities).

Running the app spawns a navigation map - either a GMaps overlay or a specially created one (perfectly possible for small areas), showing the user’s location (X, above, wide and zoomed) and the accessible storypoints - location-specific ’shards’ of the story.

As the user moves across the map, they come into contact with the storypoints - close enough, and they trigger the shards associated with that point: scrollable texts, an audio recording, even images or video.

This format offers a number of interesting possibilities for the narrative form, beyond a simple (and still wholly possible) linear structure, such as:

• Multiple entry and exit points
• Threaded/associative storytelling (storypoints only revealed after certain others have been visited)
• … tending to “Choose your own adventure” style
• Surprise shards (hidden storypoints)
• Story as treasure hunt.

To achieve the full potential, it would require a writer prepared to engage with (at least partially) non-linear storytelling.

So, that’s a start. Thoughts? Would be pretty sweet to set one of these up in time for London Lit Plus in the summer…

Further reading:

• The Missing Voice
• And While London Burns
• Navball
• Mscapers

An update on some of the locative stuff I’ve been talking about…

I did get that GPS unit, and thanks to quite a lot of Googling I’ve managed to hack it to my laptop to update my location on Google Maps (screenshot above) - which involved teaching myself rudimentary Python and exploiting my new, poor PHP skills. What I did learn was how fun technology on your own terms is; just as we’re moving past the stage of being passive consumers of TV and other media, so we’re taking control of technology at it’s most base level too. But I digress…

In my research, I’ve discovered I’ve been partially beaten to the punch by more professional services. CrowdScapes uses Yahoo’s ZoneTag service to pull in Flickr photos near your location - at the moment it’s limited to Nokia N-series phones in the US, but you can get a taste by hitting “Launch” and entering your location here. It’s pretty cool.

Patrick from mscapers pointed me towards the fascinating stuff that Hewlett Packard are doing with a bunch of UK artists, mostly centred around their research centre in Bristol, from fun locative games like Hidden Danger UXB! which can be played anywhere (providing you’ve got a GPS-enabled HP tablet - anyone?), ‘playable’ guides to specific locations (e.g. The Tower of London), to more meditative experiences like always something somewhere else.

‘always something somewhere else’ is a generative mediascape that creates a temporary map in a location as the user is asked to seek out certain base materials such as glass, stone, and water. As they reach each material they hear the beginning of a fictional narrative about another person in a far off location standing next to the same material. As the map is created the user can return to the points they marked to hear the stories fold in on themselves and conclude.

The associations with storytelling here remind me strongly of earlier, less-tech’d-up locative artworks, particularly the operatic climate-change tour And While London Burns, and Janet Cardiff’s awesome The Missing Voice (which I believe is still available on request from the Whitechapel Gallery, but I’ll double-check). Story-telling is incredibly well-suited to this medium - does anyone have any other examples of such experiments?

For myself, I’m going to keep hacking away - I think I missed a trick not getting a Bluetooth GPS to work with my phone, so that might be the next step. I’m particularly interested in what geocached information we can hack out of Google Book Search:

Literature is inescapably intertwined with our everyday environment. By making this visible, we can encourage and spread it, and send it in new and exciting directions.

I’ve been reading William Gibson’s latest, Spook Country, and it’s been messing with my mind. I still consider myself a huge Gibson fan, although I confess I’ve found him a little cold and remote since around Idoru - the virtual space seems to be becoming more cluttered, and less thrilling as our reality comes ever more to resemble Gibson’s vision. Or at least, my reality.

What has got me excited, however, is the novel’s focus on locative art, art that is bound up to physical locations through virtual technologies - virtual reality, geotagging, GPS tracking. I’ve been a geo geek for a while, starting with a reasonably common obsession with maps and mapping and moving into more complex areas as the technologies become available.

One of the technologies that Gibson discusses, with his usual air of the near-future, is the annotated environment, the application of metadata to the physical world. And it struck me (has lately been rather obsessing me) that this technology is available, hackable right now.

Imagine a world where it is possible to access all the information about a location at that location. Standing in the street, on a bridge or in the park, your presence triggers the automated retrieval of that location’s metadata. A grid reference transforms into a list of photos, blog posts, encyclopaedia entries, literary references, forthcoming events - and people. Memories, activities, occurrences, stored in time and mapped to a location.

This is possible now. Google Books maps references to places in literary works (here’s the reference map for George Gissing’s New Grub Street) - walking down the street, I can find literary references to pubs and old restaurants as easily as I find critical reviews of them. Wikipedia is gradually accumulating geodata on listed locations (e.g. London), Flickr has rolled out full geotagging support - Dan Catt of Geobloggers reckons there are over 18 million located photos available there alone. Here’s a photomap of London. Street addresses used in events services such as Upcoming can be converted into grid references, creating future ghosts as you pass through the sites of future happenings.

To do: I think I need one of these. (I’d also like one of these, although that’s probably a way off.) Hooking together a GPS link and a wifi connection (via a 3G card, until we get a cloud over London) would allow an automated agent to crawl the web for geo-encoded data matched to your location. Microformats have gone a long way to making this data machine-readable - the next stage is to enable a Google-equivalent search for such microformats (it’s probably already out there, somewhere, I just haven’t found it), and increase the use of GeoRSS feeds.

I already have Google Maps on my phone. I already get annoyed by people asking me for directions. Just look it up. This data is available. The one thing I can be pinned down to, in the physical world, is a grid reference. I am here. If you want to find me, access the metadata. When we (you, me, the clouds of data) meet, interesting things happen.