Exhibition: Digital Storytelling

The narratives featured in the exhibition will prompt visitors to consider what new possibilities emerge when they are invited as readers to become a part of the story themselves. Visitors will get to discover how technology can be used to enhance their reading experience, from Zombies, Run!, the widely popular audio fiction fitness app, to Breathe, a ghost story that “follows the reader around”, reacting to users’ real-time location data.

On display for the first time is a playable preview of Windrush Tales, the world’s first interactive narrative game based on the lived experiences of Caribbean immigrants in post-World War II Britain. The game is still in development; the preview is its first public launch, and is made exclusively available for the exhibition by 3-Fold Presents. The exhibition also premieres a new edition of This is a Picture of Wind, with a new sequence of poems inspired by Derek Jarman’s writing about his garden. This is a Picture of Wind was originally written in response to severe storms in the South West of England in 2014.

Items on display will also explore how writers and artists can provide an empathetic look into the lived realities behind the news. Digital Storytelling illustrates this through A Dictionary of the Revolution, which charts the evolution of political language in Egypt during the uprising in 2011. Another work, c ya laterrrr, is an intimate autobiographical hypertext account of the loss of author Dan Hett’s brother in the 2017 Manchester Arena terrorist attack.

Visitors will also get to experience the wide-ranging possibilities of historical immersion and alternate story-worlds through these emerging formats. The exhibition will feature Astrologaster, an award-winning interactive comedy based on the archival casebooks of Elizabethan medical astrologer Simon Forman, and Clockwork Watch, a transmedia collaborative story set in a steampunk Victorian England.