Lyric Blog 1

Hello, welcome to the Lyric Hammersmith’s first Theatre Sandbox Blog! We are delighted to be working with Ed Collier and Melanie Wilson towards The Observatory, a multi-sensory interactive adventure for children!

As a first step towards pervasive media enlightenment I visited the Studio in Bristol for an introductory session for the artists and technology advisors. These two days had the combined effect of being inspiring, terrifying and maddeningly mind boggling. It confirmed just how brilliant Ed and Mel’s idea was, whilst prompting several hundred questions about how it was ever going to work. That said, we managed to have our first key contact with people who knew what they were talking about and to identify four key moments that we could realistically explore through the R&D period.

This currently breaks down as ‘The Portal’, a glimpse into the other world, a sonic barrier to navigate around, and the corridor into ‘The Observatory’. Looking at the possibilities inherent in the project it was almost disappointing we couldn’t do all of it, however these moments still allow for a lot of experimentation. Crucially, at each point of activity on the adventure the interaction can only be triggered by the children taking part, rather than visible or audible to all, so it will be heavily technology dependent whether using GPS, Wifi, RFID, video tracking or something we need to invent!

Following these sessions we hosted two workshops last week working with local children who spent time with Ed and Mel experiencing sound recordings (some previously created by Melanie) and walking the streets surrounding the Lyric looking for places and items related to the narrative. It was really interesting to watch both groups of 7 – 8 year olds on the first day, and 9 – 10 year olds on the second day, listen to the recordings. It seemed to simultaneously evoke fear and laughter and they were especially impressed when sound seemed to come from a specific direction – there was lots of twisting round in chairs to see if someone really was walking behind them! It was also great to see imagination in action during the walk round, there were potential ‘portals’ everywhere we looked, often with a specific point of access or code system that was visible to children but not to adults.

This week, whilst the Lyric de-camps to Latitude, Ed and Mel will be meeting with the Kings Mall management to explore the inner working of the shopping centre to see if there are any areas we can integrate into the children’s journey. I think we also now have a video artist interested in working with us and the first steps are being made to talk specifically about how we create the work using pervasive media – rather than just creating a really sophisticated audio guide.

So, an exciting start with a lot of questions and a lot of ideas.

My main concern is currently the time frame and where to hide a Unicorn in a shopping centre.

Bailey x