Starshed was a 2006  collaborative commission for the Electric Pavilion event at the Watershed Media Centre by the Ship of Fools[i] artist group, where we constructed an interactive map of Bristol, correlating each place with a starry map of the heavens. Stories of the uncanny sent in by the general public, were aligned star by star with real locations in the city.

Participants were able to log sites and add rich-media stories of strange or uncanny happenings and encounters found across the city. The spatialised log of the uncanny grew rapidly and was collated through a two-stage submission process from online and mobile sources. As the first serious attempt to use mobile media for this purpose, it stands as a unique piece and opened out in graphic form the liminal and uncanny nature of the medium itself and demonstrated how metaphoric mapping could elide the physical and the imagined in a single interface.

[i] http://www.shipoffools.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk

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