Martin Rieser Artist and Writer Riverains

 

A site-specific proposal for Manchester, Riverains Is a multi-user mobile story game, which collaboratively maps an imaginary world onto a cityscape. Riverains are souls tied to watery energies, running under our cities in rivers, cables, sewers and tunnels. They travel unseen by these invisible routes and cluster around sites of past experience. Participants can use their mobile phone like a douser to discover this hidden world, which will correspond to real underground locations aligned with the sites of notable events, and, then use the Riverain’s overheard tales to map those sites and find clues and directions to others.



One can play as a team and eventually add one’s own stories and avatars. Manchester has a rich underground world of hidden or “lost” rivers, nuclear fallout facilities and command centres and Second World War bunkers, in addition to Victorian sewers and underground railway system. It also has an archeology going back through medieval to Roman times. The Riverains will be drawn from this rich history and from the City’s annals of poverty, industrial revolution, political protest, commerce and innovation, gang warfare, gun crime and uncanny happenings. The project will map video sprites and stories across a large area of central Manchester.



The project will also allow the public, using a
combination of website and GPS-enabled mobiles or mobiles with image and semacode recognition, to discover the Riverain presences, which will follow participants around, suddenly appearing at seemingly random times and places to participating individuals. They will emerge on screen and speak when automatically triggered by pre-tagged locations,. Users can also use the Riverain’s tales to discover new sites and find clues and directions to the mysterious Gatekeeper. Once they find the Gatekeeper they will be able to further create and animate their own video avatars which can be determined through a collective web interface. A dark map of the city will be progressively lit by a virtual torch or lantern as the teams or individuals discover the stories and the stories can be stored and replayed by participants.




While a basic terrain and story map will have been placed online in advance, the database will be form a growing urban map of user-generated stories. To guard against unwanted spamming an editorial level will be built into the project along the lines of the earlier Starshed project, which mapped tales of the uncanny across a city.

(see: http://www.electricpavilion.org/ media/projects/) and be visually similar to the installation Hosts (see:http:// martinrieser.com/installations/hosts.html)

 

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Technologies:

 Most Mobile phones  cannot access GPS signals,
 so we envisage using a combination of
 Bluetooth beacons, and either Semacode
 technology, RFID chip-reading or image
 recognition software, depending on the user’s
 mobile capabilities.

Production Time Scale:

Project scoping and agreement deadline:End of October 2008.

Software development and testing deadline: End of January 2009.

On-Site installation and testing deadline: September 2009

Projected Exhibition Dates: October 2009.