I’m speaking tonight on Notes for Walking at the AR Meetup at the Metropole Hotel, 6-9pm, cnr Bridge and George St, City OR Click here for the dedicated Note for Walking site.
Notes for Walking, locative artwork, app and insrallation by Megan Heyward. Sydney Festival, 2013.
Final touches to sound design, final tweaks, getting closer to finalising The Secret Language of Desire. Coming soon to a tablet near you…And very excited to announce that the work will be premiered at ELO 2015 in Bergen, Norway, in August 2015.
Further updates on Secret Language… I am getting closer – yes, I keep saying this but building every little thing from the ground up is very, very time consuming. The writing is done; the app has been designed and built by me, I am now finalising all of the animations which will add interactivity and “accents” to the text. Close to finishing most of these- last night and this morning animating seaweed for a sequence ( see image below)… I am about to animate 27 chapter titles..wish me luck ( for I keep finding an excuse to delay, such as writing this post). It is very, very finicky as they need to perfectly match and then be laid on top of the main menu, all as separate files…it will probably take me a couple of days to do… Heaven forbid that I want to change anything…!!
I am also working with sound designer Michael Finucan to add sounds to the animations and interactive sequences- this is also quite tricky primarily because of the very short time frames we are working with, along with limitations regarding the capacities of tablets themselves and what they do to audio in terms of compression… Aaaahh, please remind me never to do any of this again!!
Below is a screengrab of the Edge Animate file I built to animate the seaweed.
Edge Animate
I am getting closer to finalising the new creative work, The Secret Language of Desire, a digital narrative written and designed specifically to take advantage of the intimate and haptic nature of electronic tablets. Secret Language is comprised of close to 30 ultra short, highly compacted narratives / textual episodes enhanced with animation, sound and interactions that are triggered by the reader’s touch of various onscreen elements. The Secret Language of Desire is a kind of digital pillow book and electronic text, exploring – what happens to intimacy in a world of instant gratification?
More work, more animation, more writing … more soon.
Spent most of today working on a lovely little haptic effect for this new work… scratch ‘n’ sniff ( well, scratch at least)… A nice way of revealing hidden contents…
Working with the beauty of real objects and crisp, genuine shadows… this may be a theme in the new digital work…
I am quietly and solidly working away on a new digital narrative, integrating text, image, animation and sound…exploring the haptic and intimate nature of tablets, and what happens to the reading experience, to the textuality, in an interactive, tablet environment. To be released early 2015, with more detail soon. Meanwhile, here is another image.
Very happy to mention that I have been recently been awarded an Australia Council Literature Board grant in New Media and Digital Writing, to develop a new electronic literature work for tablet devices. Work will start on this project in 2014, so more news once the project is underway next year.
Notes for Walking will be staged again at Middle Head as part of Mosman Festival and Mosman Art Gallery’s site specific program during the International Fleet Review, on the October long weekend, 4-7 October, 2013. Remember to download the Notes for Walking app prior to visiting onsite. Please note that it is only running for iPhone, iPad and iPodTouch during the long weekend. Android users will need to visit the site with a iOS friend!
To download the app click here. If visiting onsite please follow the user checklist. For further info please visit the Notes site.