Ambient Literature

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Breathe

by Kate Pullinger

Breathe tells the story of Flo, who has the ability to talk to ghosts. As Flo struggles to communicate with her mother, Clara, who died when she was a young girl, other voices keep interrupting. As these ghosts disrupt Flo’s search for Clara, they recognise the readers’ surroundings and begin to haunt the reader in the same way as they haunt Flo. Breathe is a literary experience delivered through your smartphone that responds to your presence by internalising the world around you. Using APIs — application programming interfaces — the story leverages data about you, including place, weather, time, in order to create an experience that is personal and uncanny. Created in collaboration with Editions at Play, which is itself a collaboration between Google Creative Lab Sydney and London-based publisher Visual Editions, this browser-based book for mobile phones is accessible wherever readers have wifi. READ BREATHE (This book is best experienced on your mobile…

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Illustration by Grace Attlee and James Brocklehurst.

The Cartographer’s Confession

by James Attlee

Winner of the the If:book New Media Writing Prize 2017 The second of the Ambient Literature commissions features a story written by James Attlee, author of titles including Isolarion, Nocturne, Station to Station, and Guernica: Painting the End of the World (forthcoming October 2017). His new ambient literature work, The Cartographer’s Confession, combines fiction and non-fiction, imagined and real locations, to create a story of migration, loss, betrayal, and retribution that builds to a savage denouement. The smartphone app allows you personal access to source materials for the film The Cartographer’s Confession, collected by screenwriter Catriona Schilling (CS). It features audio, prose, illustrations, an original collection of 1940’s London photographs, 3D soundscapes, and a bespoke musical score by group The Night Sky. Readers in London can immerse themselves in the film’s locations, experiencing elements of the plot in the places where they happened. A chapter at a time, cassette tapes of Thomas…

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It Must Have Been Dark By Then

by Duncan Speakman

This book will be available for purchase in Spring 2018, if you would like to be notified when it is released please send an email to hello@duncanspeakman.net Do you notice the world around you gradually changes? There is always something happening somewhere else. It Must Have Been Dark By Then is a book and audio experience that uses a mixture of evocative music, narration and field recording to bring you stories of changing environments, from the swamplands of Louisiana, to empty Latvian villages and the edge of the Tunisian Sahara. Unlike many audio guides, there is no preset route, the software builds a unique map for each person’s experience. It is up to you to choose your own path through the city, connecting the remote to the immediate, the precious to the disappearing. In January and February 2017 Duncan Speakman travelled with collaborators across three countries on three continents, visiting environments…

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