This talk will present Uninvited Guests’ Augmented Reality performance Billennium, a guided tour of possible futures for a city, and Future Places Toolkit, an AR engagement activity for planning consultation and engagement. Through these examples, I will explore how AR and site-specific science-fiction storytelling can support people in imagining and experiencing alternative futures for their places.
In Billennium, future architecture appears around participants as 360-degree AR animations, and spatialised audio immerses them in the sound of utopian and dystopian times to come. Using guided conversation, live Virtual Reality sketching and AR on smartphones, Future Places Toolkit (FPT) makes it possible to see plans and people’s ideas for a building project visualised immediately in 3D, overlaid onto the existing place and context a building is proposed for.
Drawing on the Perform Europe-funded tour of Billennium to Bilbao, Belgrade and Budapest, as well as engaging communities in Bristol and Birmingham with Future Places Toolkit, this talk will explore whether AR and collaborating on speculative fictions can help ‘people participate more actively as citizen[s]’ in co-creating ‘more socially constructive imaginary futures’ for their public spaces (Dunne and Raby, p.5). Can intermedial methods of participatory futuring enable more representative people to narrate themselves into times to come and see themselves represented in their own preferred scenarios? Does the in situ approach increase a community’s capability to imagine otherwise, to envision alternative imaginaries, and to take agency in shaping their places/futures?
Using live VR drawing, AR and spatial audio, Uninvited Guests materialise virtual possibilities for neighbourhoods and enable participants to explore them physically, in an embodied way. This presentation will address whether such technology-enabled, immersive approaches make possible futures for places more tangible and support people to explore their emotional and affective relationships towards them.