PLAYING PLACE: PITTSBURGH, AUGMENTED
An ongoing spatial storytelling project that illuminates interactions between narrative and cityscape. Playing Place is currently in a data collection phase where undergraduate students curate site-based stories and prototype playable threads. We are building towards an augmented reality mobile application which enables people to physically explore the stories of Pittsburgh. Through interactive overlays, players will engage stories ranging from the bloody history of the Homestead Labor strike to the fantastical adventures of the Monongahela River Monster. Collaboration with Jessica Fitzpatrick (University of Pittsburgh), Emma Slayton (Carnegie Mellon), and Jessica Benner (Carnegie Mellon).
THE ULTIMATE WITNESS
A series of audiovisual reworkings of police body camera footage. This project began with one of my dissertation chapters, which focuses on the mediation of a 2015 officer-involved killing in Cincinnati. As I wrote about how body camera images become inseparable from the things people say about them, I felt the insufficiency of my textual descriptions. These videos are an attempt to stage the entanglement of speech and image in a more affective way, to convey viscerally the body camera’s failure to witness. You can watch an excerpt of one below. Here, I combine slowed-down images from University of Cincinnati police officer Ray Tensing’s body camera with audio of city officials, forensic video experts, and police officers making contradictory claims about what those images show.