Immersive ‘Memory Walks‘ for the Changing Minds festival at Southbank

Working in close partnership with Deborah Tchoudjinoff we developed a series of immersive video walks through emotions we might all experience but don’t yet exist in our vocabulary. As the experience unfolds, the participant listens to one of five emotional description narrations, Kenopsia, Anecdoche, Sonder, Onism, and Monachopsis, originally written by John Koenig The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. Each walk introduces one of these emotional states, whilst creating a subtle and temporary feeling of being out-of-place. The experience overlaps multiple recordings of the same place creating a new and completely individual experience.

I developed an immersive audio experience using a mobile web app and videos with binaural field recordings. By following a pre-recorded path through a location, paired with binaural sound, we could immerse the viewer in a past experience whilst simultaneously and temporarily removing them from the present. This process allows participants to each have unique experiences of the same place at the same time.