5. Manchester Time Machine 2012 (with Marion Hewitt)

This is the world’s first iPhone app to combine archive film with GPS to create a mobile way of accessing film in the location it was shot. This was a three way collaboration between Marion Hewitt, Director of the North West Film Archive, Dr. Darren Dancey from Science and Engineering.

My role was the creative one - selecting the clips, writing the narratives, determining the overall shape of the piece.

This fits with my ongoing research questions which are to do with new ways of presenting narrative through emergent technologies, and an ongoing collaborative practice with engineers. The app was commented on in York University’s (Canada) Future Storytelling blog – Manchester Time Machine is the first ever app for the iPhone which merges archive film (read: database cinema) with GPS to create a street level tour of Manchester’s streets and people over the last 100 years. This is super awesome! Okay, I admit it, I was wrong about GPS cinema
The clips, chosen and edited by me, give a story of the twentieth century in the world’s first industrial city. There are 80 highlights from the early days of film in 1911 (a Whit walk in Market Street) through every decade of the last century until the 1970s (as a student demonstration scatters in Oxford Street).
Each is presented with a GPS locator and virtual compass so you can find exactly the same scene in the present day, even when many of the buildings may have disappeared.

This is a free iPhone app, which has 7000 downloads to date, 30 reviews in the App Store which gives it five stars overall, shortlisted for the 2012 How Do Media awards, featured in the Sun online, a 10 minute Granada TV piece, Manchester Evening News and lots of online comment.