Hawley, S., 2012.

Manchester Time Machine

'Manchester Time Machine': the first ever app for the iPhone which merges archive film with GPS to create a street level tour of Manchester’s streets and people over the last 100 years. There have been over 10,000 downloads.
This was a three way collaboration between Steve Hawley Creative Director, Marion Hewitt, Director of the North West Film Archive, and Dr. Darren Dancey from Science and Engineering MMU.

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.

“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”. York University’s (Canada) Future Storytelling blog

The clips 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.