Digital Ghost Hunt
The Digital Ghost Hunt, a fusion of coding education, augmented reality and live theatre, was a 2017-2019 collaboration between the University of Sussex, King’s Digital Lab and KIT Theatre. The project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the Immersive Experience funding stream. As the project’s Primary Investigator, Mary Krell, Professor of Creative Media at the University of Sussex directed activities, provided top-level leadership, combined the expertise and activities of the team and provided theoretical and strategic guidance.
The research aim of the project was to explore how an immersive experience can deepen social and historical engagement with the physical world, and in doing so stand in contrast to the “black box” design paradigm that remains prevalent in IT, which tends to frame the interior of technology as an opaque domain that is only open to initiates.
The project allowed the team to compare the engagement of participants invited to engage with technology-aided experience as builder-makers and as naïve audiences to an already designed experience. This involved an exploration of the interactions between design and technology as a means of bringing people of different ages and attitudes to technology together through shared learning and problem-solving, with a nod to the popularity of escape rooms.
The heritage venues were conceived as technological objects, within which the team installed storyworlds to bridge the time spans separating audiences and the legacy of the sites. This was devised around the idea that human users are the “moving parts” that produce experience in technologies past and present, drawing on the notion of “theatre machines” and KIT Theatre’s wider body of work with young audiences in educational settings.