“Location-based mixed reality storytelling in contested urban environments”
Location-based XR media merge the real with digital worlds in ways that offer local communities a vivid enactment of hidden narratives in a publicly accessible archival record of place. Sarah Drury will present the Gowanus Augmented Reality Walking Tour (GowanusAR), a location-based augmented reality app for the smart phone. GowanusAR engages visual and sonic artifacts in a virtual 3D installation, speaking to the colonization, industrialization, and remediation of the Gowanus Canal, a post-industrial Superfund site in Brooklyn, New York. The app uses interactive design and programming to create a sensual immersive experience on the Unity platform, embedding water-based storytelling elements realistically in the landscape. The tour's particle-animated guide speaks as Water itself about colonization, production and development, starting with the colonial-era technologies used to sequester water, harness its power and transform its energy into production.
The AR tour includes a collaboration with composer Guy Barash to create interactive sonic compositions that are triggered as one walks, following a map of the branching network of Underground Waterways. Vocal samples are layered with different qualities of voice and language, and each invisible underground stream is enacted as a distinct audio layer that one encounters, lingers with, or crosses over.
The poetic Seepage Text voices the persistent force of water in the hardened urban landscape, relentlessly saturating the built environment in ways both regenerative and destructive. The voices of Resistance Organisms speak to the struggle of creatures from the microbial to the mammalian to adapt to toxic waters in evolving ecosystems. The Native Place Names that have been subsumed into everyday Brooklynese are spoken aloud, translating ancient features of the terrain that have long been graded, straightened and obliterated.
Sarah Drury is a media artist working in video, installation and interactive media across various forms and practices. Her projects explore embodiment and participation via media technologies, using critical approaches to layered narratives. Her current project, The Gowanus Augmented Reality Walking Tour App, is a hybrid virtual-physical app for situated storytelling for mobile devices. She presented this project recently as ISEA 2025 in Seoul, South Korea. Drury's works have been presented nationally and internationally at gallery, museum and conference venues, including The Walking Project, a collaborative performance project on non-normative embodiment using wearable devices to amplify gesture as live animation, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts; and interactive video design for Violet Fire: a Multimedia Opera About Nikola Tesla, presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival and the National Theater of Belgrade. Drury is an associate professor in the Temple University Film & Media Arts Department.
This event is free and open to the public.