Emma Whittaker, James Brocklehurst
Interactive Story, 2014. iBeacons, App

The Lost Index: NATMUS is an interactive narrative game that transforms the location of a museum into a dystopian story world… Your phone rings, “You have been selected… your help is required … time is running out…” Searching for objects from the lost index holds the key to stabilising the changes. In response to their actions participants receive phone calls – fragmentary updates from which possible stories build. But as time runs out the uncertain future draws nearer and so too does the metamorphosis of the museum. Binaural soundscapes layered with ambient sounds stimulate perceptual illusions and combine with attentionfocusing techniques to create a “mixed reality” environment that physically situates the player within a fictional world of the game. The app is experienced via participants’ own iOS device and headphones, with innovative use of iBeacons.

In our lived experience, categorical distinctions between the real, the mediated and the imagined are often permeable and unverified, argues William James. It is the particular happening of events that provides the context to our thoughts and the tangibility of their occurring next effects. The Lost Index: NATMUS develops James’s radical empiricist insight as an approach to interactive narrative that plays with the contexts of players’ beliefs, directing and misdirecting their attention and keeping knowing in transit.

The Lost Index: NATMUS can be downloaded from the iOS App Store for use at The National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen. Headphones are required.

This work will be exhibited at National Museum of Denmark, Copenhagen
https://vimeo.com/108626316