Hauntology: A Digital Ghost Walk for the Worcester Festival

The Worcester Festival takes place every summer, for two weeks during August. Its an eclectic mix of arts, culture, history, food, drink and much more besides. Of course, this year, the festival will be somewhat different, with a series of events curated largely online.

Digital theatre company C&T decided to make a virtue of these constraints and, in someway, subvert them. How might a virtual festival, constrained by Covid-19, enable real world activity, rather than a purely virtual experience? The result is Hauntology: A Future Ghost Walk.

Worcester has a rich history of ghost stories and ghost walks. Hauntology, plays on that tradition. Its an adventure for all the family (most suitable for 9+) that starts and finishes at the historic statue of the composer Edward Elgar. Using a smartphone and headphones you can login into Hauntology for free and begin to explore the city in a new and playful way. Your phone will navigate you around streets, to landmarks, across bridges and alongside rivers and canals. Voices of artists from Worcester’s future will navigate your journey, setting you creative tasks and challenges. The whole walk takes less than one hour.

Hauntology makes full use of our Prospero technology, particularly its ability to create narratives using GPS and interactive maps. As you move across the city, Prospero tracks you, triggering video, audio and interactive tasks as you move to new locations. We worked with a number of Worcestershire Cultural Education Partnership’s Young Producers, initiative using voice actors to record binaural sound monologues. Binaural sound is an amazingly evocative new technology, that makes any audio experience richer and more dynamic in thrilling ways. Together with Prospero, these technologies make Hauntology a fun and creatively engaging addition to this years Worcester Festival.

And what about the title itself, Hauntology? How we arrived at that name and what it means for C&T’s future work will appear in a blog post coming soon!

Hauntology: A future Worcester Ghost Walk is part of Worcester Festival 2020, and is available from 15 August. Reserve your place for free here.