>Media Portrait of the Liberties

The Media Portrait of the Liberties concerns the development, production, and interactive delivery of multiple short stories about the Dublin Liberties community. Mairen Johnston's book “Around the banks of Pimlico” provides the basis for the script that shapes the media segments. Based on the author’s memories of growing up in the neighbourhood, the book describes the life, lore and color of the Liberties. Real individuals become characters and the anecdotes about their lives are woven together with historical descriptions of the social condition of the people living in the area in past and recent times.

People like to listen and empathize with stories. The goal of this interactive media portrait is to offer the contemporary community a view into the stories and history of their neighbourhood and to provide an evolving repository for anecdotes community members wish to add. Each short story is developed as a unit for a particular setting in the neighbourhood and, can be delivered via mobile technology in the appropriate location. The stories are arranged in a multi-branching structure. Multiple characters develop their own plot through the narrative fragments and eventually intersect with other characters who appear in different stories and who are connected through the common social network or shared adventures. The stories, in form of downloadable video clips, are available to the audience at the geographical locations where the stories happened, and contribute to a community-related story map of the area.

In addition to artistic and social issues, this neighborhood portrait addresses how such a portrait can be delivered to the liberties community as well as to people who visit the neighborhood. The software for the "Media Portrait of the Liberties" has been developed by Ian Oackley as partt of the CARMEN project (HCA funded research for mobile context aware multimedia narrative)

The project was awarded the Visual and Perfoming and Visual grant from Trinity college Dublinin order to accomplish the filming and production of the multimedia stories.

click here to view some story clips

the Liberties Neighbourhood

short demo video (3.3 mb)