Looking Through Windows

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Looking Through Windows

An interactive game inspired by the artwork collection “All Clouds Are Clocks, All Clocks Are Clouds” by Sara Barker (2020)

One street, three households, one shared moment. With this interactive game you can step into the lives of three strangers whose lives overlap in unexpected ways.

This game gives you the freedom to explore the relationships between the neighbours and experience their lives separately or find the connections between the three when you listen to them collectively.

Use the sliders, volume buttons or other functions to explore the worlds of the individuals and become a fly on the wall while looking through the windows into other people’s lives.

This piece was created for Leeds Art Gallery, as accompanying material to Sara Barker’s recent exhibition. It was created by 2^nd Year Theatre and Performance BA students at The University of Leeds.

The piece aims to explore how we construct our separate perceptions of the world. It is inspired by Sara Barker’s use of mixed media, and the way her overlapping layers of canvas, wire and screens suggest overlapping worlds. Psychologically, humans create a personal reality based on information our bodies deem ‘relevant’, and we can open new worlds by consciously altering the way we absorb and focus on the information at our disposal. We called the project ‘Looking Through Windows’ to evoke the idea of looking into other people’s lives, as if they were different worlds. This idea gave us the idea to give the player control over how they tune into each character’s world.

The piece is also inspired by the videogame philosophy of Anna Anthropy, who believes games are a powerful mode of storytelling because they gradually give the player access to information. Each player discovers the game in their own way, and no two experiences of the game will be the same. This allows the process of tuning in and out of the different characters to be personalised to each player.  

Credits

Programming, Design, Artwork: Laurie Owen

Writing, Voice Direction, Audio Editing: Phoebe Langan

Voice Acting: Laurie Owen as Vera, Phoebe Langan as Sarah, Kelton Hoyland as Neil

Developed on Construct 2

Art edited with Krita

Sound edited in Audacity

Photo Credit: Terraced housing in Lime Street, Wolverhampton cc-by-sa/2.0 - © Roger Kidd - geograph.org.uk/p/1735257

Music Credit: Pizzactcato by Jonah Rapino is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.