Research-creation, storytelling, counter-mapping, mobile locative media, documentary, data visualization, embodiment, co-design, Indigenous, colonization, Ipperwash
Led by Monica Virtue, Nathan Pilla
In-Situ Data Stories is a platform designed to deliver multimedia content to mobile devices as users travel across a terrain. Using GPS, the platform launches video, interactive visualizations and audio as users cross through preset zones. The content builds to tell a story that unfolds during an embodied walk across a landscape.
The In-Situ platform was designed in tandem with The Ipperwash Beach Walk
Watch: Video featuring Monica Virtue
Located a two-hour drive from Detroit on the south shore of Lake Huron, Ipperwash Beach has been a site of conflict since Henry Ford invented the Model T. Co-designed with the Kettle & Stony Point First Nation, The Ipperwash Beach Walk uses geo-location to deliver documentary media and interactive visualizations to mobile users during an embodied “beach walk” along a disputed strip of land on Lake Huron. As users travel an historic trail between two Indigenous communities, crossing a series of GPS points along the water’s edge, they learn via smartphone how settlers colonized Ipperwash Beach. The experience is a form of counter-mapping which presents an alternative viewpoint to broadly accepted notions about how Ipperwash Beach became a vacation destination.
