Breathe: A Digital Ghost Story

Abstract

Breathe is a literary experience, a work of experiential storytelling – a ghost story for the smartphone that uses data pulled from the reader’s phone to personalise the story to every reader. Funded by the AHRC’s larger Ambient Literature project, Breathe builds on much of Pullinger’s earlier research into new ways of creating fictional forms native to the smartphone. Specifically, it explores the question of how the affordances of smartphone technology can be used to create literary works that are situated in time and space in relation to the presence of a reader, making use of three APIs (application processing interfaces) – weather, time, and location – so to access data via the reader’s phone in ways that subtly alter the story for every reader.