BATTERCTRAX: Observations of Sensory Dissonance, 'Doubling' and other Residual Effects of Geolocative Media

Résumé En

This paper will describe BATTERCTRAX, an experimental geolocative media project undertaken during 2014. It examines the possibility that cinematic media (in this case audio from films) can be repurposed within an immersive, mobile heritage guide. The paper will describe the project in broad terms but will focus on certain unexpected and unusual perceptual effects generated during the test phase of the project. BATTERCTRAX began as an adjunct to a larger academic initiative called Cinematic Geographies of Battersea: Urban Interface and Site-Specific Spatial Knowledge, a collaboration between Liverpool, Cambridge and Edinburgh Universities and English Heritage. Amongst many outcomes, Cinematic Geographies built a comprehensive database of films shot in the London district of Battersea, which created ways to mobilise historic moving images for the analysis of social and material change in cities. As a tangential outcome of this project, BATTERCTRAX was a mobile phone app that played audio content from feature films, documentaries and TV shows at the places where they were originally recorded. The user would walk through clusters of GPS-enabled geofences in the test zone of Battersea Park, triggering a succession of historic cinematic sounds from across the 20 th century. However, by anchoring fictional audio content to the places of their origin, BATTERCTRAX appeared to create a sense of dissonance between sensory stimulants, destabilising a sense of perceptual cohesion in the user. These novel effects lead the researchers to speculate that such technology could not only be used to construct highly immersive, location-based urban experiences, but that it could also trigger psychoactive effects in ways that media developers and users had not anticipated. This paper will propose that geolocative media has the ability to tap into unexplored realms of "collective" cultural memory, but can also elicit unexpected psychological and perceptual responses.