I wrote a post in May about the TOTem (Tales Of Things and Electronic Memory) project RememberMe which was taking place as part of Future Everything in Manchester. Coincidentally they came to our faculty last week and gave a seminar about their research to date and some hints at its future direction.

There websites seem to have grown and come together well over the last month. This was the site I initially linked to which seems to be about the research in general while these two, Tales of the City and Tales of Things are two ongoing projects being developed. It was the second of these which was part of Future Everything and which was mainly used at the seminar.

Angelina Karpovich from Brunel University outlined the research while we got to interact with some of the ‘Things’ tagged as part of the Tales of Things project, notably the teddy bear in the image above.

Using an iPhone app (images above) we were able to scan the bears tag and read a text/tale about it. Angelina was keen to point out that the tagging technology involved was not new, the purpose was to explore it in ways that had really not been explored in great depth. What was a little disappointing was the inability for me to feed into the tale we were reading in the iPhone app but the project makes no such claim to do this and within the context it’s presented, as a method of story telling, works well.

It should be noted that the seminar was presented as part of a series at The George Ewart Evans Centre for Storytelling and I have been told a video of the seminar will be posted to the website soon.

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