The Broadside of a Yarn

The Broadside of a Yarn is a multi-modal performative pervasive networked narrative attempt to chart fictional fragments of new and long-ago stories of near and far-away seas with naught but a QR reader and a hand-made map of dubious accuracy. This project may perhaps be best understood as an assemblage of interrelated narrative elements mediated across a continuum forms - a collection of stories, a folio of broadsides, or an unbound atlas of impossible maps composed of a combination of historical sources, interspersed with "found" images, quotations from well known sailors’ yarns, and my own drawings and photographs, and fiction. These printed maps are embedded with QR codes link mobile devices to computer-generated narrative dialogues which may then serve as scripts for poli-vocal performances, and/or suggest a series of imprecise pervasive performative walks. This project is, in a Situationist sense, a wilfully absurd endeavour. How can I, a displaced native of rural Nova Scotia (New Scotland), perform the navigation of a narrative route through urban Edinburgh (Old Scotland)? How can any inhabitant of dry land possibly understand the constantly shifting perspective of stories of the high seas?