'The Common Line: generating novel encounters with place through art-geography and immersive technologies'

Imagine a line that crosses the longest reach of mainland Britain, from the south coast of England to the north-west of Scotland. Think about the incredible diversity of places and landscapes such a line would traverse and connect: fields, farms & housing estates; shopping centres, roads & railways; schools, factories & mountain-tops. What would happen if you could see that line, interact with it, and hear its hidden voices and the politics of its places as you walked along or across it?

This line is 'The Common Line', the brainchild and vision of Exeter-based artist Volkhardt Mueller. This AHRC/EPSRC-funded research development project will provide one means to realise that vision, through exploring how immersive technologies can render it into rich, live experience, and by disclosing and discussing thereof issues of access, knowledge, ownership and commonality. Cultural geographers John Wylie (PI) and Paula Crutchlow (PDRA) from the University of Exeter will work with creative technologists Controlled Frenzy, artists Volkhardt Mueller and John Levack Drever (Blind Ditch), specialists in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and partners from the University of Cumbria to investigate and develop place-based, digitally immersive activities that can bring the concept of The Common Line to life.

The project will proceed from an expert GIS-calculated estimation of The Common Line's trajectory across Britain, mapped and made scaleable and interactive. In this development phase, field research will focus on sites in and around the city of Carlisle, Cumbria, which is established as sitting close to the centre of the line. Having opened dialogue with and brokered access via key local landowners and experts, the project team will deploy their varied expertise to create field recordings, data visualisations and performance walks. The outcome of this work will be a web-based or downloadable platform, providing users with a novel placed-based, multi-sensory immersive experience on The Common Line. In creating this platform, we will be especially alert to the potential that the gradations of mediation to be experienced through 'in situ' AR and VR, and will pay attention to how their combination can create not only deepened layers and rhythms of experience, but also points of interruption and dislocation. In terms of further development and scaleability, we will develop our work through open source data and code; this will secure its future accessibility to users, and its ongoing potential evolution as a resource for other digital technologists to work with and develop.

The Common Line project more widely calls public attention to pressing questions concerning place, environment and identity in contemporary Britain. Like all human-made land-lines and borders, it has an arbitrary quality. Like all such lines, it both connects and divides - it brings people together, and it pushes them apart. The production and testing of a digitally-immersive experience of place on The Common Line will expose participants, and future wider publics, to questions of ownership and belonging over time, and of what is held in common across Britain's places and landscapes.

Who might benefit from this research,and how?

The Common Line project envisions a line of trees planted along the the longest straight line mappable across Britain, reaching from the north-west coast of Scotland down to the south coast of England, and traversing in its course myriad places, environments and habitats. This AHRC-EPSRC funded development project has the aim of bringing this vision into lived experience by producing digitally-mediated, mixed-reality place-based immersive experiences at specific sites in Cumbria, close to the centre of the Common Line. The project will draw on expertise from a range of sectors and sources, and will engage also with members of the public to realise its vision. In this way the work will have particular impact upon the following groups of people:

Digital and creative technologists - The main partner of this research will be Controlled Frenzy, a prototyping, software development and research consultancy. Controlled Frenzy will work in partnership to develop and realise project outcomes, and thus the work will facilitate new networks of knowledge and collaboration, and allow Controlled Frenzy to access new data and sources for the realisation of immersive digital experiences. More widely, our intention in this project is to work through, and to create, open source data, tools and software. By working in an open source manner, the potential future evolution and wider reach and impact of the project outcomes is enhanced. Rather than producing a one-off event, fixed digital tool or physical artefact, this project will result in a digital platform that other digital technologists can work with and adapt.

Creative arts communities and organisations - Members of the art group Blind Ditch will be commissioned as members of the project team, working on the production of content and delivery of project outcomes. This research will therefore directly and positively impact upon Blind Ditch's artistic profile, research and future sponsorship and project potential. It will do so in three key ways: a) through enabling the production of new original artistic outputs, b) through facilitating the acquisition of new technical expertise and experience, and c) through providing new platforms for Blind Ditch's creative talent and acumen to be showcased and communicated to wider audiences, including peer audiences in the UK and overseas. This project also has potential to impact upon other artistic groups, communities and organisations, in the UK especially in the first instance. The project through its online dissemination and exhibition, will provide a stimulus to others in the creative industries whose work deals with issues of place, environment and experience.

The Woodland Trust - confirmed partners within the wider Common Line project, providing both seedlings and expert advice as part of the wider ambition to physically mark the line with trees along its course. The ambition speaks directly to the Woodland Trust's mission focus on not simply the preservation of the UK's extant forests and trees, but on the creation of new woodlands. The work of this research project will positively impact upon and be of benefit to the Woodland Trust in providing both a new and iconic example of woodland creation, and a template for developing future on-the-ground creative digital interactions with woodland sites.

Public Participants at events stages along the Common Line - Impact here lies in the transformative enhancement of people's knowledge and understanding of local places, in terms of their landscape aesthetics, their sensory amplification and their wider framing within histories of environmental change, stewardship and ownership. While numbers will of necessity be relatively small at this development stage, it is hoped that the experience of The Common Line will result in changed or renewed values and attitudes with respect to issues of place, identity, ownership and belonging.