What happens when a story comes to you where you are reading? What new types of storytelling are made possible when narrative accesses technology to personalise itself to you?

Breathe is a digital ghost story to be read on your phone. It tells the story of a young woman, Flo, who can communicate with the dead. As Flo attempts to make contact with her mother, Clara, who died when she was a young girl, other voices keep interrupting. The ghosts that disrupt Flo’s search for Clara recognise your surroundings and begin to haunt you, the reader, in the same way they haunt Flo.

For the past two years, I’ve been participating in a research project called Ambient Literature. With colleagues from the University of the West of England, University of Birmingham, and my university, Bath Spa, we’ve been investigating the locational and technological future of the book, scoping the field of digital literature and thinking about what urban data flows and the smartphone as a reading and listening device can bring to storytelling. At the heart of this research lie questions about how literature can make use of novel technologies and social practices to create evocative experiences for readers. The funding for the project (provided by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council) has allowed for three creative works to be commissioned as practice-as-research and Breathe is my response to that commission.

Breathe is a collaboration with the digital book space Editions at Play, which is itself a collaboration between Google Creative Labs Sydney and the London-based publisher Visual Editions. What we’ve created is a literary experience delivered using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and context recognition technology that responds to the presence of the reader by internalising the world around them. The story uses place, time, context and environment to situate the reader at the centre of Flo’s world as the book changes in ways that we hope are both intimate and uncanny. It’s a book that personalises itself to you.

The story takes about fifteen minutes to read; it is available for free and can be read on mobile devices via www.breathe-story.com.

The two other commissioned works, Duncan Speakman’s It Must Have Been Dark by Then, and James Atlee’s The Cartographer’s Confession, take diverse approaches to the challenges set by the research project; each of these works was created with a different set of collaborators. Along with the three creative pieces, the Ambient Literature project is producing a range of publications, from a how-to toolkit for writers and makers to a scholarly book co-written by the research team. As a creative writer, it’s been fascinating to work on Breathe, which builds on my own work in the field of digital fiction. With Visual Editions and Google’s Creative Lab Sydney, I couldn’t have asked for a better team of collaborators to bring this personalised locative ghost story to life.

As Anna Gerber, Creative Partner at Visual Editions, says, “Breathe is a story for anyone who wants to know what it’s like to read and experience a personalised book. Here, the book knows where readers’ are, the street names around them, the cafes nearby – and will give them a chill when they see their digital and real worlds combine. Breathe plays with readers’ minds as it explores what books can be like when you marry technology, literature, readers’ physical spaces and their everyday worlds.”

One final note – The Ambient Literature Project is looking for participants to try out Breathe and talk with us about their experience. If you are interested, follow this link to the sign up form.

Can we shape a digital literary form using the world around us?

What happens to literature when a reader is mobile and engaged in a narrative both spatially and temporally?

How can a writer use ubiquitous computing, available using a smartphone, to situate readers in a literary work?

Such questions brought together researchers from three universities in the UK (the University of the West of England, Bath Spa University and the University of Birmingham) to think about the intersections between place, technology and literature.

The resulting Ambient Literature project is a two-year AHRC-funded research collaboration investigating the potential of situated literary experiences delivered by pervasive computing platforms, which respond to the presence of a reader to tell stories. Such stories take place both in time and space; the reader is brought into contact with a physical location as part of a narrative.

Works of ambient literature can be shared with the reader in different ways, including through text and audio, and the reader is asked to also read situation and context. They may read text on the screen of a smartphone and listen to audio through headphones but also read the physical environment around them, walk along city streets or experience the sights and sounds of a single location. For example, in work resulting from the StoryPlaces project at the University of Southampton. This has both the potential to offer both an immersive literary experience as well as a reframing of the everyday world.

The technology used by the Ambient Literature project is often not new. For many years, artists, writers and performers have experimented with locative storytelling and used GPS tracking to tell stories through tagging locations. There is a long history of this type of media and creative production; in arts and performance by artists such as Janet Cardiff, who creates audio walks, the writer Eli Horowitz, who in The Silent History^⁠ tagged stories to locations using GPS so the reader had to move between spaces to access story with the use of a smartphone and, working at the intersection between performance and games, Blast Theory , an artist group that uses interactive media to engage audiences.

Countless others have explored this terrain and experimented with the idea of the situated participant who engages with a physical location through their movements in time and space. To add to the work of these artists, writers and performers, the Ambient Literature project wants to experiment with how ubiquitous technologies found within smartphones, such as sensors, can be an opportunity to access the data that is all around us to produce literary works.

To help us understand what ambient literature might become we have commissioned writing projects from writers Duncan Speakman, James Attlee and Kate Pullinger . The first of our commissioned works, It Must Have Been Dark by Then by Duncan Speakman, launched in May. It is a book and audio experience that uses music, narration and field recordings from three places in the world experiencing rapid human and environmental changes; the swamplands of Louisiana, Latvian villages and the Tunisian Sahara.

During this work, the reader is asked to physically seek out, by walking, types of locations in their own environment, such as elements of the natural world and human-made feature, and, in response, are given sounds and stories from remote but related situations.

At each location, the reader is invited to make connections between places and, in the process, create a map of both where they are standing and places that may not exist in the future. As the reader is encouraged to walk along city streets, there is space around the narrative for interruption, unpredictability and serendipity and this is a potentially exciting feature of ambient literature. A writer is unable to know exactly what a reader will encounter and so must think about their experience. For example, there may be an interruption from a passerby, an unexpected encounter or a strange sight in the physical environment.

This experience of being part of a narrative but staying open to these uncontrollable parts of a real-world space can resemble the visual art and performance art practices of participation and improvisation. The reader may be reading a text and listening to audio but, at the same time, they are part of an immersive experience that includes everything around them. It Must Have Been Dark by Then encapsulates this idea. In the experience, a reader is asked to navigate city streets through walking but there are physical boundaries and borders in place. The city controls their movements and they cannot pass entirely freely from one place to the next. There are rivers, commercial and business areas, fenced off areas and unsafe places. You can’t get to certain places and this becomes an interesting metaphor in the work. You experience a work about physical global borders while experiencing the borders in front of you.

In ambient literature, as an emerging form with its roots across media and literary production, there are opportunities for writers to play with the physical material of the city to shape a story. Technologies that have become a part of our everyday lives can be used to build narratives that are immersed in places. Through a carefully orchestrated experience, a writer can draw a reader’s attention to different aspects of the environment, highlight what is usually unseen or distract them from the familiar. This involves a re-thinking of what we understand as literary, what we mean by reading and how we can use the technologies all around us to tell stories.

You can follow the progress of the Ambient Literature project on our website [www.ambientlit.com] or on twitter @ambientlit.

Our second work of ambient literature, The Cartographer’s Confession by James Attlee, will be launched in September followed by our third, Liquid Continent by Kate Pullinger.

All images by Mark Lawrence capturing It Must Have Been Dark by Then.