Stories spun by students from lost love on a bus, to the apocalypse at the top of Sehome Hill Arboretum, carry participants through Western Washington University’s campus. Setting and atmospheric audio effects place a listener firmly in a world created through collaboration.
“Ghostwalk, A Creative Haunting of Sehome Hill,” a literary locative media piece, was launched Thursday using the Gesso app. This virtual installation by creative writing and audio recording students takes listeners on a tour of campus locations that inspired ghosts, stories, poems, songs and radio plays.
If the cold doesn’t give you goosebumps, this will.
Locative media uses GPS and Wi-Fi technology to deliver media to a user’s phone based on their location. One of the most popular examples of locative technology is PokémonGo, where players are prompted to catch a Pokémon based on the user’s location.
Creative writing instructor Hayley Steele was inspired to bring locative media to campus in her mixed-genre writing class.
Steele had been in conversation with Jeremy Hight, one of the creators of what is recognized as the first piece of literary locative media, “34 North 118 West.” This piece, set in a freight depot in downtown Los Angeles, lets the user uncover the city’s hidden history, from the turn-of-the-century railroads onward.
Ezra Anisman, an instructor in Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies, works on recording audio for “Ghostwalk” from the Fairhaven Recording Studio. (Photo courtesy of Hayley Steele)
Steele and Hight wanted to introduce a literary locative project to Bellingham, but Hight died unexpectedly in August. Steele wanted to honor his work by seeing their plans come to life.
“This is like a blank page we can use to put anything we want into it,” Steele said. “I think we’re still in the early stages of figuring out what some of these technologies have to offer us as artists.”
Steele hopes “Ghostwalk” can be used to teach literary locative media at Western in the future.
After meeting Fairhaven instructor and Western alum Ezra Anisman at a Fairhaven Alumni Panel, the project came to fruition over tea. Anisman was instructing intro to Pro Tools but did not have content or scripts for students to practice their recording skills.
The duo came up with an idea.
“We could throw some creative writing students in the mix and see what happens,” Steele told Anisman.
The app Gesso.fm displays a map through Western Washington University and up to the top of the Sehome Hill Arboretum. Each location will play an audio ghost story inspired by the location. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)
“I wanted to make it something that was more fun and people could look forward to and not be intimidated by the software,” Anisman said of the project. Anisman had taken the same class as an undergraduate and remembered its difficulty.
With the help of work-study student Rosie Reynolds, who was the locative media curator, Steele and Anisman began putting the pieces together.
“It was really wonderful to realize that we could put our classes together and serve both groups of students so well,” Anisman said.
Steele first instructed her students to pick a location on campus and create a ghost based on that location. They had to find a spot to haunt before writing a piece inspired by their ghost.
“There were a couple that got rather surreal,” Steele said.
Senior Mary Sawyer, one of Steele’s mixed-genre writing students, chose the stairs next to the Environmental Studies building where she spent a lot of time as a student.
“I wanted to reflect on those past versions of myself,” Sawyer said.
Because Sawyer’s story involved past versions of herself, she decided to layer her voice over itself. Sawyer’s words bouncing off each other and the vibration in the audio’s background gives it a spooky quality.
One ghost story is inspired by the view looking out from the Viking Union of Bellingham Bay. (Hailey Hoffman/Cascadia Daily News)
Working in a collaborative space on personal writing seemed daunting at first for Sawyer, but she ended up enjoying it, especially being able to work with Anisman.
“I had never experienced that level of collaboration before,” Sawyer said. “To be able to work as equals … that was a game changer.”
Anisman and Steele said the first step was making sure everyone was on the same page. Meanwhile, the creative writing students had to learn the language of audio recording.
“Hearing the words outside of your own head is good,” creative writing student Jose Anthony-Bennett said. His one regret is he doesn’t have the deep, reverberating voice of Orson Welles, he said.
Anthony-Bennett’s writing was a radio play inspired by a ghost he created at the broadcast tower at the top of Sehome Hill Arboretum. Anthony-Bennett worked with audio-recording student Aeden Humphreys, who used special effects to make Anthony-Bennett sound like an old radio announcer, adding creaking and crinkling that sends shivers down the spine.
“It’s like a whole world in the piece, and if we hadn’t made that sound art and gone in this direction, you wouldn’t have gotten that whole world that emerges,” Anisman said.
Steele hopes this creative collaboration becomes more standard at the university.
“You always have to work with other people, and learning those skills is so vital,” she said. “What this turned into was what it means to physically be on campus instead of just zooming in; what it means to really engage in the space of the campus and what it means to be there and leave your legacy.”
This story was updated to include the link to “Ghostwalk, A Creative Haunting of Sehome Hill” at 9:51 a.m. Oct. 31.
