MyStory
Sunday, August 29th, 2010
It’s hard these days to pick up a glossy newspaper supplement in Victoria without reading something about Melbourne’s laneways. Laneway cafes, laneway bars, laneway boutiques and laneway tours, once a subject of scorn, these laneways are now used to represent the cultural heartbeat of Melbourne’s cool. The Melbourne city council has been quick to capitalise on this popularity and have commissioned a number of art projects that centre around these cement tracks. One of these is the MyStory project.
Despite my cynicism about the laneway phenomena, the Mystory project is truly a special and innovative one. MyStory is a collection of interactive self-guided tours of laneways in Melbourne by four writers: Barry Dickins, Cate Kennedy, Tony Birch and Matt Blackwood.
Blackwood who is the MyStory mastermind explained that he wanted to create a “literature map of Melbourne”. By this he does not mean a map of where literature was created, but in fact a map of where literature is to be experienced. An example of immersive narrative experience, the project utilises technology to produce site-specific aural storytelling for its audience.
