Jack Lowe

I’m a cultural geographer and visiting lecturer in Digital Storytelling at Royal Holloway, whose research engages with various forms of digital media art to investigate the processes through which places become meaningful.

I'm currently undertaking a practice-based PhD project, supervised between Geography and Media Arts, which involves making and testing location-based games in my home city of Canterbury. This method seeks to understand the potential of location-based game development and play for enabling people to tell their stories of places in the district, and learn about the stories of others.

Creative works have included The Timekeeper's Return, a mixed-reality treasure hunt in Canterbury's Cathedral Quarter played using QR codes; Canterbury in 3 Words, a participatory storytelling platform and location-based treasure hunt played using the What3Words app; and The Gates to Dreamland, a locative audiowalk game based around Margate's Dreamland amusement park (made as part of A Different LENS – a collaborative story-mapping project funded by Arts Council England, Kent County Council and Margate NOW).

These projects follow prior professional and academic experience in this area. I have worked with four-times BAFTA-nominated interactive arts organisation Blast Theory as a volunteer; with StoryFutures as a consultant on location-based games; and I have presented research on the narrative environments of digital games at international conferences on several occasions.

In parallel with my PhD research, I have a longstanding interest in the cultural geographies of video game environments; in particular how a sense of place can be crafted in their hybrid physical and digitally-rendered landscapes. I’m interested in how post-phenomenology might provide theoretical frameworks through which we can apprehend the relationships between different kinds of materials, bodies and social contexts in the production of game experiences, such as feeling ‘a sense of place’ or 'attunement' with their associated landscapes. My research in this regard has centred on 'walking simulator' games, where I have used autoethnographic play techniques alongside interviews with game developers to study these phenomena.

These research interests stem back to a broader fascination with psychogeography; and particularly how different kinds of practices might engage with elements of a place’s cultural significance. To me, this is a creative challenge as well as an academic one – hence why I’ve long been interested in research that bridges between disciplines, reaches beyond the academy, and explores creative methods of inquiry.