IFC 2014: Inside Outside Battery

According to Chris Brooks, Battery Radio (Canada), Inside Outside Battery is a “landscape documentary or perhaps a place-based feature (unless it’s not)”. It is an iOS or Android app taking to out into the landscape playing all sorts of audio – literary features, songs, current affairs, investigative journalism, historical documentaries, even a full-blown ghost story – based on where you are. It is, as its maker Chris Brooks puts it, an interactive “three-dimensional sound design”. There is no linear narrative arc, no beginning and no end, dozens of protagonists, and yet it is a fascinating multimedia experience. But is it a feature? Is it not? (Or does that matter at all?)

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