The Collingwood-Fitzroy journey on the 64 Ways of Being app allows players to engage in a process of urban play, rediscovering this place through Indigenous-led cross-cultural storytelling and augmented reality.
If this is the first time you have used the 64 Ways of Being app, visit this page for information about how to find the starting point of the Fitzroy journey and advice for getting the most out of the experience. Make sure you have your fully charged smartphone and headphones and set aside at least an hour to fully immerse yourself in this Labyrinth of Language.
The Fitzroy Collingwood journey begins at Collingwood Yards on the lands of the Wurundjeri People. At the beginning of the journey, Uncle Colin Hunter Jr tells us that this is a gathering place for mob from different parts of Country and a meeting place for language. It is also now a meeting place for other languages and cultures from other places. A labyrinth allows us to explore this meeting place.
Like mazes but usually more complex, labyrinths are perfectly suited to a walking meditation. An opportunity to bring ourselves into the present moment and listen, and look, to the cues in the app – the Fitzroy journey brings our attention to things that are here, but not necessarily seen. The narrative challenges players to think beyond sight.
Early in the Labyrinth of Language journey we hear,
“Apparently, it’s a law of physics, a universal law, nothing really disappears. It just disappears from sight.”
As players are drawn through the Labyrinth of Language by a beautiful, complex, and captivating soundtrack, there is an emphasis on doorways, entrances, hidden codes, guides, and stepping through, into other fictions. Spoken words provide prompts to look, and find, and invite players to consider this time and place, and that what lives here still, is not always seen.
An important element of this immersive journey is the soundtrack, featuring CORIN and Fia Fiell (aka Carolyn Schofield), along with many other voices and languages.
CORIN is a Filipina-Australian electronic producer, composer, DJ and performer working in the fields of performance art, sound design, theatre and club spaces. With a background in classical piano, Corin is interested in creating sonic spaces in which western classical music can be blended with contemporary electronic production and non-western forms. Corin has lent her composition and sound design skills to the 64 Ways of Being experiences to create vivid, ethereal, and reflective soundscapes that keep players engaged in real and imaginary worlds, including in the Labyrinth of Language.
Fia Fiell’s music also features throughout the Fitzroy Collingwood Journey. She is a Vietnamese-Australian electronic/synth musician who applies her practical and theoretical ability as a pianist and composer to creating modern, millennial electronic music constructs. You can find out more about Fia Fiell’s work on her website and on Instagram.
In these journeys, one step at a time work with music made in Melbourne to create a score for the urban environment. Each track is meticulously edited and synced with the movement of the player through urban space and cued via GPS to begin at an entrance to a laneway, a new location – moments of transition in the journey. In Fitzroy, working with an urban labyrinth of backstreets and byways, the science fiction inspired ‘sentient sound’ of CORIN creates an otherworldly atmosphere juxtaposed with everyday, urban life.
You are in this world as it is coming into being, through your presence bringing things ‘disappeared from sight’ back into view – even if only for a moment.
Download the 64 Ways of Being app from the App Store or Google Play and experience the Fitzroy Collingwood journey for yourself today.
Once you have wandered through the Labyrinth of Language, why not explore one of the other journeys on 64 Ways of Being to continue your urban play adventure?