Please Mind the Ghosts - Discover a new AR app at our Friday Late
On the evening of Friday 18 March 2022, I will show the visual elements of my prototype Augmented Reality (AR) music-heritage app Please Mind The Ghosts™ at London Transport Museum’s Friday Late – Legacies: London Transport’s Caribbean Workforce.
When I originally thought of my idea back in late 2020, I wasn’t consciously thinking about creating something that would feature London’s transport system, it was simply a combination of factors that melded together. In essence, my idea was born from grief. Following my Mum’s death in 2017, I had been looking to creatively explore my heritage – my Trinidadian parents were part of the Windrush generation who had settled in London. During one pre-pandemic day in Covent Garden circa 2018, my Dad mentioned that he would take the Piccadilly line from there up to Finsbury Park for lunch at home. My Dad had started off his career in the UK as a young Scientific Assistant in a Laboratory of the Government Chemist outstation on Endell Street for a couple of years in the 1960s (the building is no longer there). The Piccadilly line was quick and tickets cheap which helped him keep to the family’s modest household budget.
Fast-forward to the pandemic - while the UK was in the first lockdown, I was one of the few commuters travelling on the London Underground as I was freelancing in Westminster. I stood in empty Tube trains which passed through closed stations, went up and down escalators free of people, and strolled through empty tunnels to change lines. It was unusual to come across even a handful of people at rush hour. The eerie atmosphere was reminiscent of the Tottenham Court Road station scene in the classic film An American Werewolf in London (1981), albeit without the werewolf – anyone who knows me will know I would have been happy to see a wolf character!
These factors merged to form an idea in my head during the summer of 2020 while I was preparing to embark on an MA in Immersive Storytelling at Royal Holloway, University of London, on a StoryFutures scholarship. Immersive storytelling concerns various forms of alternative realities, some of which are digitally overlaid onto the real world – like Augmented Reality. It had occurred to me whilst travelling around the deserted Underground and waiting on empty platforms during lockdown that perhaps I wasn’t alone, that in fact the spirit of the many people who had worked in London and made it into the sprawling Capital it is today, were still here in some form. It was as if the quietness and solitude allowed me to tune into something ephemeral.
The London Underground’s vast network seemed a perfect metaphor for my concept which I had decided to base around the Windrush generation. My Trinidadian parents were in their early twenties when they arrived in 1960 with a baby in tow (my eldest sister) and moved around the Capital living in cramped rental flats in the time when my brother and sister were born – Acton, Fulham, Streatham, and Ealing. At that time my Mum would work night shifts in the kitchen at Highgate Hospital in a small team of four, so that medical staff would have something to eat around the clock. When Mum arrived home in the early mornings my Dad would be leaving for work. They settled for a while in Finsbury Park where I was later born.
Through this immersive project, I am keen to bring an alternative view of Windrush because of my background and personal view formed by listening in to adult Trinidadians with varying points of view who visited our home while I was growing up as a young girl. The Windrush generation contained different personalities from different Caribbean islands, so surely there would be different perspectives and experiences that perhaps have not been heard. My ancestors were indentured Indian labourers who migrated to Trinidad to work on plantations following the abolition of slavery.
Included in this intake were Chinese indentured labourers. Their working and living conditions were terrible. This part of history is for me, almost forgotten. So, I feel it is important to represent the full range of ethnicities that were part of the Windrush generation, which could feed into a more three-dimensional understanding. I also want to illustrate that their experiences spanned different decades, and for some this included the Second World War, with West Indians deciding to return to the ‘mother country’ which they had served for.
This passion project keeps a connection with my Mum, albeit an augmented one. When I was holed up in my flat creating the prototype for my MA final project last summer during pandemic limbo, I could sense Mum dancing beside me while I was playing back the spatialised classic calypso tracks.
My project reveals the past in an immersive way to help people take heart in the present, it is a celebration of the Windrush generation, an impressionist piece of work which aims to encourage people from all kinds of cultures and backgrounds to keep going today with all the hardships we are enduring, just as the Windrush generation did during the last century.
But what of the future? I intend to make my immersive concept into a full exhibition project, complete with spatial soundtrack. Once I secure funding, I will bring on board fantastic immersive tech company Sugar Creative Studios who are award-winning specialists in Augmented Reality. I am also accruing a rock-solid team of other partners and advisors to make this idea come to fruition.
Perhaps those Windrush ghosts - including my Mum, would be happy to be remembered in this way.
Find out more about Wolfskill Ltd and Meet Patricia at the Museum on 18 March to explore her Please Mind The Ghosts™ AR app prototype.
See the full programme of our Friday Late and book your tickets on our website.