Ghosts of Solid Air

Premiered at the 67th BFI London Film Festival, GHOSTS OF SOLID AIR is an interactive Augmented Reality (AR) story for your phone,

Ghosts of Solid Air is an interactive story taking you into a world of radical voices and shadows.

Wearing headphones, you open the app on your phone – standing somewhere in Trafalgar Square. You hear two voices, speaking to you in unison, swirling around your head with meticulously crafted sound design. These are the voices at the gate – and they persuade you to speak up. Bit by bit, as you softly murmur into your phone, the ghost world is revealed – a strange world of pink sky, drifting mist and indistinct figures.

As you explore, you meet a host of characters from across time who were radicalised through personal experience and forced into disobedient action.

These characters are based on real people from history.

You meet Olaudah Equiano haunting the statues of Trafalgar Square – enslaved as a child, he became an abolition activist with one of the earliest-known examples of published writing by an African in the UK.

Udham Singh paces around Horse Guards Parade – an Indian revolutionary, he witnessed the Amritsar massacre of 1919 and eventually murdered the British Army general who was responsible.

And Josie McGowan – the first woman to die at the hands of the Dublin Metropolitan Police in 1918 – keeps watch on the police stationed at the back of Downing Street.

As each ghost tells their story, of violent memories, moments of change and reasons to rebel, the voices at the gate keep bringing the story back to you. What makes you angry, and what words can you find to speak that anger out into the world?

You can only stay in the ghost world for so long – and when you finally reach Parliament Square, voices from now occupy the airwaves. What felt like a ghost world rooted in the past has become a sea of voices both past and present, woven together.

As the voices of contemporary activists who have spoken up fill the airwaves on the grass in front of Big Ben – you are invited to consider: what will you hold onto from all these voices – which stories will you tell?