Forest Keep
By Electric Medway feat. Square Pegs Arts
Come and play test a futuristic story at Rochester Castle
Gardens in augmented reality where you choose the outcome. Developed by John Whall and Adam Glen with young people at our Young Hack digital camps and production workshops, and with students from Canterbury Christ Church University.
Rochester Castle, Castle Gardens, Rochester ME1 1SW.
what3words location: /data.burns.digit
You will need to bring your phone or tablet device that has access to WiFi. We can only provide a limited number of tablet devices. Your guide will take you through the story. Please allow 30 minutes for your experience.
The story
In a distant future where Earth’s ecosystems have collapsed, a buried AI beneath Rochester Castle awakens. Once designed to archive the planet’s biodiversity and stories, it has grown sentient and now fuses memory with matter. Through fungal networks and residual tech, it projects reconstructed creatures and myths into the real world as machine-nature hybrids.
Now, a new research expedition (led by Amelia and Jason) ventures into the castle grounds to investigate. But the terrain is unpredictable, and past expeditions have vanished. To help them, the team activates the T.A.P., reaching back in time to request assistance from those with living memory of Earth’s lost past… us.
About
Forest Keep is an immersive, site-specific narrative experience set within the historic grounds of Rochester Castle. Audience members will access the story through their mobile devices explained to them as the Temporal Assistance Program (T.A.P.), within the narrative participants from the present day guide a future expedition team through a post-collapse world. At the heart of this transformed ecosystem lies the BioAnomaly, a sentient AI machine-nature hybrid that reconstructs lost biodiversity and folklore as strange new life forms. Players must navigate the ethical and ecological challenges these reconstructions pose.
Acknowledgements: Forest Keep is part of our wider young people programme Young Hack. This phase is supported by Medway Council UK Shared Prosperity Fund, Arts Council England, Henry Smith Foundation and Colyer Ferguson Charitable Trust, with partner support from Rochester Castle and Guildhall Museum. Game Design students from Canterbury Christ Church University helped shape the initial project.