TrailOff Storywalk
TrailOff is a mobile app that brings its users a cutting-edge artistic experience that’s equal parts immersive theater, GPS-triggered tech “magic” and connection to the great outdoors. This mixed reality experience features 10 original audio dramas, free to download through the app, that unfold on trails across the Circuit Trails network.
Created by Swim Pony in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Environmental Council (PEC), stories feature local BIPOC authors who bring new and diverse perspectives that shake up the narratives one typically associates with nature trails in the Philadelphia region. Each story is written specifically for a trail on the Circuit Network, evoking a conversation between the external landscape and the internal sonic world. Stories are compelling and tailored to their selected route of the path, and are available 24/7 and responsive to the pace, weather and time of day in which the user undertakes the experience.
Stories cover a range of topics and styles from Afrofuturism-inspired mythology mysteries (LiSumpter’s Chronicles of Asylum) to urban legends surrounding the Jersey Devil (River Devil II: The Return by Carmen Maria Machado). Each of the 10 stories is scored with original music and design that features binaural audio, which gives it a spatialized 360 feel. Trail locations are easily searched in the app, found throughout the city and its surrounding suburbs.
TrailOff Storywalk on the Schuylkill River Trail
River Devil II: The Return by Carmen Maria Machado
Saturday, June 7th at 3PM
River Devil II: The Return by Carmen Maria Machado
FREE. Bring a charged iPhone and headphones.
All Mercedes wants is to do her job: capturing behind-the-scenes shots for a cheesy horror movie sequel shot in Manayunk with her conspiracy-theorist camerawoman, Bernice. But travelers beware; the deceptively beautiful Manayunk Canal may have other ideas… Nature fights back in this cryptozoology-meets-The-Blair-Witch-Project horror story — River Devil II: The Return.
More about the trail:
Popular for biking and walking, the path is a mixture of pavement, boardwalks and gravel. This low to medium difficulty walk is 1.9 miles or roughly 1 hour from start to finish with no inclines. Note that this is a point-to-point trail, meaning you’ll have to walk back the same way you came at the end. Metered street parking or paid lot parking is available near the trailhead.
More about the author:
Carmen Maria Machado is the author of the bestselling memoir In the Dream House, the graphic novel The Low, Low Woods, and the award-winning short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. She has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction, the Brooklyn Public Library Literature Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. In 2018, the New York Times listed Her Body and Other Parties as a member of “The New Vanguard,” one of “15 remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.”
Her essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Vogue, This American Life, Harper’s Bazaar, Tin House, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, The Believer, Guernica, Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts.