ScaryMushroom, Middlesbrough Mystery Box
Brief Project Diary Project Documentation Budget OutcomesProject Brief
Project Type:
Experimental
Audience:
Aims:
Engage an audience with local cultural heritage.
As escape room obssessed, mystery loving, puzzle fans ScaryMushroom and myself have much in common, and so when she returned from a jaunt around the world to her base in middlesborough just as I was toying with concept of using a puzzle box as an interactive exhibition space it seemed like an ideal partnership. As such this project has started with a somewhat diffferent brief:
- "Exhibit" Middleborough, showcasing its history, cultural sites and highlighting all the interesting things in Scary's backyard.
- Low cost, so no/mimial entry fees for venues, minimal traveling, and no expensive components.
- Possible London side quest - talking with Scary I knew she would be making a trip to London so, I could possibly inlcude some sites in the city.
- Semi-fictionalised - taking inspriation from the likes of The Mysterious Package Company, and making a way to tie togeather disparate sites develop an "exhibition narative" that tied in real elements while driving her to explore differnt sites and venues.
- Non-linear story telling - I knew going in I couldn't always guaruntee what order Scary might solve puzzles in so she had to be able to piece togeather the exhibition narative out of order
Project Diary
Concept & Planning
Inspiration & ideas
Inspiration
For a few years now I've been playing with the idea of an escape room in a box, in my previous incarnation as a librarian it had potential as a method to teach studnets how to use a library and how to do research, but Scary's return from her round the world trip to a rainy Middlesborough catalysed the iea into wondering if I could make a mildy feindish little box of puzzles that could do the exact opposite of an escape room and get her out and about to see some intersting things at home.
I've been following Mysterious Package Company
The History
Coming into this project I have very little idea of Middlesborough's history but luckily I have a unique, and appropriately creepy, connection to it from which to begin; in the 1970s my father worked for Middlesborough Parks Department where he was once tasked with clearing gravestones from an area designated to become a park. A lost graveyard is a good place to start with any narative, but the research gods were clearing smiling on me because a little digging revealed Ayresome Gardens nee Cemetary is a gift from a narative point of view.
Project Documentation
Reseach & Essays
Ethics, Cultural Appropriation, Co-opting lives and histories, and representing mental illness
Aboriginal History, Mythology, and the role of Captain Cook
Victorian Middlesbrough, Cheif Inspector Saggerson, and the Asylum system in late Victorian York
Planning
Location Options
Story Structure
"Exhibition" Contents
"Exhibition" Design