‘Today my kids surprised me by suggesting we (take a) walk..but only so they could take over a Pokemon gym. Initially, I thought that location based gaming would be such a radical and refreshing re-imagining of space. But it just seems it reduces every spatial interaction to a bland monoculture of itself. There has to be something better than this, something where the perception of the exquisite organic complexity of the real meets the creativity of the players imagination in an endless remediated interpretation of what space is.’                                                         

Mark Wright, retrieved FB, Aug 2016

In the summer of this year, my youngest daughter left primary school and I wanted to make a final piece of work documenting this last class (I’d worked with this group on many occasions over the years, mainly looking at the impact that the computer and digital culture had on their lives).

That summer, location based gaming had exploded onto the scene and it seemed that much of this group’s time outside school was spent chasing Pokémon around the streets of the city. Using GPS and their camera functions, they roamed the city inhabiting two worlds at the same time – one geographic and one imaginary. In this set of portraits, I wanted to capture that dual existence, where space has been re-imagined by the appearance of location-based gaming – and continue to look for what Wright described as ‘something where the perception of the exquisite organic complexity of the real meets the creativity of the players imagination’.

W.McM