Summer of Darkness

Summer 2016
iOS App
Collaboration with Anindita Basu Sempere

Conceived to celebrate the 200th anniversary of The Year Without Summer, this iPhone/iPad app tells the story of the famous summer Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and their companions spent in Switzerland — the summer the world was supposed to end.

Beginning in May 2016, the story of The Year Without Summer will unfold as a series of  notifications appearing on your iPhone or iPad. Notifications will arrive in “real” time concurrent to the dates and times the events actually took place in 1816, from Claire Claremont’s romantic pursuit of Lord Byron to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s writing of Mont Blanc to the famous night when Mary Shelley had a vision of Frankenstein’s monster in response to a ghost story writing challenge issued by Lord Byron.

Each notification will unlock new content. The audience will follow the journeys of the group across a map of the region, encounter the daily weather from 1816, and read original source material: the journals, letters, and literary works of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and Dr. John William Polidori. In this way the audience can experience the travels of Lord Byron and his entourage as if they were contemporaries.

Once the summer is over, you can continue to explore the fully unlocked content at your own pace or choose to reset the story and start over.