Mixed Realities: Augmentation of Places through Screen Tourism

Screened and fictional narratives influence the more general reception and understanding of the actual places. There are thin layers of meaning mixing fictional, factual, historical, mythological stories and imageries augmenting the actual places. Sometimes these fictional narratives conflict, replace or challenge the actual history or the material space. For example, in Northern Ireland, where Game of Thrones is mixing the realm of the entertaining fantasy narrative with the country’s border conflicts as well as the delicate ongoing Brexit negotiations. The places and landscapes are all marked by these different stories: Game of Thrones, Brexit, and the political history of Northern Ireland as a contested place (Joyce Reference Joyce, Barber, Hansson and McQuaid2019). This mixed layer of fictional and conflicted political condition is also the case for Dubrovnik, another globally recognizable Game of Thrones film location, with its own war history that recedes into the background when we follow Cersei Lannister (Lena Headey) on her walk of shame in Dubrovnik’s amazing medieval old city scenario.

In a seminal article conceptualizing the circuit of tourism, Irena Ateljevic (Reference Ateljevic2000) addresses the ‘cultural turn’ in human geography, which attempts to transgress and reconcile dichotomous notions of production (economy) and consumption (culture). Drawing on critical theorists in human geography and cultural studies (Urry Reference Urry1990; Urry & Larsen Reference Urry and Larsen2011; Lefebvre Reference Lefebvre1991; Harvey Reference Harvey and Bird1993; Thrift Reference Thrift1995; Hall Reference Hall1997), she advocates that tourism production and consumption systems are interconnected through reproduction, and their dialectics can be studied simultaneously through John Gold’s (Reference Gold, Gold and Ward1994) notion of negotiation. Negotiation refers to sense-making processes along which promotional expressions and individual experiences become attuned to a wider ideological framework. Seen through this conceptual lens, tourism is a nexus of production-consumption place-making circuits, where producers and consumers ‘feed off’ each other in endless cycles of place creation, imagination, perception and experiences (Ateljevic Reference Ateljevic2000, 372).

Ateljevic’s idea of this circuit of tourism acknowledges the simultaneous presence of Lefebvre’s threefold spatial dimensions, connecting representations of space (in advertising, fiction and mass media); material space (the actual and experienced); and symbolic-imagined spaces of representations (in the individual’s imagination, in part based on media representations). In other words, tourism is a negotiated reproduction of space, and this notion enables researchers to address contested and multilayered place identities, cultural translations of global consumer tastes and lifestyle values or material, spatial and cultural transformations. The popular cultural narrative, the technical portrayal or the story behind the film provides a place with an additional narrative layer. For instance, the recent wave of Nordic Noir (crime novels adapted for television and film) envelops the Scandinavian countryside with a gloomy, foggy and scary atmosphere; a scenographic template for crime scenes. The mixing of both fictitious and authentic foundations leads to new regional narratives and identities, allowing for innovative new experience offerings and thematic niche products such as ‘murder walks’ or vampire experiences (Lexhagen et al. Reference Lexhagen, Larson and Lundberg2013). The novelty of these kinds of place-making processes lies in that the popular cultural tourism experiences are often grounded in fictional narratives, which do not (necessarily) originate from local image resources and hence no authenticity claims can be made. For instance, Bollywood dance cruises and Indian buffet restaurants have nothing to do with Swiss cultural history or culinary traditions; still they have become an integral part of the Central Switzerland ‘experiencescape’ (Gyimóthy Reference Gyimóthy2018).

Affordances, Potentials and Challenges of Smart Crime Tourism; the DETECt Aarhus App: Idea and Concept

In the light of the potential of popular crime dramas to attract tourists to European locations and the new technological possibilities of screen tourism that come with the ubiquity of smartphones and mobile data, the DETECt project includes the task of creating and managing ‘a web mobile app for the comprehension of European translocality and transidentity’ (DETECt 2018). Because of the international popularity of Nordic crime drama, Denmark’s second biggest city has been chosen as the site for developing a smartphone-based screen tourism app. The ‘DETECt Aarhus’ mobile web app was created between May 2019 and March 2020 in a collaboration between media scholars from Aarhus University, the tourism office VisitAarhus, and the Copenhagen-based software company MOTES, which developed a platform and content management system that facilitates locative smartphone-guided city tours. The task of creating a screen tourism app provided a unique opportunity to combine practice and research in such a way that new forms of insight into the potential and limits of screen tourism apps could be generated. In the following, we elaborate on the functionalities of the DETECt Aarhus app, and present the findings from the testing of the pilot version with Danish and international students,Footnote ³ which has allowed us to nuance our understanding of the challenges and potentials of smartphone-based screen tourism.

The location Aarhus, in itself, brought potential as well as challenges to the project. Aarhus gained international visibility as European Capital of Culture in 2017 but had already been a growing tourism destination before this (Degn et al. Reference Degn, Hansen, Thomsen, Nordentoft, Xie and Hansen2018, 100–101).Footnote ⁴ The large student population of over 40,000 Danish and 4000 international students makes Aarhus an attractive terrain for intertwining practice and research, since we were able to involve Danish and international students in testing the app. On the one hand, Aarhus is a city pre-destined for screen tourism. The most popular Aarhus-based production is the crime series Dicte, which has already been the subject of screen tourism activities by VisitAarhus and Filmby (Filmcity) Aarhus. Dicte has been estimated to have generated for the city a brand value of €12 million with its last season (Edmund Consulting 2016). Even though the series concluded in 2016, Dicte is still available on streaming in several countries. Moreover, Aarhus has a rich heritage of silent film, an active literary scene, and, through the studios and creative hub in Filmby Aarhus, the city has become an attractive space for filming new productions, too. On the other hand, Aarhus is a tricky case for screen tourism. In contrast to Copenhagen, Aarhus does not have the global recognition of a European capital. The reach of its most famous production, Dicte, is also not comparable with the sustained international popularity of Wallander or the Copenhagen/Malmö-based Nordic Noir series The Bridge.Footnote ⁵ Finally, Aarhus is not always recognizable as the setting of a particular movie that has been shot there;Footnote ⁶ a fate it shares with major European production hubs such as Budapest. This status makes Aarhus an interesting terrain for exploring how screen tourism can work in locations where the films or series will not be the main pull factor for tourists, because they do not know what has been produced in the location and therefore do not know that they can be screen tourists in the city.

Acknowledging Aarhus’ mixed visitor profile, the DETECt Aarhus app is targeted at non-Danish tourists on daytrips or holidays, cruise ship passengers on excursion, business visitors with a few hours to kill, and international students who have just relocated. The app is accessible by opening the website www.detectaarhus.eu in the smartphone browser, which makes it easily usable across operating systems without previous installation. To reflect the DETECt project’s focus on literature, film and TV, but also the diversity of Aarhus’ (crime) culture, the app offers a choice of three differently themed tours: Aarhus on Screen, focusing on recent film and TV productions, Literary Aarhus, which introduces contemporary writers who have been translated, and When Aarhus was Hollywood, which celebrates the vibrant silent film production in the city before the First World War. Each tour takes about one hour on foot and features between five and eight audio-visual stories connected to specific locations in the city plus tips for food and drink. Each story contains a combination of audio (e.g. interviews with authors and experts), video (e.g. trailers or behind the scenes videos), images (e.g. stills from silent films) and texts (e.g. historical information about the location). The test version developed between May and October 2019 included eight stories that were the basis for the three tours that have been extended after the test phase (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Screenshots from the DETECt Aarhus pilot version. © DETECT project.

All of the audio-visual stories add specific layers of meaning to the material space users are in. Therefore, tourists have to be in Aarhus and navigate to specific locations to experience the stories. Because it can only be used on location, the DETECt app belongs to the category of locative media. According to Rowan Wilken and Gerard Goggin (Reference Wilken and Goggin2015, 3) locative media are ‘broadly defined as media of communication that are functionally bound to a location’. The app’s geolocation functions help users navigate to the locations on foot, bike or public transport. The interactive feature of ‘unlocking’ the stories on location adds the feeling of a paper chase. Users are invited to share their comments and experiences and ‘love’ their favourite locations, whereby they create an archive of the content they unlocked.

Testing the Affordances of Smartphone-based Screen Tourism

The first step in the research process was mapping the terrain of screen tourism in the Nordic region, to identify what sorts of experiences are offered to tourists, how they use them and to assess which qualitative changes the use of smartphones brings to screen tourism. In digital media research, these offers, uses and qualities are characterized as ‘affordances’. The term designates what sorts of practices a technology allows for, both from the perspective of its technological properties, but also through the way people use it, which is not necessarily aligned with the intended use (Hopkins Reference Hopkins, Friese, Rebane, Nolden and Schreiter2016, 1–3). To determine the affordances of screen tourism offers in the Nordic region, we used the method of walkthroughs (Light et al. Reference Light, Burgess and Duguay2018) of existing (screen) tourism apps and offers. Based on these walkthroughs and desk research, we developed a typology of screen tourism experiences that classifies them according to their form of mediation (personal, locative and virtual), the specificity of their reference to fictional places as well as the level of commitment they ask from their users. This research has been documented in Waade and Bengesser (Reference Waade and Bengesser2020).

The following section focuses on how we have developed our understanding of the affordances of smart tourism during the testing phase of the DETECt Aarhus app between September and November 2019. We have determined three qualitative changes that the use of smartphones and location-based services have brought to screen tourism: (a) a convergence of activities; (b) a trend towards customized, flexible experiences; and (c) an easier crossing of thresholds between locations as tourism destinations, sites of production and fictional places. At the same time, we have identified three aspects of screen tourism that remain unchanged or challenged by the use of smartphone technology, namely (a) the tension between commitment and the experience of co-creation through interactivity, (b) the uniqueness of embodied experiences, as well as (c) the importance of the users’ personal emotional connection to the media text.

Technological Augmentation of Screen Tourism Experiences

The smartphone is a site of media convergence as it combines distinct services and practices. The combination of navigation, playing audio-visual media and interactive features in the DETECt app is a case in point. Its offer of different functions and a choice between different modes of information was in line with our test-users’ expectations.

Our observation of the international student group testing the app in September 2019 showed that, in general, users prioritized the audio-visual information, which has made us realize that the choice between different media and functions is a key quality of smartphone-mediated tourism. Users’ preference for audio-visual content, subsequently, not only affected our choices of which types of media to present on the app, but also led to the conclusion that practical information, such as where to navigate next, must be offered to users through several media. Moreover, the combination of functions that converge on a screen tourism app is supposed to bring added value to the user. For the foreign students, this added value became clearer than for the Danes. Discovering the city was a main motivation for the foreign users and therefore they expected and enjoyed being led to new places and being offered different layers of new information about these places.

This statement exemplifies that for foreign visitors not only a convergence of technical functions, but also a convergence of screen tourism and traditional site tourism is important. While the app enabled the foreigners to discover something new, the Danish students said that they did not know what to do with the information they found in the stories. For the Danish students, the app’s combination of functions did not have the same added value, because they already knew their way around town, had (some) information about Aarhus’ sites and were not particularly excited about the films and series that had been shot there. In fact, the mention of Dicte made them doubt whether the app would be interesting.Footnote ⁷

The differences in expectations between the groups surveyed and users’ appreciation of the choice between different media are connected to another affordance of smartphone-based tours: customization and personalization of experiences. In contrast to pre-booked guided tours, people taking smartphone-guided tours do not have to commit to a fixed time and place to start the tour and are also free to digress from the designated route. Yet, the expectation of customization also exceeded logistical flexibility:

The affordance of personalization of information and experiences is at the heart of many social media and travel apps. Services such as Foursquare achieve this customization through vast amounts of user data, a practice that was not feasible for a small-scale pilot project such as DETECt Aarhus. Instead, the app offers personalization through choice between different media, topics, protagonists and types of stories. Still, we found that users were also ready to be surprised by what the app offered to them.

For this Danish student who recently moved to Aarhus after commuting for a while, finding out about Aarhus as a location for crime novels, films and series was surprising and ‘more interesting tha[n] something that happened 200–300 years ago’. This quote not only reiterates that the Danish testers had fundamentally different expectations compared with foreign visitors, it also shows that surprising users with content they did not anticipate can yield engaging results. Hence, the curation of content for smartphone-guided tours should not only consider data-based knowledge or preconceptions about different target groups’ varying interests, but also allow for elements of surprise that lead users to places or information they did not previously know or considered to be interesting to them.

An important advantage of technology use in screen tourism experiences is the possibility to show more than the tourist can see with the naked eye, which can help crossing thresholds between the representations of space in fiction and the material space of the city. The use of audio-visual media as part of a tour can immediately evoke the mood of the crime story and thereby ease users’ suspension of disbelief as they see the original and the transformed fictional location side by side. This effect comes into play when users of the DETECt app watch trailers of films set in the city or stills from the silent film era, which enable crossing the threshold into (film) history. Moreover, watching the behind-the-scenes videos in the app helps users to experience Aarhus as a site of cultural production. In fact, we would have liked to use more material from media productions and behind-the-scenes footage, but we faced problems of copyright and licensing restrictions that limited the range and amount of original content and behind-the-scenes material that we can show. Because of these restrictions faced by third parties making a tourism app after the production of a film or TV series has ended, a joint or parallel production of screen tourism material in conjunction with ongoing filming projects is advantageous. Such an integrated approach has, for example, been taken in the case of La Porta Rossa tourism in Trieste (Coviello et al. Reference Coviello, Re and Barra2020, 69–70) and appears advantageous.

During the testing, it became clear that a successful crossing of thresholds through audio-visual material depends on the connection between the content and the location. This connection was not always visible for the testers of the DETECt Aarhus app. The app, for example, features the trailer for the film Lev Stærkt, which is a thriller about a deadly accident occurring during an illegal street race in Aarhus. In the pilot version, users could watch the trailer whilst standing on a bridge over Fiskergade, the street in which one of the races was filmed. The trailer contains a section of this race in which the street can be recognized, but this connection was missed by some users, either because they stood in the wrong place when watching the trailer or because the scene in the trailer is too short to be memorable. One exchange student pointed out: ‘I could have watched it at home. I could have googled movies made in Aarhus and then I could have watched the trailer’ (7 November 2019). At the same time, a Spanish student, who did see the connection, found this to be the most interesting stop: ‘I would not have looked at it, and I mean, it’s just a street, and now I can look at it a second time, I mean, it’s just a street, but now I can look at it and say “it’s great”’ (Spanish student II, 8 November 2019). A similar effect was achieved by the behind-the-scenes interviews and footage that helped users to switch their perception of certain places in the city.

So, not only seeing material from films and TV series, but also getting an insight ‘behind the scenes’ into the work of local creatives helped users gain a different perspective on the locations. This experience challenged the students’ preconceptions about the city and its culture. This experience also shows how locative screen tourism apps can enable encounters with locations as a material space, as a representation of space in fictional narratives and as sites for cultural production. To this mix, all users bring their personal cultural backgrounds and preconceptions about Aarhus which enter into the process of negotiation. When using the DETECt Aarhus app on location, all these facets converge in the moment of use by an individual who has customized the experience based on her or his own interests and needs. For foreign visitors, this combination enables a multilayered transnational cultural encounter.

Challenges of Technology Use and Non-technological Affordances

Neuhofer et al. (Reference Neuhofer, Buhalis and Ladkin2014, 347) have argued that successful technology-enhanced tourism experiences ‘incorporate high levels of technology and co-creation’. Co-creation is understood here as a form of participation facilitated by interactive features. A co-created experience is not merely ‘staged’ by a stakeholder in the tourism industry; it emerges through the visitor’s (technologically mediated) interaction with them. Based on our research, we seek to question the assumption that high levels of technology use and co-creation are preconditions for successful smart tourism. Our participatory observations during the research phase preceding the launch of the pilot version highlighted that co-creation through interactive apps can indeed be meaningful for users, but there is also a trade-off between co-creation and commitment that can limit the flexibility offered by smart tourism (Waade and Bengesser Reference Waade and Bengesser2020, 14). During the testing, another aspect of interactivity emerged, namely its interplay with the other affordances. The Danish users, indeed, liked the interactive feature of unlocking:

At the same time, this group of Danish students felt that what they actually found behind the locks was anticlimactic and ‘boring’, because they already knew the sites and were not excited about the series and films in the app. Therefore, the interactive features created a sense of leading nowhere for them. In contrast to this, the foreign visitors still had something to discover and were not so critical of the films and series, because they had no preconceptions about them. These different experiences highlight that interactivity alone cannot create a meaningful experience. Instead, the value of interactivity depends on its interplay with other affordances that are not necessarily bound to technology use.

In fact, one major affordance of screen tourism that has nothing to do with technology use is the embodied experiences on location. Of course, when films and series have been shot in locations that are not easily accessible to viewers, such as the locations of South Korean drama series, offering virtual ‘screen screen tourism’ (Schulze Reference Schulze2017) can be a way to substitute for travel. Still, embodied experiences on location are important, for example tasting the Wallander cake in Fridolfs Konditori (Saumon et al. Reference Saumon, Guyot and Migozzi2015), sitting in the detective’s chair (Reijnders Reference Reijnders2010, 45) or wielding an axe in front of Northern Ireland’s stunning scenery. To allow for such embodied experiences as well as for their playful discovery alongside discovering the city, the content in the DETECt Aarhus app can only be ‘unlocked’ and accessed when a user is at a specific location in the city. Being on location created a more meaningful experience of the stories told in the app, as is illustrated by this US-American student:

By taking users to the harbour area, for example, the DETECt app invites them to hear the noises and smell the sea and the city’s busy industry. This embodied experience can indeed be very memorable: in a group interview, a Danish and Spanish (II) student joked that they found this last stop of the tour creepy and ‘were sure that the grand finale was that we were going to get murdered’ there (8 November 2019). The same sentiment could not have been invoked by virtual travels.

The existing research on screen tourists’ experiences, furthermore, highlights that it is ultimately their personal and emotional connection with the screen narrative that gives meaning to their screen tourism experience. Stijn Reijnders’ (Reference Reijnders2010) and Nicky van Es and Reijnders’ (Reference van Es and Reijnders2018) interviews with participants of detective tours in Inspector Morse’s Oxford or Wallander’s Ystad indicate that the imagination of stepping into the story and feeling closer to beloved characters is a central affordance of visiting the film locations. In contrast to this, Tina Askanius (Reference Askanius2017) portrays a fan of The Bridge, who did not join a dedicated tour of Malmö and Copenhagen to follow fictional heroes Saga Norén and Martin Rohde, but chose to cross the Øresund Bridge on his own to get into contact with locals and experience the region’s transnationality. This contrast underlines that what makes a screen tourism experience meaningful is highly individual.

Creating an emotional connection to the stories it presents has proven the biggest challenge to the DETECt Aarhus app, both as a product and a site of research. Because Aarhus, in contrast to Copenhagen or Ystad, cannot bank on the media texts to offer a personal connection that attracts and engages visitors, and because different types of content appeal to different users, the DETECt Aarhus app uses several strategies to create emotional connections. In general, the app explores aspects of the genre of Nordic Noir, into which fit most of the globally popular crime series from Scandinavia. However, hardly any of the users interviewed during the testing phase knew of Nordic Noir, let alone the books, films and series the app features. Hence, the challenge was to create a reverse pull. The trailers shown in the app aim to draw viewers into the fictional worlds they do not yet know and indeed we saw that the international users actually became interested in the films, series and books through the app. The behind-the-scenes videos as well as the stories about silent film production aim to surprise the users, since Aarhus’ importance for silent film history is not even known to many locals. The silent film tour thus appeals to the curiosity of users inviting them to see the spaces they are standing in with different eyes, aided by the images from Aarhus in the silent film era. Lastly, the conversations with Aarhus-based authors facilitate a way of engaging with the local culture by meeting the creatives and learning about their connection to the city. In the Women’s Café, users can listen to an interview with author Elsebeth Egholm. One US-American student was particularly taken by the audio interviews with her; not least because the student himself has ambitions to work in the creative industries.

Similarly, the videos with location scout Ulla Malmos were appealing to the users, because they gave an insight into the process of filming. The video in which Ulla explains how they filmed a stunt scene in the apartment close to the train station for the film Undtagelsen (The Exception) worked well with the users, because it gave insight into the production process. At the same time, Ulla also presented users with a local’s perspective. A Spanish student (I, 8 November 2019) remarked that these videos made her feel connected, because Aarhus is Ulla’s city.

Conclusion: Smart Crime Tourism – a New Means for Multilayered Cultural Encounters

The development process of the DETECt Aarhus App as well as the testing have shown that not all affordances of smartphone-based screen tourism are necessarily connected to the technological possibilities offered by an app. While elements of convergence, customization and an easier crossing of thresholds between material space and its representations in fiction are enabled or at least aided by smartphone technology, technological interactivity is only meaningful if a screen tourism app can also offer meaningful non-technological affordances, such as a personal connection to the stories and places and embodied experiences. The testing with Danish and international student groups has highlighted the differences in their expectations and experiences, which suggests that it is difficult to appeal to native and foreign screen tourists with one and the same offer.

Because Aarhus is a destination that is not widely known as a destination for screen tourism, our research has shown that visitors can nonetheless become screen tourists in the city and have a rewarding experience through stories told about the city as a site for production and audio-visual culture. In fact, we were surprised that many users expressed interest in seeing more after learning about these crime stories in the app.

This finding challenges the usual understanding of screen tourism as an activity that is ‘induced’ by having watched a particular film (Beeton Reference Beeton2005). The students’ answers quoted above indicate that there is also the potential for the consumption of audio-visual and literary culture to be induced by the visit of particular filming locations or settings of (crime) narratives. So, although usually directed at fans of films, series or authors, screen tourism offers also have the potential to be interesting for non-fans, who do not even know that they could be screen tourists in the city.

The crime genre is particularly suited for facilitating encounters with different aspects of local culture. First, it is popular across many different markets and cultures – as the international success of Nordic Noir and connected tourism demonstrates. Second, locations play important and multiple roles in crime dramas as the space investigators traverse in their effort to solve a crime, as representations of societies, and as the source of tone and atmosphere. Since screen tourism apps allow for including sounds, videos, and images from the screen productions, they can facilitate this process of encountering different layers of meaning because they can offer teasers of literary, film and TV productions. Still, discovering new films or series to watch and broadening the appreciation of the local culture through a smart tourism app such as DETECt Aarhus, goes beyond the mediated cultural encounters offered by locations in films or TV series described by Bondebjerg et al. (Reference Bondebjerg, Redvall, Helles, Lai, Søndergaard and Astrupgaard2017). The locative nature of the app means that the encounter with the location’s representation in the fictional world of the crime narratives happens at the same time as users discover the material space. Additionally, they can discover the space as a site of cultural production through behind the scenes videos or look into the past via archive material. Hence, different aspects of local culture can be discovered simultaneously. The connections but also tensions between these facets and the users’ choices and embodied experiences on location have the potential to contribute to the users’ comprehension of Europe as a transcultural space, because it lets them experience the negotiation between the different ways in which we encounter and understand locations of culture as tourists, locals, consumers of fictional stories, and producers of media in Europe.