Walking the Resonances: AI, Sound, and Storytelling in Hybrid Heritage Games

As part of the EU-funded CAPHE project (Communities and Artistic Participation in Hybrid Environments), Dorota Hrycak-Krzyżanowska investigates how AI-enhanced hybrid games can foster synesthetic, transcultural encounters in heritage spaces. Her practice draws on McLuhan’s concept of synaesthesia as a bridge between the senses, combining architecture, soundscapes, narrative, and embodied movement to design immersive experiences. Her first project in this field was Odyssey: Dionysos and Ariadne, a hybrid game created for the island of Naxos using the Actionbound platform. The game invited participants to traverse myth and landscape, engaging with the island’s architecture and natural environment through layered storytelling and sound. Building on this experience, she developed Walking on Water: Secrets of London’s Hidden Rivers and Secrets of Liguria: In the Footsteps of Poets and Painters, each expanding the practice into new cultural and geographical contexts. In these projects, AI acts as a creative partner, generating narrative elements, visual textures, and soundscapes that enrich the sensory and emotional dimensions of the experience. Participants are invited to explore cultural memory through multisensory, participatory journeys that blur the boundaries between physical and digital presence. The presentation reflects on the design strategies, creative outcomes, and participant responses to these hybrid games. Hrycak-Krzyżanowska also considers how such approaches might inform future practices of immersive heritage storytelling, particularly within resonant architectural spaces such as the Bazeos Tower. Through AI-enhanced hybrid games, stones, sounds, and stories are reimagined as voices that speak across time and culture.