Alum Shoshanah Tarkow Creates Augmented Reality Scavenger Hunt for Fall Arts Festival

Saturday, Sep 28, 2019

students

Students using the app.

Shoshanah Tarkow, M.A. '17 Alum, is combining her love of poetry, immersive theater and technology to bring Walt Whitman’s famous poetry to life at this year’s Fall Arts Festival on Wednesday, October 2.

After downloading WallaMe onto their mobile device, players will search on campus for selections of poems from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. At each “discoverable wall,” as Tarkow describes them words will leap off the screen and into the real world. The goal of the scavenger hunt is to gather lines and stanzas and eventually complete entire poems.

While at NYU, Tarkow discovered a passion for new media in theater and museums, exploring new methods of creating art and educational experiences.

The Fall Arts Festival won’t be the first time Tarkow brings her creativity and immersive theater chops to Adelphi. This past spring, she directed the first immersive production staged at the Adelphi University Performing Arts Center, Words Like Fresh Skin, written by fellow alumna Megan Lohne ’04. The pair have recently founded a theater company, Like Fresh Skin, which will utilize emerging technologies to create text-based, immersive theatrical experiences that champion untold feminist stories.

After the festival, Tarkow hopes to develop OnWords into a brand-new, free, augmented reality app for any educational or cultural institution to utilize.

To read more about the festival and hear more from Adelphi administrators about Tarkow's work read the full version of this story here on the Adelphi website.