Follow Me is Lee and Symon’s first collaboration, but they are both interested in challenging the traditional relationship between audiences and art. Symons has most recently has worked with Metanoia, the Malthouse, and Apocalypse Theatre Company. She has a particular interest in interactive storytelling and creating more immersive experiences for audiences. Symons wants to create opportunities for audience members to participate in theatre and storytelling, going beyond traditional mediums where the audience “just sits there and we tell them the art”.

Lee is an independent game designer who has created both digital and board games. These include an iPhone app ‘Stickits’, which was included in The New Yorker’s list of Most Elegant iPhone Games of 2013, and ‘Exodus’, a board game similar to Risk, where players try to maintain political power and safeguard their resources in the Maldives, all while trying to adapt their strategy to the new challenges presented by climate change. Lee is also passionate about sharing ideas and collaboration, facilitating “Freeplay”, the Australian independent games festival; All Day Breakfast, a creative community hub in Melbourne; and Interference Space, an experimental art gallery in Prahran. Lee and Symons also have another project in the works, called The Briefcase.

Follow Me is a story installation that guides the participants around Melbourne and is intended to reveal a new perspective of the city that is not immediately apparent. There are four journeys for participants to follow, each tracing a day in the life of a character in Melbourne.

Melbourne is an ideal setting for a project such as this. There are as many ways to experience this city as there are visitors, with many rich and varied perspectives which encompass the city’s intriguing history, a dynamic present, and the private significance of certain cafes and tram stops and alleys. Follow Me is an opportunity to uncover a personal history of public spaces.

Follow Me is informed by the concept of psychogeography, a term defined in 1955 by Guy Deboard, a member of Situationalist International, a politico-artistic organisation of social revolutionaries and members of the avant-garde. In essence, psychogeography is the act of experiencing an urban environment in a playful, distractible fashion, open to new perspectives and experiences; one seldom adopted in our hectic day-to-day lives. As Lee says, “if you get completely lost and wander around the city all afternoon discovering new parts of Melbourne, and never make it to the end of the story, that’s fine. That’s good, actually. That’s what we want.”

The journey begins at the Queen Victoria Market/Elizabeth St tram stop (Stop #7), on the West/Citybound platform. Follow Me will run from 11 August until 4 October. Each narrative will take about fifteen minutes to follow, longer if you become distracted by the wealth of new discoveries the different perspective affords.

This year, McGrath is one of 18 artists selected to partake in the second iteration of the Melbourne Fringe Festival’s public art program, Uncommon Places. But while his airport mural invites the public to observe, his latest creation is about encouraging audiences to interact with and ultimately destroy his work.  It’s a piece rooted in the nebulous relationship between art and sports – specifically the AFL practice of players bursting through a fabric banner before the commencement of a match.

“I’ve always found it very interesting and bizarre, the idea of making a banner for your team and then they destroy it with this big brute force before the match,” McGrath says of the work. “But there also are similarities between that and art history with the Japanese avant-garde and Klein with The Void. I thought I could have a bit of fun and see where it went.”

But McGrath won’t be emblazoning his work with football sponsors. Instead, he intends the pieces to be a playful jab at the asinine aphorisms we see on the internet, in chain letters and in Facebook and Twitter memes. “It’s about you, but it’s really about me, like humblebragging sort of stuff,” he says. “These slogans would appear on the banners, and I just like the idea of intervening in the daily life of workers and people occupying the city during the week, be it Monday morning, Wednesday afternoon or Friday night, inviting them to come and partake in this art/sporting performance.”

The banners will appear at random, undisclosed locations throughout the city, with members of the public encouraged to burst through and destroy the work à la football players at the beginning of a match.

McGrath says the work emerged out of frustration with the lack of tangible outcomes in a public art piece he produced in Dunedin, New Zealand. In response to a proposed high-rise hotel development that drew mixed reactions from the public, McGrath suspended a giant yellow luftballon 96 metres in the air to demonstrate how the hotel would dominate Dunedin’s skyline.

“I was finding it difficult to gauge the success of the work when it was out in the public forum,” McGrath says. “There was no monetary way of gauging success through money or bums on seats; it was all through hearsay and bits of information that just kind of like trickled through after the actual intervention.”

For McGrath, the opportunity to witness the general public transform his Uncommon Places piece in a tangible and observable way is a welcome opportunity.

“Like all the performance and public art that I’ve done, whenever you invite the public to get involved, you never know what they’re going to do. So you can only plan to a point and then push it out and see what happens.”

McGrath’s Uncommon Places installations will be placed at randomly selected locations throughout the CBD during Fringe. The documentation of the performances will be featured at 123/129 Victoria Street, Melbourne, in the shop window of Market Sports at the Queen Victoria Market Food Court.

Originally a woodcarver, Duyker has since shifted his creative practice to explore the artistic potential of the guts of vintage computers, which is the focus of his most recent creations. Over the length of his career his body of work has traversed a range of mediums: his sculptures are made of cast concrete, ceramic and glass, and he’s also created kinetic sculpture and mosaics. Duyker’s contribution to the 2015 Uncommon Places, a site-specific installation series produced by Melbourne Fringe, is a mixed-media work entitled Combobulator, which includes the sorts of objects that Duyker cups in his hands.

A self-confessed hoarder, Duyker rescues these bits of tech history from the rubbish tip, people’s front lawns, and offices undergoing refurbishment. Duyker is a rare breed of sculptor who also holds a degree in electrical engineering, so it’s not surprising that he finds beauty in unlikely places, such as the contents of machines which are used every day but rarely, if ever, seen. Duyker’s background in engineering has informed Combobulator, which explores the relationship between those who design and sell novel technology and those who purchase it.

Combobulator is a fictitious product. How Combobulator works and what it does is expressed in the sort of mystical techno jargon intentionally unintelligible to the public. It is impossible to work out what Combobulator is used for but it succeeds in impressing viewers with its complexity, including its mysterious ‘dolphin brain technology’.

Duyker describes his relationship with people in the technology industry as love-hate: while he loves their work, he finds that, as people, they can appear disinterested in the world outside their field of expertise. At the same time, they’re tasked with creating and selling products to people who often don’t know a lot about what they’re buying. Combobulator demonstrates the great disparity in understanding between these groups. Certainly there’s a lot of trust involved as most people don’t understand and can’t understand the functionality of every piece of technology they use, and at the same time, there is potential for exploitation. This sculpture will strike a chord with anyone who has pretended to understand what a salesperson is talking about when they purchased a new laptop, camera or phone.

Combobulator can be found in window of the Errol St Salvation Army Op shop from the August 11 until October 4. It seems like a peculiar place to exhibit a sculpture, but as Duyker says, “I’m all about recycling”. And sometimes you can find treasures in an Op Shop.

“Well, it’s not pop,” Giles says of his work. Certainly not, though it’s difficult to define a genre that encapsulates the scope of his work. What is clear is that Giles’ music is often intimately linked to the setting in which it is appreciated: there is an intentional blurring of the distinction between the content of the piece and the ambient noise of the space. The use of ambient noise in music has become more accepted and appreciated since the controversial premiere of John Cages’ 4’33” in 1952, which consisted of four minutes and thirty three seconds of ambient noises in a concert hall. However, Giles’ work is intended to enhance the existing soundscape instead of merely making the audience aware of it. One such piece, Heard/Unheard: Flux, which was performed at the Portland Upwelling Festival in 2012, guided listeners through the Portland Foreshore, the composition evolving as the listener progressed through different areas.

Giles has a keen interest in the sciences, which is reflected in the way he sources and structures the sounds for his compositions. While some of his pieces are quite minimalist, such as the recent piano piece Movement Study #1, the majority of his work focuses on finding new ways to weave hard science into musical composition. His residency at the School of Chemistry demonstrates the breadth of Giles’ inspiration. In addition, Giles’ fascination with ‘microsound’ – sounds at the very cusp of human detection, of very short duration, very high or low frequency, or very low amplitude – betrays his fascination with the physics of sound.

This August through October, Giles’ work will be on show as part of Uncommon Places. Giles’ contribution is a suite of two electronic music pieces that are intended to be appreciated in the Auction Rooms café in North Melbourne. Each piece is inspired by different aspects of the setting: one piece is inspired by the chemical composition of a Kenyan single-origin coffee (Kihuyo), while the other samples the ambient sounds of the café itself. This suite of music is designed to be consumed alongside a pour-over coffee, and a link to access the audio will be listed beside the beverage on the menu. A pour-over is a method of coffee preparation that reveals the complex and subtle flavour of the beans, and is an appropriate pairing for Giles’ composition. Through this music, Giles hopes that the mundane act of coffee drinking, something that people do several times a day without ceremony, will become a more mindful experience. The Auction Rooms, a café renown for its dynamic approach to coffee, is definitely an appropriate setting for exploring new ways to appreciate this daily ritual.

Giles’ Bits and Pieces and Put Together to Create, as well as the Kihuyo pour-over piece can be acquired, consumed and meditated over at the Auction Rooms Café, 103-107 Errol Street, North Melbourne, from 11 August until 4 October.

It’s these sorts of contradictions, filtering through to women in public, that Roberts-Orr hopes to explore in her latest offering for the Melbourne Fringe Festival. Her sound installation, aptly titled How to Behave, will be accessible to participants via their smartphone as they move freely about Grattan Gardens in Prahran, beginning August 11. The piece is one of 18 location-specific installations by emerging artists in response to the theme of ‘instruction’, created for Melbourne Fringe Festival’s Uncommon Places.

“Whether someone’s actually saying ‘take off that short skirt, wear something more appropriate’, or whether you’re suddenly thinking it in your own mind, there’s an element of conditioning, of fear,” she explains.

Roberts-Orr has cut her teeth as an artist at a time when conversations about violence and women have been prominent in the public discourse. She recalls living as a student in a share house in the Brunswick area when ABC journalist Jill Meagher was raped and murdered in 2012, an experience which she drew on for her 2013 Fringe Festival play It’s Happening in the Space Between My Face and Yours. This new project will be a continuation on the same theme.

“Generally all of my work is concerned with feminism,” she explains. Her thinking around How to Behave was strongly influenced by the murder of Doncaster schoolgirl Masa Vukotic earlier this year.

Returning to the same intellectual project “a bit more developed and with a bit more experience”, Roberts-Orr hopes to cultivate a design that speaks to the audience experience.

Location-wise, the choice of Grattan Gardens, a narrow parkway, seeks to expose the conflicting expectations of women: as mothers and family members, signified by the playground and supermarkets at one end of the park, and as sexual commodities as the audience are funnelled closer to the Chapel Street shopping and nightlife precinct at the other end.

The audio design of the artwork is calculated, too, intended to heighten the participant’s senses. As Roberts-Orr explains, there’s an “awareness of space” that she’d like to tap into – that feeling of walking alone late at night, “where you have a heightened sense of sound”.

Roberts-Orr will relinquish control of the experience to the participant, allowing them to access SoundCloud clips on their smartphone while they move freely throughout the space.

“You can do things with sound art, like placing someone as the protagonist in the narrative, as opposed to just showing them something,” she says. “It’s quite literally like walking in someone’s shoes.”

The motivation behind Roberts-Orr’s return to the theme is to reinvigorate the discourse around women in public spaces. “There’s a lot of conversation about this in the media, particularly this year, in terms of violence against women, and it’s something that can be really hard to connect with in a way that’s meaningful. It can be really disempowering.”

“I want to give people tools and ways of looking and seeing and being in space that are positive,” she says.

How To Behave will run from 11 August until 4 October in Grattan Gardens, Prahran. For more information visit: http://uncommonplaces.melbournefringe.com.au/