Alex BUTTERWORTH
(University of Sussex, Brighton, UK)
Keywords: Immersion, assemblage, narrative, chronotopic, fictionality
Abstract:
Geo-locative heritage projects already offer examples of genres that variously combine informational responsibility and imaginative evocation, frequently employing a hauntological device of ‘ghost presences’ to elide the two in a narrative structure that is more or less compelling. Such work can effectively sensitise users to the deep histories of the places they encounter and the infrastructures they traverse; to change and persistence in the built environment, and the social, cultural and political significance of its continuities and discontinuities. In seeking to situate historical experience within those spaces, however, the effect can be uneasily stranded between the didactic and the dramatic: two modes of authored performance, underwritten by hierarchical information that may be accessed as reassuring provenance. The paper proposes a more dynamic model for locative history and heritage, grounded in ideas of ‘storyworld’ simulation, that engages the user in exploring networks of historical actors (animate and inanimate) and the ‘thick mapping’ of their relationships, in order to constitute assemblages of spatially relevant data that contextualise the historical moment and, in sequence, generate a narrative experience. The paper will refer to the prototype for a project that experiments with this approach to bring together historical urban space and museum collections, and speculative designs for two projects that address two very different pre-modern urban sites: one of ruination and one of incessant over-writing.
Relevance for the conference: With a specific focus on the challenges of opportunities of generating and communicating historiographical insight through the design of locative media experiences, the paper will also address thematic issues of wider salience, touching on key questions from other sessions, including cartography and narrative, immersive experiences of the past, the management and representation of non-chronological time, and the inter-actor as negotiator of controversies.
Relevance for the session: The paper will elaborate a conceptual framework for aligning the affordances of urban space with dynamic geo-locative assemblages of data that contextualise and complicate an engagement with its historical significance.
Innovation: Through a series of case studies of prototyped and speculative projects, the paper proposes the situated user of the locative media object as the explorer of thick-mapped networks of diverse historical actors, and generator of interpretive meaning, rather then the browser of rigid hierarchies of information.
References:
• Flintham, M (2018) BatterCTrax: Observations of Sensory Dissonance, ‘Doubling’ and other Residual Effects of Geolocative Media, Media Theory, 2/1
• Nevola FJD, Rosenthal D (2016). ‘Locating experience in the Renaissance city using mobile app technologies: the ‘Hidden Florence’ project. In Terpstra N (Ed) Mapping Space, Sense, and Movement in Florence:. Historical GIS and the Early Modern City, Routledge