Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

In this paper, I aim to unpack the politics of representing pasts in the socio-political practices of making 3D models by performing a critical media analysis on the project “Reconstructing the Neighborhood” (RtN). RtN is an interactive article made by the New York Times news agency. It’s purpose is to retell the cataclysmic event of the “Tulsa Race Massacre” happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma by the growing hatred towards Black communities in 1921. While RtN started as a virtual reconstruction project – of making 3D representation of the buildings and other communal structures that was destroyed on the street of Greenwood Avenue – it later transformed into a space for cultural imagination by which the lack of historical evidences about the neighbourhood, manifests racial discrimination against the repressed history of Black communities and offers a decolonial and speculative view towards understanding of pasts as an observer-dependent spatio-temporal entity (Burdick). This paper argues that, examples like RtN create new design paradigms to help re-imagining of pasts by their experimental narrative, aesthetic, and technical qualities. Additionally, this paper uses the critical theory of “infra-ordinary” as a method to understand the significance of seeing everyday things “whose seeming insignificance requires excessive attention” by their ideologically and culturally imposed racial codes (Campt, 8). As a final argument, this paper emphasizes the importance of making practices that uses experimental methods to challenge and criticize set conventions of the grand cultural narrative on how the past is captured, limited, imposed, and politicized by the situatedness of making and representing.