Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures
Abstract
The field of locative media offers opportunities to excavate and access rich historic events in immersive storytelling, to create experiential geospatial experiences that delve into past, present. and speculations of possible futures. This paper will discuss the role locative media plays in how we can engage in cultural histories from this spatiotemporal perspective through the examination of the augmented reality app, Ambedo, currently under development as part of a broader interdisciplinary research project entitled, Configuring Kommos: Narrative, Event, Place and Memory. In September of 1943, during World War II, approximately 5,200 Italian soldiers were massacred on the Greek island of Kefalonia by German troops. This massacre is credited as one of the largest ever prisoner-of-war massacres, in recent history (Lamb, 1996) and left an indelible mark on the island of Kefalonia. With little to no in-depth documentation of this event, it is at risk of erasure. Ambedo relies on geo-referencing to layer oral stories from its community of survivors and descendants upon specific locations dotted across unmarked terrain –an olive grove, a dried-up well covered with brush, a church built into a cave —most appear seemingly banal, but in actuality, are infused with complex and meaningful history. This paper will explore how we can interact with a physical space through an integration of its intangible past into its evolving present. This paper aims to study the potential this mode of representation brings to how media makers visualize and approach a landscape and its people through site-specific, context-aware, participatory technology.
Sadia Mir has an active interest in co-creation with and within communities grounded in equity and social justice with the use of documentary practices from creative nonfiction writing to immersive storytelling. This interdisciplinary research engages with cultural methods of production, and also investigates how we present and construct cultural and community narratives. In her own creative work, she often explores how we make and map meaning through the stories we tell and the temporal and physical spaces we inhabit. Sadia Mir is currently an Associate Professor of English at VCUarts Qatar.
Dr. Diane Derr’s practice-based research is framed within the areas of narratology, computational technologies, and critical design. Within this framework, she has two primary areas of inquiry: the construction of intertextual narratives across systems of communication, and the phenomenology of interaction enabled by computational technologies. She has exhibited and lectured internationally at venues including Design Days Dubai, Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Shanghai Institute of Visual Arts, the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, and the University of the Aegean. Dr. Derr is currently the Associate Dean of Research and Development at VCUarts Qatar in Doha, Qatar.