RSSSpomenik
Spomenik is now part of the Pervasive Monuments project run by Horizon Digital Economy Research run out of the University of Nottingham (UK). Pervasive Monuments began in reality while I was working with Dave Kirk ( now a lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction at Nottingham University) at Microsoft Research Cambridgewhere we were both working on the Family Archive project. Dave’s interest coincided quite accidentally with mine in memory, family and the digital and after four long years, Spomenik now sits as a firmly supported research project.
How do we collectively remember? How do you design for competing histories, grudges and feelings as fresh today as they were 50 years ago? And most importantly, how do you best express this spatially in a time when place is in itself transitional? Spomenik seeks to find the overlap between memory, place and narrative in making a memorial more of a matter of relational geography than concrete and manicured grass. Using a network of mobile access points and transposed narratives, Spomenik plays with the notion of signal and tuning to memories and stories buried in the ground and in the past. More importantly, Spomenik is an relatively easy to deploy, bottom-up, version-able commemoriation that the survivors themselves will help foster.
The work has how taken on immense undergoings, not only now with working also with public memorialisation with the recent genocide in the 90's in Rwanda, but with the team expanding to include Adam Moore from the Department of Geography and Rolf Wiesemes from the Department of Eduction, as well as many other collaborators.
Featured in the 2009 International Symposium on Electronic Art
