Communal Remembering - The Johnny Cash Project

Cate Blouke — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 14:17:23 +0000

Screen Shot of the video opening in The Johnny Cash Project

Cyber memorials are interesting beasts. A new, more publicly available way to mourn, they are often sites of controversy - raising questions about representation, curation and the appropriation of tragedy. But what happens when a multimedia memorial invites visitors to actively participate in the creation and curation of the content? A hyper-mediated explosion of awesome (among other things).

Screen shot of frame contribution from Bobby Latham, McKinney, Texas

The Johnny Cash Project is a virtual space better explored than explained, but I'll do my best to give you an idea. Visitors are invited to contribute drawings of Cash to be included in a sort of hybrid rotoscope music video, the frames of which flash by in a psychedelic flurry of grayscale images. You can pause the video at any point to explore the frames individually, and you can even watch the"drawing session" in which the image was created.

Screen shot of the filtered viewing options

Visitors are also encouraged to rate the drawings, and the video can then be viewed from a variety of perspectives - the highest rated frames, the director curated frames, the most recent frames, and more. The project is incredibly malleable and interactive. It gives visitors an extreme sense of agency in both controlling their own experience and contributing to the experience of the memorial as a whole.

Screen shot of rame contribution from Marc Verhaegen, Merksem, Belgium

The project bills itself as a "living," "communal" work, and the language is interesting in terms of its push towards vitality, especially given the song selection - "Ain't No Grave." The idea is that the project will continue to grow, creating "a living, moving, and ever changing portrait of the man in black." It encourages a sense of assimilation and immortality. People can become a part of Cash himself (or at least the remembrance of him) by contributing an image to the collection, and the "portrait" will continue to live on.

All in all, the project raises interesting questions about mourning, memorial, agency and ownership. Aside from being a pretty amazing piece of hyper-mediated content, it's certainly a very democratic approach to memorial.

The Statue Controversy

LaurenMitchell — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 16:07:37 +0000

Because the purpose of memorials is to represent and remember a person or event, they make arguments. Once there is representation, there is argument. It's also clear that memorials make arguments because people get very excited about how and where someone or something is represented. That’s why the rebuilding of the Twin Towers site is still being discussed. This sort of passionate argument about memorials is also seen in University of Texas at Austin's statue situation. One part of the UT statue controversy is that many have called for the removal or modification of statues of those famous confederates Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis. This is not a new controversy and complaints have been made for years.

In addition to this, the University is attempting to diversify its statues in order to counter-balance the confederate representatives. This can be seen in the Martin Luther King statue installed in 1999 and the more recent statues of Cesar Chavez, which was just unveiled, and Barbara Jordan, which is still in the works. The Barbara Jordan statue is particularly interesting as an example of visual rhetoric, and maybe body-language rhetoric, because the design has gone through two versions. Barbara Jordan was the first African American to represent a southern state in Congress, and the first design had her sitting on a bench leaning back as if to take something out of a briefcase. Supporters of this design felt that it conveyed her as a politician of the people (anybody can sit next to her on that bench), who was not controlled by special interests during her time in office. Dissenters said that it didn’t portray her power or strength. Some said it didn’t look like her, and others wondered why she had to sit while other white, male statues such as Davis and Lee got to stand. In any case, that design was scrapped, and now they have a new one with her standing tall, hands on hips. I can’t see how you can get more powerful than that. Clearly who gets a statue and what that statue looks like says a lot about what people and what events are important to UT.

viz. - Memorial

Communal Remembering - The Johnny Cash Project

The Statue Controversy