Experiencing a Long-Lost Town

Megan Eatman — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:34:24 +0000

Front page of Welcome to Pine Point, by the Goggles

Welcome to Pine Point is an interactive experience that documents a mining town that, rather than declining slowly or attempting a resurrection, erased itself, leaving behind only empty land and a website entitled "Pine Point Revisited." Mike Simons and collaborator Paul Shoebridge built Welcome to Pine Point to document and reflect on the experience of discovering that a place Mike remembered from his childhood was not simply empty or decayed; it was actually gone.

The project is constructed as sort of an enhanced scrapbook. The artists combine grainy video, including shots from a memorial video that was offered to residents before the town was destroyed, and old and new photos of Pine Point and its residents with text that reflects on the experience of rediscovering the town. The fragmentary nature of the documents and the scrapbook feel give the project a certain intimacy, as if the reader/viewer/user is discovering these traces of Pine Point herself. It doesn't hurt, of course, that the project draws on the nostalgia most of us feel for places we experienced as children. For viewers who remember the eighties, the poor video and photo quality (as well as the wardrobe choices the images document) will likely draw on that nostalgia as well.

The collection of different media into a digital format raises questions about how we remember, and the project at times seems to invoke these questions. The initial load screen features an illustration of a VHS tape rewinding, thereby replicating a regressive process that most of us haven't seen in a while and thereby drawing attention to how technology affects the process of remembering. A later load screen, which features the word "Town" and a progress bar, draws attention to Pine Point's fully digital existence. Wiped off the map, it exists primarily in its memorial website and in this project. While the disappearing town is by no means a new phenomenon, the project does raise questions about what will become of towns that are currently in decline and how they might best be remembered.

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.

viz. - interactive

Experiencing a Long-Lost Town

Communal Remembering - The Johnny Cash Project