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Mediated Memories. Memory, Remembrance and Memorial. The history of recording memories. Pliny The Elder. Joseph Wright The Corinthian Maid, 1782-1784 Paul Mellon Collection. http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=61396&image=15725&c=gg61.
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Mediated Memories Memory, Remembrance and Memorial
Pliny The Elder Joseph Wright The Corinthian Maid, 1782-1784 Paul Mellon Collection http://www.nga.gov/fcgi-bin/timage_f?object=61396&image=15725&c=gg61
The Gutenberg press with its wooden and later metal movable type printing brought down the price of printed materials and made such materials available for the masses. It remained the standard until the 20th century. During the centuries, many newer printing technologies were developed based on Gutenberg's printing machine e.g. offset printing. *http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blJohannesGutenberg.htm cited 15.8.06
Photography We owe the name "Photography" to Sir John Herschel, who first used the term in 1839, the year the photographic process became public. (*1) The word is derived from the Greek words for light and writing. The first successful picture was produced in June/July 1827 by Niépce, using material that hardened on exposure to light. This picture required an exposure of eight hours.* *http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/ cited 15.8.06
Sound Recording The first recording devices were scientific instruments used to capture and study sound waves. These devices were capable of recording voices and other sounds long before the phonograph. The most famous of these was Leon Scott's 1857 Phonoautograph.* *http://www.recording-history.org/HTML/musictech1.html cited 15.8.06
The photograph is not only a visual document or record of an event, it may also be viewed as a memory site. Memories committed to photographs were often stored in photo albums or a shoebox for private viewing. How does the contemporary practice of photo-sharing challenge/alter our relationship with these objects of memory?
In 1946 my father served in the BCOF in Hiroshima. These are some of our family memories.
Making Memory Matter: digital technologies and personal photography.
Memories are shared across a wide range of digital mediums and networks. Twitter, facebook, myspace, youtube, blogs and websites. The physical stuff of memory becomes meshed within the heart of new technologies.
Why do we record and share our memories online? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFfG3PyI-Ao
The shoebox of photos has been replaced by the computer hard drive. The “Kodak moment” has become the “mobile moment”. Mobile phone footage challenges traditional broadcast models. Mobile phones have become a key tool for providing marginalized voices and activists with access to mainstream media.
7/7 London bomb terrorist attack on bus http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nuhBdHc8Nqs
Final 8 Minutes Of Phone Call From Flight 11 On 9/11 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-Tr0u35Tek
As Reading (2008, p.356) suggests: • Just as the shift from the public clock to the private • timepiece or wrist watch shifted the individual’s • relationship to time from the public domain to • the private body, so too the mobile phone suggests • profound changes to human beings relationships • to knowledge, communication and recall. • (2008, p.356)
Execution of Saddam Hussein mobile footage. http://www.youtube.com/verify_age?&next_url=/watch%3Fv%3DlvIK5M9lOOY Source: http://www.infowars.net/pictures/jan07/040107Saddam3.jpg cited 4.5.09
Van Dijck observes that: • “media technologies are not just a method of building up a stockpile of personal memories, but their function is concurrently formative, directive and communicative. • They enable the self to grow and mature, to give meaning and direction to one’s past and present” (2007, p.171).
Ubiquitous computing: Sharing memories across the network(s).
These digitised memories are much more than an exercise in recall or recitation, but “a key to our emotional understanding of ourselves and the world”. (Gibbons, 2007, p.4).
Recovery In 2006 I used a camera-phone to record my 2 year recovery period from a serious illness.
Digital and networked media offers unique modes of expression and new ways to store share and document the artifacts of memory. Also new ways to engage in the act of remembrance.
British Artist Katie Lips has developed many projects and applications that enable people to save, store and share text messages.
Mobile Memories are shaping personal and collective acts of remembrance.
The increasing digitization of our personalities in the • “Knowledge Age” will render the mobile an important • instrument of exchange. (Golding 2005:238) Golding, P. (2005) The future of the mobile in the 3G era. Thumb Culture: The Meaning of Mobile Phones in Society, Glotz, P; Bertschi, S; and Locke, C. (EDs) (2005)Transaction Publishers, London, U.K.
Personal photos were found hidden inside the covers of mobile phones in a recycling plant in Tokyo. http://www.s9.com/images/portraits/33744_Rinko-Kikuchi.jpg
Vincent (2005) observes: • “Each mobile phone is uniquely reflecting the users life at • that point in time; so the device ‘holds’ the memories, • the sentiments that are associated with the text messages • and numbers stored on the phone, the appointments, • the ringtones chosen and the pictures held on the phone • and not in the wallet and so on.”
In a world of digital immediacy, the remembrance of the people, experiences and events that shape our personal and collective identity are arguablyless bound by the traditions/customs of the past. Photo of my sister’s keyring. After she died I kept her phone number in my contacts.
Remembrance and Online Memorials
According to Van Dijck (2007, p.48), “memory items are becoming networked objects, constructed in the commonality of the World Wide Web”.
As Green observes: • Media technologies and practices of mediation have long beenconsidered central to subjective, socio-cultural and institutional forms of remembering, memorialising, and forgetting, and it is increasingly recognised that new mobile media are again intervening in memory practices in diverse ways. • This is reflected in both the growing attention paid to mobile media of memory in the computing and commercial domains, and by a recognition of shifting cultural patterns of memory-making in changing times. • (2008, p.267)
Will our final resting place be online? http://www.lastingtribute.co.uk/latesttributes
Virtual Poppy Field http://www.lastingtribute.co.uk/poppyfield
online memorial for Rachel Joy Scott (Columbine shooting victim). Source: http://www.racheljoyscott.com/ cited 23.4.09