What happens when technology enters historical sites?
The project Mediating Memorial Landscapes (MeMin) explores how one specific digital tool affects visitors’ experience and understanding of history and cultural heritage, by way of user surveys, focus group interviews, and comparative analyses. The project started in Summer 2020, and continues through 2021.
The MeMin project addresses a challenge that digitalisation poses for cultural dissemination and cultural policy: Access to advanced digital technology opens up endless possibilities, but we lack knowledge about how technology changes the media and the cultural practices which they are part of.
How do the new tools affect visitors’ experience and understanding of historical sites and of connections between past and present? Do such tools alter how users relate to history and to each other? These are some of the questions that the project seeks to answer.
The project’s central case is the app «Falstad digital reconstruction» which was launched in the summer of 2018. The app is a tool that gives visitors to Falstad the opportunity to move in a digitally reconstructed campscape.
The tool was developed by Eodyne, Barcelona as part of the large European research project IC-Access (Accessing Campscapes: Inclusive Strategies for Using European Conflicted Heritage).
In the MeMin project, visitors’ meetings with and use of the app are subject to critical analysis.
On 3 February 2021, project leader Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt gave a presentation at the international webinar «The Digitalisation of Memory», organized by the Falstad Centre in cooperation with POLIN Museum, Warsaw. Recordings from the webinar are available on Youtube – the presentation of the MeMin project starts at 1:22:35.
Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt, NTNU/Falstadsenteret (project leader)
Ingeborg Hjorth, Falstad Centre
Insa Müller, NTNU
Anette Homlong Storeide, Falstadsenteret
Rob van der Laarse, Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory and Material Culture
Paul Verschure, Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia and the Future Memory Foundation
Eodyne, Barcelona
MeMin is funded by the Arts Council Norway, the Falstad Centre and the Faculty of Humanities at NTNU.
The project forms part of the Arts Council’s research initiative “Digital culture, aesthetic practices”. The initiative focuses on how digitalisation and digital media culture affect contemporary artistic and cultural practices.
For additional information, contact project leader Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt at ingvild.hagen.kjorholt@falstadsenteret.no.
