Re-Reading the Past in Public Spaces. How New Media Art Challenges Practices of Commemoration

Anna Norpoth & Felix Fuhg show how new media art, especially augmented reality, reshapes commemoration by reinterpreting history, expanding public narratives, and enabling new engagement forms.

Introduction

Text: Anna Norpoth & Felix Fuhg

Memory and remembrance are two entities that correspond to each other. Without individual and collective memory, there is no remembrance, and without remembrance, particularly collective memories seem to be useless. As memory culture is collectively practised and an essential tool for creating collective and individual identities, public spaces function in various ways as spaces of and for commemorative practices and cultures. Firstly, places are an inherent part of individual and collective memories as their built, and social environments are key and/or the framework for personal stories and collective historical experiences.

We observe that, particularly the first—individual memories and stories about the historical identity of places, often verbally and orally passed within societies—has gained more attention over the past few years. Here, the World Wide Web is already treated as an archive and communication platform that allows the reconstruction of the historical identity of places. UNESCO, for example, asks cities applying for inclusion into the World Heritage lists to collect the memories and feelings of inhabitants posted on social media. Secondly, the past, present, and future communicate with each other via the architecture of the built environment. The past is conserved within the historicity of architectural languages. Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, places—being the subjective, material, and qualitative expressions of spaces—play a crucial role in the monumentalisation of the past.

Public monuments are the most obvious, the most visible, and perhaps the most frequently used entrance points or portals to the past.

When reading the public monument through Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of symbolism, the monument is a material Signifier that is more than just a physical object. The monument is a symbol, representing a narrative of remembrance that is, however, subject to constant social change and generationally driven debates. De Saussure introduces his concept of the Signified, which allows him and his followers to look beyond the symbol itself and refer to its social and cultural meaning, particularly the arbitrary relationship between the Signifier and the Signified.

New Media, including techniques such as projection mapping and, in particular, augmented reality, claim to offer new opportunities to reframe historical narratives that have become physical expressions in public spaces. With augmented reality, the digital is layered over the physical space, paving the way for re-readings and extensions of monumentally and spatially embodied historical stories. Firstly, augmented reality allows for the extension of what can be discovered in the physical space. It can enlarge what we see and find in public spaces by adding something to them, for example, in the case of history, through the reconstruction of something that was once there but no longer exists. Secondly, it can intervene in memories that have been set in stone by re-reading monuments or playing with the destruction of them. Thus, augmented reality interventions function as critical comments on existing heritage or memory culture that shapes the notion of public places. Thirdly and finally, digital art that uses augmented reality allows the past and present to communicate in a new way, offering new forms of participation where human action in public spaces enables users or visitors to speculate and intervene into the past—a time known for being an established construct.

Virtual monuments and counter-monuments, AR walks and AR performances have become new forms of public art that, according to Christiane Paul, can be informed by the bi-polarity of public art itself. This bi-polarity is determined by public arts’ character of being “authorised and sometimes financed by the government or an entity administering the respective space” and having “a history of “guerrilla” public art (…)” (Christiane Paul, Augmented Realities: Digital Art in the Public Sphere, in: Cher Krause Knight / Harriet F. Senie (eds.), A Companion to Public Art, Wiley/Blackwell: Malden/Oxford 2016, S. 205). For her, digital technologies have expanded the agency enabled by our embodied condition: our bodies can function as interfaces in navigating virtual environments; avatars can be understood as virtual embodiments; wearable computing can establish a technologised connectivity between bodies, allowing them to communicate or even share physical sensations; and mobile devices can act as technological extensions of embodiment, connecting us to location-based information and enhancing awareness of our environment or “social body’’.

This video can not be played.

Load external video from YouTube.

Read more in our privacy policy.

Border Memorial Data in Google Earth Source: YouTube/John Craig Freeman

It was the arrival of the mobile digital device that became a game changer for re-reading the historical monumentality in public spaces. Since then, projects have been initiated that gave space to marginalised communities, gave attention to untold stories that haven’t found their way into the canon of official memory cultures or paved the way for remembering the horrific death of people trying to cross borders. A perfect early example in the history of claiming public space with Augmented Reality is John Craig Freeman’s Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos (2012). The project visualises the scope of the loss of life at the United States/Mexico border using a virtual object to mark each geolocation where human remains have been recovered. By pointing their mobile devices at the border and surrounding landscape, people are able to retrieve these mementos of human lives lost.

  • Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos, data visualization, Google Earth, 2011.
    Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos, data visualization, Google Earth, 2011.
  • Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos, John Craig Freeman, augmented reality public art, Arizona, 2012.
    Border Memorial: Frontera de los Muertos, John Craig Freeman, augmented reality public art, Arizona, 2012.

From Destroying to Adding: Digital Counter-Monuments

Since many years, the creation of counter monuments, the destruction of monuments, or the adding of virtual monuments to the landscape of physically existing ones have become a common practice in the field of digital public art. Campaigns working with geolocation, such as #MakeUsVisible by the international ARORA art collective and the Snapchat project BCA x SNAP: Hidden Black Stories of the Black Cultural Archives in London, have become role models for redefining the history of public spaces by making the stories of marginalised subjects, women and Black Londoners, more accessible.

  • Photos: Antimonument Extended

Other projects, such as the KINFOLK App, understand themselves as more than just a digital archive working with augmented reality technologies. By doing so, they create virtual monuments that communicate with their audience through voice-over and can be displayed in both public and private space(s).

An even more radical response to unloved monuments standing for injustice, discrimination, racism or white and national superiority, is the project „Antimonument Extended“, which describes itself as “an Ausländer-initiated VR and Mixed Reality Art Project for deconstructing traces of Nazis behind the public monuments in a non-violent and democratic way”. In VR, users can demolish monuments across the globe, and by doing so, they must reflect on the tricky debate about the right tactic towards outdated memory culture in public spaces.

What do we lose when erasing unloved monuments?

Are they, in terms of the theater writer Oliver Zahn, still spooking around public spaces where they have been erased as ghosts of the monumentalised past? Is commentating on such monuments really the solution for reducing their harmful character? The fact that the question of the involvement of Ausländer (engl. foreigners) makes it even more spicy. What is the agency of Ausländer within the ritualised memory culture that has been set in stone over the past 150 years?

While the previous project has its focus on practices of deleting and erasing as an emancipatory practice of making unloved stories invisible, Talya Feldman creates in her project WIR SIND HIER (WE ARE HERE) a digital space for survivors of right-wing terror in Germany and families of victims, arriving from their fight to reclaim their right to remembrance in the public sphere. Although not interrupting directly into the public space, WIR SIND HIER adds new stories to public spaces in the digital sphere, displayed as videos on a website, combined with voice-overs of family members and friends of victims. “By actively listening to the voices of those affected, by recognizing their right for space within their cities and within commemoration politics, WIR SIND HIER asks users to imagine an alternative reality and an alternative future”.

Photo: Talya Feldman / WIR SIND HIER

Re-Reading Monuments

Next to the practice of adding stories of the past to public spaces or erasing physical landmarks of history, artists also engage artistically with existing monuments to find ways to re-read them. Tamiko Thiel, one of the first media artists worldwide to use AR and push the boundaries of its use in arts by being part of the Manifest.AR group (together with the previously mentioned John Craig Freeman). #JulietToo was created as an AR installation for the #MakeUsVisible (ARORA) counter-monument project, which was developed together with the Munich-based art collective denkFEmale, featuring 30 augmented reality sculptures for the city.

Photo: Tamiko Thiel / #JulietToo

The controversy surrounding the Juliet sculpture, a gift from Munich’s twin town Verona, is the point of departure for Tamiko Thiel. According to the oral tradition, touching the gold-plated chest of Juliet’s right breast brings luck, and it glows gold where the patina has been rubbed off to reveal the bronze beneath. But, and this is Thiel’s question, does Juliet really want to be touched in such a sexualised way?

How is the female body presented in public memorials?

Thiel duplicates Juliet multiple times, equipping her with a sword and a round shield as a Viking shield maiden, and with bow and arrows as an Amazon – two cultures in which women bared their breasts not as a sign of sexual submission, but as a sign of their prowess as women warriors. The copies of the modified Juliet sculpture rise up and defend themselves from being touched by users and by-passers.

Occupying the Public

The given examples already refer to the materialised stiffness of memory culture set in stone. The memorial is static and occupies space through its static presence. The social construction of the past and today’s reality, however, is to a huge degree created through performativity. Talking, walking, dressing, and moving are forms of sociospatial and often ritualised practices. Although initiated in 2017, Marisa Williamson’s Sweet Chariot app set new standards in the use of AR to bring back performativity in the representation of the past in public spaces.

Photo: Marisa Williamson / Sweet Chariot

Her project is a mix of a walking tour, immersive videos and provided contextual information in one app. The video scavenger hunt tackles the African American struggle for freedom by giving performers space to perform in public spaces related to this historical fight. At Congo Square, for example, that was in the late 1600s a burial ground for enslaved Africans, artist Noelle Lorraine Williams performs the poem of Lamont B. Steptoe. In another video, a dancer performs against a backdrop of paintings by artist Michael Williamson at Pennsylvania’s Liberty Tree.

Video: Marisa Wiliamson / PENNSYLVANIA LIBERTY TREE (2017) Sweet Chariot

Another project that is bringing back the human body as a talkative and embodied intervention into public space via augmented reality is Kampnagel’s project Statues of Resistance. Statues of Resistance is an augmented reality parcour of anticolonial resistance, paying attention to and intervening in public spaces determined by Hamburg’s imperial history.

Video Kampnagel / Statues of Resistance

When walking towards buildings that memorialise and glorify the golden age of Hamburg’s imperial port, humans appear together with a multiplied girl that is dancing around them. The agents of history, as they introduce themselves, reflect the space of their appearance and tell the story of anti-colonial activists who resisted forms of colonial oppression.

Reflecting the Contribution of Augmented Reality

In 2022, Fabian Raith, a German dramaturg specialising in digital productions dealing with theatre-inspired storytelling, published a radio play called „A Bug That Eats Memories“. Although an audio production, his play is a unique piece that creatively investigates the shifted notion of time resulting from the interplay of personal memories, public art, and digital monuments, creating an overlay of time since the arrival of technologies such as augmented reality. The audio snippets used in the radio play are contributions submitted by DLF listeners who responded to the question of who or what they would like to build a memorial to. The AR walk that appears in the radio play is also a real-life augmented reality walk.

“How do memories live on when the people in them gradually disappear?”

“The memory of Mika’s mother is slowly fading since all the recordings have been deleted. In the radio play, Mika goes on an old augmented reality walk on the topic of “memory”. The walk is from 2022, and Mika walks through the city in 2035: the layers of time overlap. Mika becomes increasingly involved in following the voice in the Walk. She keeps asking this one question: If you knew that the world would end tomorrow – would you still plant an apple tree today? Between public places of remembrance, digital monuments and encounters with passers-by, it becomes apparent how looking into the future and looking into the past influence each other”.

Photo: Fabian Raith / Ein Käfer, der Erinnerungen frisst (2022)