Remediated Places

This project is a collaboration of Ruth Tringham (UC Berkeley/MACTiA), Steve Mills (University of Cardiff, UK), Michael Ashley (UC Berkeley/MACTiA/CIO/IST), Colleen Morgan (UC Berkeley), Eric Blind (Archaeology Unit of the San Francisco Presidio Trust) and Jason Quinlan (Çatalhöyük Research Project).

Ruth, Steve, and Michael after Sunday brunch in Bernal Heights neighborhood of San Francisco

The project aims to share the multisensorial experience and memory of a place, specifically Cultural Heritage sites. Media through which this challenge is approached include VideoWalks, Video(Pod)casts, audio recordings, interviews of remembered sensations. The first site in which the project has been developed is the 9000-year old mound of Çatalhöyük, Turkey.

This image is licensed by a Creative Commons attribution 2.5 license

Ruth and Steve Mills preparing their peripatetic video at Çatalhöyük, july 2005. Note that I am using Mike Figgis (“Timecode”) FigRig as a steadycam for my beloved Sony VTR2000. The usual question at airports is “what happened to your car, Madam?”. Steve is using a digital soundrecorder with some kind of GPS attachment. Very cool!.

The project was created in the Fall of 2004 with some video interviews of Çatalhöyük archaeological team members on their memories of sensual experience at the site. The idea was to create a database of these memories and add to them multi-sensual memories of imagined residents at the site 9000 years ago. in July 2005 we added the dimension of layered videowalks that were filmed during the excavation season. At this point the project was called CatalVideoPlace project.

In May 2006 we all got together in San Francisco for a month. The project expanded to include the San Francisco Presidio, which was in continuous use as a military post from 1776 to 1994, spanning the Spanish, Mexican, and United States periods. It is now a National Historic Landmark District. At this point we renamed the project the Remediated Places Project.

In July 2006 Colleen Morgan (Anthropology, UC Berkeley) continued the project at Çatalhöyük, while the rest of us were enjoying the summer scene in San Francisco. She has now joined the collaboration.

An article that sets the scene:
Putting Vision in its Place: the interweaving of senses to create a sense of place at Çatalhöyük]. I gave this at the Stanford University “Seeing the Past” conference in February 2005. This version does not have any illustrations (yet).