DRHA2019 conference. London – 8-10 September 2019
RADICAL IMMERSIONS
Navigating between virtual/physical environments and information bubbles.
“How will this help me catch more fish?”: Interfacing intangible cultural heritage in an off-grid environment
Anna Troisi (School of Design, Greenwich University)
Gauti Sigthorsson (Dept. of Media, Culture and Language, U. of Roehampton)
In this presentation we ask whether Augmented Reality (AR), anchored in physical environments, can go beyond simply enhancing a specific location, drawing in temporal and emotional features connected to communities and intangible heritage. AR has been used in numerous projects relating to cultural heritage management: It works as a digital “layer” on top of physical reality which enables the user to see, hear and feel “more” of the environment where s/he is located. In this way, AR can be used to map buildings and features on to geospatial coordinates, but it can also locate memories, traditions and practices associated with intangible cultural heritage.
First, how to “augment” something when it’s not know in advance, when the researcher comes from outside the community and only has broad preliminary knowledge about what constitutes intangible cultural heritage for its members: The main research method explored here is a community-based cooperative inquiry, which draws on ideas of co-inquiry (Heron & Reason, 2006), defined as research with people rather than research on people.
Secondly, is digital compulsory? As a brief look at the literature will show, AR requires internet access. But what if you’re working in contexts where connectivity is limited, unreliable or absent? This is consequential for research on intangible cultural heritage, for example when it’s under threat from the displacement of people or rapid, large-scale development – circumstances in which digital resources can make an enormous difference to the volume and detail of the archive (Eoin, Owens, and King 2013). Our specific example is CoaAST (Coastal Aural archive of Spaces & Time), now underway in Mombasa, Kenya. The aim of CoaAST is to investigate the impact that changes in the environmental and economic conditions along the coastal areas of Mombasa have had upon the communities that live there, and on their cultural practices. These changes are sometimes unwelcome, as the title question illustrates, asked by a fisherman from Bamburi Beach.
The area in which the fieldwork takes place raised an immediate question when we first arrived in Mombasa: How to engage local people in discussions of cultural heritage when it’s not a priority for them? Furthermore, what do you do in the absence of a digital infrastructure, if your aim is to collaborate on creating an overlay of documentation and memory atop the immediate physical environment? CoaAST serves as a starting point for thinking about “immersion” from the low-tech end.
