“We should be less interested in the design of bridges, and more concerned with how to get to the other side.” Cedric Price
Once we have been forced to throw aside habit-words like ‘museum’ and ‘heritage’- we inevitably find ourselves face to face with this impossibly broad question; what purpose do those things serve? Rather like how LeCorbusier, having ostentatiously put aside the word ‘house‘ for ‘a machine for living in‘, could then open up a train of thought which encapsulates all of the ‘machines for living in‘ that man had used up until that time; by getting rid of the word ‘museum’ we can wander down a train-of-thought which considers the ways in which man has used technology to assist ‘collective memory’ so far. So here’s an attempt – a self-consciously speculative and misinformed history of collective memory. It’s just thinking-out-loud. Please correct and refute:
If there ever was a time at which collective memory can be considered to have been technologically unassisted- it would take the form of stories and folklore, passed-verbally between generations within families and groups. Although we tend to feel a sort of nostalgic warmth towards this method- it must be of limited effectiveness- being highly localised and prone to the ‘chinese-whispers’ effect. Three early tools used to improve this technique were fires (providing warmth and light enables longer stories to be told- and after dark), natural ores/ochre/charcoal, used to make pictorial records on cave walls, and musical instruments (song lyrics are more memorable, and slightly less susceptible to paraphrasing and selective recounting than prose). A more advanced version of this is theatre; dramatising the events as if seen first-hand, and employing architectural devices to collect large quantities of people within aural/visual range of a source. The Romans arguably mastered this method of mass-remembering, flooding the Colosseum to stage reenactments of naval victories etc. (It’s worth noting that all of these aids to collective memory are also forms of entertainment- it’s only in the last couple of hundred years that we’ve invented the idea that ‘history’ is a drag-?). Of course, one of the most significant tools has to be paper – and the leather binding that enabled it to be collected into large chunks, distributed and stored for later reference more than one generation later. Collective memory could be shared over much greater times and distances (Jesus timed his incarnation pretty neatly, any earlier and we’d probably have never heard of him!). But the increasing complexity brought an important side-effect: to make books you need education and some money, and to use books you need to be able to read – so a gap begins to emerge between the rich and well-educated, and everyone else. The most effective, durable forms of collective memory came to be controlled by those with power- and inevitably used for political means. It has become normal now for us to consider collective memory as being ‘history’ – i.e- the stories and records of the important and powerful. With a few exceptions (like the Domesday book) books tended to convey a version of memory that tended to ignore ‘ordinary’ people. Archaeologists often uncover much more evidence about daily life than can be found in written records. The printing press, which you often hear justifiably argued as one of man’s most significant techno-cultural advances, went some way to dilute the memory power hegemony. But even now, to publish a book, a film, a play etc you have to already belong to some kind of accepted elite-Only since the advent of the Internet have we begun to get round this. (Ref.Long-tail theory).
Buildings, aside from their primary uses, came to be about the most ideal tool in the storing of collective memory, being in themselves marked by the events they have seen, by their nature collective (/symbolic) and, compared with the human life-cycle, prone to longevity. Such was the usefulness of this technique that not only did the the rich and powerful come up with the idea of artificially preserving buildings beyond their useful lifespan, but in fact designing structures whose sole purpose was to last. The opportunity provided by the monument/edifice is that nervous leaders could simulate strength or enforce ideology by creating collective memories in physical form, even to commemorate events which were intangible or even entirely fictitious. One of the most interesting recurring themes is in cases concerning traumatic collective memories, whereupon we do a rather strange thing- to carefully preserve scars in the physical fabric of the city. In the absence of any residual scars, architecture is even employed to fabricate them- A couple of interesting examples: Libeskind’s ‘Jewish’ Museum in Berlin (which even looks like a scar – of course it’s not a museum about the Jewish faith at all, but an aestheticisation of the holocaust- rather contrived in comparison with the genuinely harrowing experience of visiting the preserved buildings at Auschwitz Birkenau, but nonetheless politically expedient). The second is the Berlin Wall itself- when I first went there sometime in the 1990’s, they were still towing away the last sections of the wall, and you couldn’t help but feel that the thing you had come to the city to see was conspicuously absent. I wasn’t surprised to discover, on my third visit a few years later, that they’d actually rebuilt sections of the wall near checkpoint charlie.
While at a global and national scale books, educational institutions and media broadcasters and museums have become the mainstream disseminators of collective memory, at a local level we are still quite reliant upon the preservation of buildings. In Britain especially, we have developed a complex operational system (‘listing’) to grade the preservation of buildings in such a way as to ‘protect’ them from the pressure to modify them to renewed usefulness. But this paradigm of preservation finds itself apparently at odds with the forces of globalisation, as is the case in Selby, while obvious historic landmarks like Abbeys and pubs (upon whom there is sometimes more economic incentive to stay the same than there is to change) are preserved, vast swathes of historic industrial structures are erased to make way for generic, successful economic typologies- retail parks, supermarkets, commuter suburbs. These might be dirty words among the architectural community, but we have to force ourselves to remember that their presence is a measure of ‘popularity’. The conflict between modernisation and preservation is nowhere near as straightforward as we might think. Shanghai, a city of rampant erasure/modernisation, has rather ironically established a “Chinatown” district, in which the stereotypical image of the chinese city is created to ensure ongoing tourism revenue.
Architects must be the first to question our knee-jerk nostalgia / resistance to change, but also to acknowledge the potential of these conditions to create a cultural amnesia. The acceleration of time (an entire debate in itself- but set out very accessibly by James Gleick in Faster:The acceleration of just about everything.), coupled with the increasing specificity/short-term nature of technologies dedicated to altering our aspirations (i.e-advertising) together conspire with the erasure of urban leftovers to create a culture of temporal shallowness. You can probably recall four or more items from this week’s news, but how much can you remember of current events 5 weeks ago? This phenomenon of ‘now’ becoming a shorter and shorter interval of time formed the basis of the Long-Now project:
“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility—where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth.” Stewart Brand
In the succession of tools used to aid collective memory, the micro-processor has become the most literal manifestation of manufactured memory, being a super-condensed store of recorded texts, images, sounds, motion, data (but not smells…yet?). From one perspective, technology has never been so supremely capable of augmenting memory- but paradoxically its social impact has often contradicted this expectation. The mass availability of mobile phones, vhs/dvd recorders, ipods, personal computers, games consoles etc has, until recently served primarily to fragment and individualise memory. In other words, a mobile phone slightly disassociates you from your immediate surroundings, a recording device allows you to watch an event at any time, not necessarily at the same time as everyone else, a personal computer creates an interface designed around one user (one mouse, one keyboard etc), an ipod collects your favourite songs. In the last few years, the Internet has begun to challenge this condition, connecting games consoles to each other, sharing holiday photographs- essentially collectivising and connecting disparate memories to form a a quasi ‘Global brain’- the mathematical behavior of this global brain has caused us to rethink some of the principles of our old world: democratic/self-organising or decentralised power, networks, intellectual property… BUT, our unprecedented new capability to remotely store and share vast quantities of content as we go along has far from obviously increased our collective memory. We are now faced with a cacophony of information, much of which is mediocre, so it becomes much harder to handle and use it all in a useful way. Because the amount of information is growing exponentially, the new stuff perpetually overwhelms the old, and distracts us constantly with fresh, current material. Finally, although the web may seem like an accumulating vat of knowledge, its permanence is unproven- broken links and missing hosts are an everyday reality of using the web; the hope that virtual longevity might liberate us into physical ephemerality looks like it is going to be dissapointed.
I don’t think this means that the “new technologies” can’t be applied as tools to augment collective memory, but it makes it much more complicated than we might first think. There are serious projects to apply both our technological (and intellectual) progress to the question of individual memory. The “Memories for life” Project is attempting to design (and discuss the ethics of) the ability to make prosthetic memories or “brain downloads”. The key issue here not being the storage of the information itself, but the ability to handle and use it, and the social consequences of doing so. If you’re interested, there was a good prog on radio 4 about it- see if you can listen to it here.
If at a global level, the world wide web is proving difficult to rely on, our project proposes that it may be both possible and worthwhile at a local level to explore its application to collective memory in such a way that has never been possible until now.
Instead of an exercise in regurgitating and emulating past assumptions- the product of which would have been an uninspiring and fatally limited “historical website” (both words bring unwanted baggage with them), accompanied by patronising cliches and platitudes towards the users, we have tried to apply ourselves as tool-designers to this question:
What if a town could have a memory?
Not as a substitute for other forms of collective memory, but a supplementary form of memory-sharing; regardless of whether ‘built heritage’ is preserved or demolished. Such a tool could undermine the stalemate between preservation and progress by bending the rules, and provide a much more rich, human-centred record of the ‘here and then‘.
What would such a tool look like, how can we make it intuitive to use? How can we make something that is ‘unfinished’, i.e- open to the genius of others. How do you put the content in front of the container? How might it celebrate the stories of all the people of Selby, not just the ‘important’ or wealthy. How might it tell the stories of the suburbs as well as that of the abbey. How might it, like the global ‘user generated content’ interfaces of our time, be open to appropriation by the user, in whose hands it becomes not just a means of dispensing historical knowledge (One-way / Museum) but a means of collecting it and sharing it (Two-way / Bazaar).
In its design, we’ve aimed to diminish the level of conditioning inherent in selecting and curating history,by organising it by something as unbiased as cartesian space and time (NOTE: revealing rather than disguising the bias/subjectivity/unevenness). Onto this scalable interface it will be possible to place threads, narratives, themes as selected by the user. It must be interesting to all who live somewhere within its scope, not just those who are already interested in ‘history’ . It’s interface should be “exhaustive rather than exahausting” (OMA-LACMA)- A tool you can use to research for 5 days or a toy you can play-with for 5 minutes-and in both cases find something interesting that you didn’t already know. It should be highly specific, but relentlessly open-ended.
As designers- we are conscious of the ambitious nature of the project, and as half-architects, we are conscious of our lack of qualification in coding / web-design (the particular language and technique of the chosen infrastructure). Although the intent of the project is linked to architecture in the traditional sense (in that it proposes alternatives), it also implies a new means-of-engagement for architects- as operational ‘tool designers’- even in areas where we don’t belong. Playing coding scrap heap challenge (with thanks to, and in devotion to the open-source age in which we now live) we are trying to knock-together the first step of a journey. It doesn’t really matter where the journey leads, only that it keeps going somewhere useful.
Our (perhaps idealistic) aim is that in a few years, this project may have evolved into something unrecognisable to us.
Caveat: While our invention may be patterned around a more literal (if open) interpretation of what collective memory might be, it is important to note that is is not, in itself an attempt to be collective memory. That (thank goodness) is impossible- this is just another tool or layer to enable us to interface with some aspects of it. Collective Memory (like ‘team spirit’ and the ‘zeitgeist’) is a near-impossible thing to have a conversation with. Partly because, unlike individual memory, it has no measurable ‘location’, so it doesn’t belong anywhere, and partly because its virtue is far from beyond suspicion; generations of oppressive regimes and dictators have attempted to manipulate collective memory in order to exert their authority. I wasn’t there. Someone told me.
AP
