Ghosts in the Garden: locative gameplay and historical interpretation from below

Abstract

University of the West of England, BristolOver the last decade, digital mobile technologies have played a leading role in transforming the visitor experience at European sites of heritage.2 Applications for phone and tablet have allowed heritage site managers greater control over the delivery of interpretative content by triggering automatic audio or visual interventions. Paradoxically, mobile apps have simultaneously permitted visitors an impression of greater agency in environments less cluttered with signage and props, and less reliant on their ability to find the right page in the guidebook. Apps invite forms of content design in which greater degrees of interactivity and even personalisation are privileged. In the educational sector, this potential is slowly gaining recognition and a number of institutions have begun to experiment with locative app design to change the ways students engage with, understand and evaluate primary historical evidence.3 However, most critical commentary on these processes has been dominated to date by reflections on form rather than content and purpose, and little in the way of systematic analysis of locative experiential interpretation at historic sites using mobile devices has been attempted. 4 The question we should in any case be asking perhaps, is not 'how can we use mobile and digital technologies to get larger and more diverse audiences through the door?', but 'how can we use mobile and digitally enhanced forms of interpretation to change the questions we ask and the ways in which we engage with historic sites?' There are, broadly, three main ways in which digital technologies, some mobile and some static, have been considered for use in the heritage environment: as an augmented guidebook and information resource, as a tool for enhanced simulation, and (less frequently) as a tool for changing the rules by which we construct and define historical knowledge at heritage sites. This essay reviews each of these approaches in turn and argues the case for a deeper engagement with the third. Locative mobile technologies, it is suggested, have the potential to positively transform some of the ways in which visitors to heritage sites are addressed, challenging the notion that historical data is best presented for passive consumption, and promoting, as an alternative, an experiential model of knowledge built upon agency, dialogue and informed choice. Ghosts in the Garden, an experimental project in which the author was a researcher and participant, is presented here as a case study. Its rationale was to disrupt both the form and the content of traditional interpretative approaches to the use of mobile, firstly by concealing the technology, secondly by requiring collective evaluation and decision making, and thirdly by commissioning original historical content 'from below'. Downloadable tour appsIn the first approach considered here, phone and tablet apps, freely downloadable from the Apple IStore and Google Play, dominate the field, and companies like Audio Tours, Treasure Trails an...

Crafting Critical Heritage Discourses into Interactive Exhibition Design

“…Alternative approaches to exhibition design are moving away from a single authorized voice towards the presentation of multiple and contrasting voices, with technology used to facilitate more polyvocal experiences [1]. Practice-based examples of digitallyenhanced polyvocality include a locative media bespoke device that tells 'history from below': the stories of common people enjoying a pleasure garden in Victorian times, pickpockets included [40]. Another example is the interactive soundscape created for the remains of WWI trenches that used autobiographical material from soldiers and civilians to contrast the official voice of army officials [38].…”

Review Exhibition Medieval Gardens: Earthly paradises in East and West. The National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden

“…Nonetheless, there are two interactive elements worthy of mentioning, that also include a playful element, which the historian Steve Poole, specialized in digital media, game and history from below (and interested in transforming the visitor experience of European heritage sites), strongly encourages in educational environments. 2 There was a game where you were asked to smell, read about and recognize seven different 'medieval' herbs and arrange them accordingly (fi g. 2). Th is was one of the most truly engaging parts of the route, given that you had to use multiple senses, something which Poole would encourage, as he stipulates how the 'affective turn' in the humanities has "led us to rethink the frameworks of scholarship and research that have separated the mind from the body. "…”

Assembling Arosenius – staging a digital archive

“…This has several advantages as it not only allows for the contextualisation of scale, the virtual AR document can also be made interactive and thus be virtually manipulated and studied in different ways while still protecting the physical archival document. However, as shown in projects such as New Philadelphia (Amakawa and Westin 2018), Ghosts in the Garden (Poole 2018) and Jewish Time Jump: New York (Gottlieb 2018) which all deal with exposing the histories of minorities and disenfranchised groups, AR not only has the potential of steering our gaze to lost artefacts, but also, by combining digitised documents with a physical space or object, helps us make new associations. AR can thus be used to present an alternative commentary to a physical object or space.…”