Augmented reality.

There are things along similar lines to what I have been doing happening on a slightly larger scale...
The first image is from a group on Flickr called Looking into the Past, which uses old photos of places inside recent ones, and the second is an image from an iPhone app launched by the Museum of London called StreetMuseum, which does a similar thing, combined with geotagging, to map images of the past from its photographic archives, onto streets in the present.


The resulting images are so direct that I do wonder if I should've done something similar with old photos when I visited Moniaive, (or whether that would have seemed too obvious even though it didn't occur to me at the time.) They sort of make more tangible the idea of a relationship between place and memory.

Far from a nostalgic attempt to freeze the past.

What we do with haunting.

"It seems that space and memory have a bond. I remember all the places I've been. What we do with haunting, is inhabiting spaces, being there, present to inhabit memories. It is about how we constitute each other. It is about property and invasion, or intrusion. We depend on each other."

That's a bit from some text used in Dark Light, a work by The Faculty of Invisibility. It's on at the Transmission Gallery in Glasgow at the moment. Their website explains what it is better than I probably could. I thought those few lines, from a document on The Department of Haunting, perhaps explains what happened that made it possible for me to do this project, maybe even what generates the material I am using. (That shared concern - albeit alongside some very different ones - and maybe also some simalarity in process to what I am doing, sending letters, documenting and things.)

Forgetting.

An apparently relevant quote about the nature of memory:

"When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.

And once again I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theater."

(From Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time. Thanks, Wikiquote.)

Also on the topic of memory... In one of the first posts, I mentioned an artist who'd done a video piece about a girl who turned herself into a camera. I've yet to go back and add a link, but here's a video of a guy who has actually been called 'The Human Camera'. I suspect he's better at remembering places than I will prove myself to be. Nonetheless, I think the next thing I'll attempt will be some sketches of what I can remember.

A Proposal: To go back to somewhere I once knew well and see how it has changed.

These distorted interior views, and the thought that they could represent half-remembered things from the past, reminded me of when I was about 9, and my grandparents moved house. I went systematically around each room and memorised what they looked like, and then closed my eyes to check I could remember them. I still check every so often, and I do sort of remember, but I'm not sure if my attempt at becoming a sort of human camera was what did it. (Actually, later I'll add to this post a link to an artist who did a film piece about a girl who did actually turn herself into a camera, if I can find out who that was... Here we go)

One thing to do, would be to go back, and see how well it really worked. Maybe using the underwater-camera-in-a-jug-thing again.

(I suppose what I had made by using the waterproof camera to photograph from underwater things that were not, could be a camera that distorts memories of its own accord, so, perhaps, a more truthful camera than one that shows things as they were.)

Except, it'll probably have changed quite a lot. So I'm quite apprehensive. But here's the draft of the letter I wrote. It's quite honest, and quite polite, I like to think. And I've posted the real thing now anyway.