The geological striations that mark the Grand Canyon, like the accreted tangle of streets, buildings, and signage in downtown Manhattan, attest to a complex temporality. The world, both natural and man-made, is a palimpsest, with the persistent past interpenetrating the seamless veneer of the present. Complex overlays of history challenge the taken-for-grantedness of the now.
“In Space We Read Time” proclaimed Karl Schlögel, helping to consolidate the spatial turn in historiography. Countering the long dominance of the word, he looked instead for historical evidence in the form of markings on city pavements; town plans; travel guides; and highways and cemeteries. Layers of place reveal accretions of time. And augmentation offers a way to highlight and engage both creatively and critically with those layers and accretions, making visible the invisible and bridging temporal divides.
The layering of image and sound on particular locations enables a dialogue between text and place, and herein lies the added value of augmentation for documentary. Augmentation resonates with the physical world, both packing a punch by connecting the represented (the text) to the real (the site), and layering a particular spot in the world with meaning. In this sense, augmented media differ profoundly from everyday screen cultures, which, although always local, are surprisingly ambivalent in their demands of the relationship between place and text.
What happens when media and place combine, and particularly documentary media and the places documented? The media shift from monologic to dialogic, that is, they shift from platforms for representation and expression to sites of engagement, interrogation, and dialogue with the larger world. Enabled by site-specificity, this transformation can be witnessed in the work of a new generation of artists, activists, and documentarians that has entered public space, armed with the possibilities of emerging technologies as well as long-established techniques for augmenting, documenting, confronting, and shifting cultural narratives. From large-scale projections that draw attention to the contradictions of the past, to mobile apps that augment familiar spaces with unfamiliar stories, these scenarios go beyond representation to transformation, changing our relationship with the surrounding world.
Augmentation has a deep history, from trail markings to commemorative plaques to graffiti, that can inform our thinking about the latest augmentation technologies. And it is a history that offers far greater creative agency to individuals than institutionalized media forms, whether centralized like broadcasting or networked like algorithmically-curated social media. These technologies will continue to transform, keeping pace with Moore’s Law; but their transformation also brings it pressing questions. How can artists, storytellers, and cultural institutions co-create with their communities and foster dialogue about their public spaces, augmenting people’s experiences and in the process making public spaces more sociable and equitable? How can we include more voices, making our public memorialization processes reflective of diverse communities and more democratic? How can we use augmentation technologies to reveal cultures and behaviors that have been/are in the process of being erased?
Layers of place offer an entry point to dialogues with layers of time, and with them, myriad untold stories and a chorus of new voices.