Ghosts of Solid Air

Solid Air的幽灵是一个创新的公共参与项目，旨在提供一种新的增强现实体验，使不同的观众能够理解并参与围绕有争议的雕像的讨论。正如加里·扬格最近所说，雕像不仅提供了关于特定人物或特定历史事件的误导性概念--它们还扭曲了我们对历史本身的理解。因为当你竖起一座雕像来纪念一个历史时刻时，你就把那个时刻简化为一个人“(《卫报》2021年6月1日出版的《为什么每座雕像都应该倒塌》)。Solid Air的幽灵旨在通过数字方式(重新)在雕像居住的街道和广场上填充那些没有被记住的人的声音，来解决这种扭曲的过去观点。虽然关于公共纪念和纪念的争论并不是什么新鲜事，但最近在英国和世界各地发生的事件突出表明，有必要在历史建筑环境中和通过历史建筑环境讲述更微妙和多元化的故事。这不仅仅是一个在公共空间中呈现什么历史以及如何呈现的问题，也是谁在讲述这些故事中发挥作用的问题，以及他们有什么机构来塑造新的叙事。正如南希·弗雷泽在她的开创性论文《反思认识》中所主张的那样，文化……是合法的、甚至是必要的斗争领域，本身也是不公正的场所。对弗雷泽来说，直面这些不公正意味着“改变规范互动的价值观，巩固新的价值模式，促进平等参与社会生活”。在这一背景下，参与性平等寻求避免威权主义和分离主义身份政治，而是旨在实现一种民主化的“跨文化互动”。遗产和记忆是这种互动的关键焦点，但它们也是斗争的地形，也往往是持续不公正的场所。因此，如何促进参与性平等仍然是该领域的一个紧迫问题：这个问题远远超出学术讨论的范围，影响到机会、包容性和代表权政治等问题。为了回应这一关切，并在过去12个月项目团队共同创建过程的基础上，我们打算开发的经验将与一群来自伦敦的年轻人(18-25岁)密切合作，他们通常不参与遗产实践或讨论。他们将有助于形成经验的研究、设计和策展战略。此外，使用Solid Air AR应用程序的观众将会遇到大量历史上的“幽灵”争相吸引他们的注意力：这鲜明地提醒人们，许多故事都被一维的雕像和纪念碑所掩盖。然后，他们将被邀请为这个数字大会贡献自己的经历和感受，帮助建立当代关于纪念碑景观的公开辩论的记录。通过这种方法，该项目将强调在产品设计的所有阶段“参与性平等”的重要性。到颁奖结束时，观众和参与者都将认识到，有争议的遗产有可能成为“跨文化互动”的领域，而不是进一步的社会不公正。

Ghosts of Solid Air is an innovative public engagement project that aims to provide a new Augmented Reality experience enabling diverse audiences to understand and participate in discussions around contested statues. As Gary Younge has recently argued, statues do not just give a 'misleading idea about particular people or particular historical events - they also skew how we understand history itself. For when you put up a statue to honour a historical moment, you reduce that moment to a single person' ('Why every single statue should come down', The Guardian 1 June 2021). Ghosts of Solid Air aims to address this distorted view of the past by digitally (re)populating the streets and squares that statues inhabit with the voices of those who are not remembered. While debates over public commemoration and memorialisation are nothing new, recent events in the UK and around the world have brought into sharp focus the need for more nuanced and pluralistic stories to be told in and through the historic built environment. This is not just a question of what histories are represented in public space, and how, but also who gets to play a role in telling these stories, and what agency they have to shape new narratives. As Nancy Fraser argued in her seminal paper 'Rethinking Recognition', 'culture ... is a legitimate, even necessary, terrain of struggle [and] a site of injustice in its own right'. For Fraser, confronting these injustices means 'changing the values that regulate interaction, entrenching new value patterns that will promote parity of participation in social life'. Participatory parity in this context seeks to avoid both authoritarianism and separatist identity politics, aiming instead for a form of democratised 'transcultural interaction'. Heritage and memory are key focal points for such interaction, but they are also terrains of struggle and - all-too-often - sites of ongoing injustice. How to foster participatory parity therefore remains an urgent question for the field: one that reaches far beyond academic discourse to impact on issues of access, inclusion and the politics of representation. Responding to this concern - and building on a process of co-creation developed by the project team over the past twelve months - the experience we aim to develop will be produced in close collaboration with a group of young people (18-25) from London who are not typically engaged with heritage practice or discourse. They will help to shape the research, design and curatorial strategy of the experience. Furthermore, audiences using the Ghosts of Solid Air AR app will encounter a multitude of historical 'ghosts' jostling for their attention: a stark reminder of the many stories overshadowed by one-dimensional statues and monuments. They will then be invited to contribute their own experiences and sentiments to this digital assembly, helping to build a record of contemporary public debate on the memorial landscape. Through this approach the project will emphasise the importance of 'participatory parity' at all stages of the product design. By the end of the award, audiences and participants alike will be introduced to the potential for contested heritage to become a terrain of 'transcultural interaction' rather than further social injustice.