Locating Stories

workshop by Valentina Nisi

29 Mar 2006
  • 10:00 -22:00
  • Felix Meritis
  • Keizersgracht 324, 1016 EZ Amsterdam

How can you capture the intangible aspects of the public domain using location-based new media technology? Through the use of mobile location aware technology, such as GPS enabled PDAs local community anecdotes and memories can be captured in the form of multimedia fragments and redistributed through the real space of a neighbourhood.

In March Virtueel Platform will host a workshop by Valentina Nisi. She will introduce the concept of creating community based locative narratives, by presenting 'Media Portrait of the Liberties' a project that she developed in Dublin. She will lead a creative scenario workshop for designing a similar project for a different context in a neighbourhood in Amsterdam. The concept and the software that Valentina Nisi developed for Dublin will be used as a starting point. Scenarios will be evaluated at the end of the workshop.

Workshop series
At the end of the workshop organisations from different neighbourhoods and communities will be able to express their interest. If enough interest is raised a three day follow up workshop will be organised to design for a specific context. A series of workshops where the actual community members are involved will be held in the neighbourhoods that have shown interest. The goal is to really establish the project in a neighbourhood, not organise this as a one off workshop.

Participants
Social and cultural organisations involved in specific neighbourhoods, like local governments, community centres, museums, libraries, computer clubhouses etc.

Media Portrait of The Liberties, Dublin
People are taken on a journey through physical and historical space of the Liberties neighbourhood public domain. Locals as well as non-locals can roam the neighbourhood streets and access stories and memories of the place. Each story is available in the specific locations where it happened and is networked with related anecdotes where similar facts of characters appear.
As a result, locals feel stimulated to recall anecdotes, engage in storytelling activity among themselves as well as with people not familiar with the area. Because they feel connected to the content regarding their own neighbourhood and their past and present lives, the experience boost the community members confidence in using technology for browsing as well as contributing to the pre-authored media stories database. The MPL authored centred approach to community stories is designed to function as a story–catalyst for the local community and offers them a starting point, and inspiration to take ownership of the project and continue to develop its collection by contributing as authors to an ongoing story database rendering a grass roots history of the area.

Location: Felix Meritis, Keizersgracht, Amterdam
Duration: full day
Costs: 75 Euro
Registration: send an e-mail with your name, function, and organisation to info@virtueelplatform.nl

More details and project documentation can be found at:
www.valentinanisi.com/liberties.html
rhizome.org/object.rhiz?36999