Towards Domestic
Heritage Multimedia
JEFF TAYLOR

Multimedia claims to bring the ability to orchestrate and readily access the fragments of archived domestic memorabilia amassed in the cupboards and attics of our homes, making shared domestic heritage as available as television.

Kresten Bjerg (organiser of HOIT -- Home Oriented Information Telematics -- conference, June 1994 University of Copenhagen) quotes the Danish philosopher Peter Sinkernagel (1992): The multiplicity of private life constitutes an infinitely multidimensional universe. Bjerg deduces that Therefore the home, considered as a context for such a universe, is a much more subtle and complicated entity than common trivialisation leads us to suspect. Home-contexts are--each home in its own and unique way:

a sedimented and sedimenting carrier of past and contemporary cultural forms and meanings
a highly developed and equipped vessel for navigating through the life-ages
a reflector of the biographies and extension of the selves of its inhabitants
a uniquely distributed sedimenting stock of knowledge
Kresten promotes Domestic Space Research, less expensive and more profitable for mankind, I am sure, than the NASA type.
This notion of domestic `sedimentation' has been introduced in this conference by Marco Susani, and we have noted the links between home, hearth and heart others have made explicit , and the poor hearth-surrogate television has made, what Ted Nelson has called the video narcosis that now sits on our land like a fog, or the Hasidic Jews of London have termed the sewer running through our living rooms. My proposition here is to re-assert the potential centrality of the role of domestic heritage into the `home' equation -- home, heart, hearth, heritage -- through new means for archiving and accessing this sedimenting stock of knowledge. Pauline Terreehorst speculates that the metamorphosis of home into a working and focal point of the electronic superhighway will encourage positive changes in domestic human relationships. I would submit that meaningful access to shared heritage can also be seen in this context as making coherent a new domestic focus.

Of course there are practical problems associated with our present domestic documentation, of obsolete formats, of access, storage and control. There is a domestic information explosion such that it becomes difficult to locate, for example, particular photos or footage. Older home formats have grown obsolete or lack durability, so in that sense as well have become inaccessible. And our shrinking domestic space poses a practical storage limit on our domestic archives. Peter Lamborn Wilson spoke earlier of the importance of RV's in America, the recreational vehicle as mobile retirement home. There is a need for VR as Virtual Roots for those who must leave their `home' behind, be they in nomadic old age, or like any average American whom we heard moves an average of 17 times, or infirm or otherwise so that they must leave loved home and prized possessions and memorabilia. Tarja Cronberg from the Technology Assessment Unit of the University of Lyngby, speaks of a domestic technology trajectory of 5-10 years, whereby new technology of industry, commerce and, I would add, academia, enter the home within a decade. Products used at work, such as PhotoCD; HyperStudio; Apple digital camera; Astound; Powerpoint; Persuasion; Macromedia Action; Premier; Avid Videoshop; Video Director, will have domestic counterparts developed, while other products, such as Interval Research's developing PostCard, will target the domestic heritage market directly. With cheap digital recording media for home use, huge growth in domestic documentation is predictable, with the multimedia diary offering cheap, readily accessible means.

Now it seems we have the opportunity to draw on all these largely unused and inaccessible treasure troves of domestic observation to make heritage once again a central focus of our home lives. The new technology enables not only access, preservation and control of previous `traditional' documentation, but also the generation of new forms and combinations. I can easily locate a track of my late father playing, digitised from a fragile aluminium recording, and combine it with a cherished photograph. And I can include my own and others' reminiscences, and link to other sounds and images.

Not just photographs and moving image, but letters and documents can be preserved and made accessible, and further, they can be hypertextualised to link to one another, or to anything else. Past homes can be preserved as virtual homes that can be `walked through', with cherished objects -- memorabilia, paintings, sculpture, furniture -- on perpetual display. And all of this can be accessed, for example, via person, place, date or other criteria. What are the implications of this opportunity within a postmodern context that encourages individual reconstructions of the past?

Anttonen notes that postmodernism can be seen as a demand for cultural and semantic heterogeneity. Instead of seeing additions as cultural material passably inherited from one generation to the next, they should be seen as constructs which people create in the present through a symbolically meaningful reference to the past.

The postmodern idea is that cultural reality is not found `around' cultural texts but is realised through and in the texts it produces, that a holistic text is composed of the intersection of several texts and discourses.

What are the potential forms and implications of domestic heritage multimedia, the domestic multimedia album, the home multimedia movie? Conflicting potentials for synthesis or fragmentation in multimedia, as artefact of postmodernism, imply the possible creation of a holistic domestic text through the intersection of several texts or discourses -- but also imply the possible fabrication of a domestic heritage patchwork of only the most glittering fragments stitched together without coherence or empathy. What are the critical issues in domestic documentation? Research on existing forms of domestic documentation is practically non-existent. Chambers (1994) has researched the family album of 1950s Australia, and these findings resonate for other countries at least in the West within that genre, but beyond this, little other research is evident. Multimedia forms of domestic heritage allow the potential to refute, offer alternative stories, descriptions, analyses, suggest individual pathways and historical interpretations. How will this potential be encouraged and realised? What metaphors are appropriate? Must we rely on metaphors from previous domestic documentation-- the family album? Or might we be guided by systems of ethnography?

Will our products be guided by lessons of, for example, the Carrier Indian project, which involved the native American subjects of this multimedia initiative of all ages as participants in construction? Will we involve, for example, all family members, and value the insights of elders as well as children? We would do well in general to consider lessons and advice to be deduced from other recent developments in cultural heritage multimedia in developing our domestic equivalents:

The Hyperkalevala Project , currently under development in Finland, aims to revitalise the oral epic Kalevala, since its linear transcription in 1849, hoping to recapture the dynamism of the oral tradition through the incorporation of sound and picture archives. Several other cultural and historical projects which are either complete or in progress include: My Brighton, The Interactive Community History Project, The Story of Jersey, the Copenhagen Freedom Museum's The German occupation of Denmark, 1940, The Wisconsin Historical Museum's People of the Woodlands, Canoe Making and Old Land, New Land. Glasgow's Glasgow, The Regency Townhouse Museum Project, Nordic Life Today.

Will we dispense with linear chronology and be driven by the technology's potential for non-linear representation? Or will we seek again the fireside tale, allowing coherence to emerge through various linear interpretations in parallel? Will the role of such documentation be information, education, entertainment, therapy... or a combination of all of these? Can templates be constructed to achieve a balance? Will content selection be driven by appearance, by attractiveness, as we represent only a sentimentalised, Dysneyfied post card fiction? Will only the most audio-visually attractive shards be retained as commercially produced multimedia albums become as wedding videos `with knobs', taking us on a nostalgic and again Disneyfied stroll down a selective memory lane, littered with the booty of plundered adornment from our pasts -- an idealisation of the past? Walsh argues that the recent boom in the museum and heritage industry has led to an increasing commercialisation which frequently serves only to distance us from our own heritage. Are we to have the domestication of commercial media or the commercialisation of the domus, the mediazation and showbusinessification of our domestic documentation? Will our multimedia home movies become as TV: a commodification of our memories as they are presented back to us packaged and homogenised?

Wherein lie authenticity, verisimilitude and digital veracity in the postmodern age? Will we be committed to representing bad hair days as well as good, to ethnographic fidelity and authenticity? Or will we reshape the past to suit whosoever present needs? From cosmetic alterations to complete reconstructions, the past becomes never so malleable. Firms already advertise services in digitally removing offending spouses from photographs, giving new meaning to the old song Gonna wash that man right outta my hair

If our identities are in part derived from our shared past, how can we enable this? The shared experiencing of domestic heritage multimedia implies systems which discourage the isolation of individuals in their own constructed domestic memories. Yet, as Cronberg notes, (male) domestic consumer designers seem ready to accept that family members no longer meet anyway, with everyone busy with their own things, so conclude there is no need to design for a reality of shared experience in time, space or cyberspace.

Chambers notes that the construction of the traditional family album, at least in 1950s Australia, has been a female preserve, so that women controlled the selection, sequencing and captioning of family photographic history. How might gender influence the construction of our multimedia domestic history? Tarja Cronberg reminds us that there is no female representation on commercial IT home development: systems are designed by men and ultimately for men. Christine Tamblyn, an author of a CD-rom on technology and women, She Loves It, She Loves It Not, elaborates with alacrity: Because computers have evolved as tools built by men for men to be used in warfare, the current interfaces tend to have a violent, aggressive character. They are hierarchical, mirroring the militaristic male pyramid with its rigid chain of command. Will the new domestic multimedia interfaces be designed by men, and will it be men who totally control the selection, sequencing and captioning of domestic heritage? Perhaps then a case for what Cronberg calls the traditional enlightened resistance of the domestic consumer, so that users' desires rather than technological possibilities become the decisive factors.

Susani argues the case for materiality, and there can be no substitute for the role of smell in helping recall and represent the past, or the physical textuality of leafing through old photographs in a shoebox, locating by accident those which unleash a flood of memories in a way perhaps the precisely accessed virtual artefact never can. These are challenges not only to our technology but also to our humility and sense of appropriateness. This is not to deny that traditional metaphors may be entirely appropriate and comfortable, relating directly to a particular domus, so that an image of a certain drawer, for instance, or trunk opened serves as interface to the treasured archive.

Although it represents a technology that can be appropriated for use at local, community level, developed by and for a particular culture or subculture, and employing its own particular significations, multimedia also can be regarded as culturally biased, a mass-communication product dripping with the values of the American technical culture that designed it. Visual clues signify meaning, often culturally derived messages, which become duplicated globally, as culturally imperialistic as Coca-Cola. The appropriateness of its imposition as a pre-cast template of Western cultural values should be critically examined.

Finally, we should look to the sharing of ordinary lives across community and cultures. Already, family pictures are appearing on Home Pages of the World Wide Web, and there would seem value, in terms of grassroots cross-community and cross-cultural understanding and identification, as well as for purely sociological and historic research, to encourage the sharing of our domestic past across community and culture. Jerome Bruner noted the value of selective historic and remote ethnographic study in order to contextualise and stimulate reflection on the current and familiar. Such a project would benefit in terms of identification and understanding not only the recipients abroad, but the originators `at home'. Are we ready for a digital European and world-wide domestic cultural heritage exchange?