This community-engaged public art initiative is dedicated to preserving and mapping memories and experiences into an accessible network.
ID.project challenges the static nature of traditional public art by emphasizing the fluid and evolving nature of collective memory. Through collaboration with locals and the sharing of stories and histories, this project aims to extend beyond historical monuments and traditional narratives that dominate general public memory. It seeks to uncover the layers embedded in everyday life -- weaving connections between people, housing, the environment, and the future, and through that process, create a more inclusive and nuanced understanding of a place's identity.
This network is designed to acknowledge the interplay between ecology and cultural memory. ID.project amplifies links between the land and the people who inhabit it, acknowledging the land as a living, evolving entity that holds constellations of histories that imprint upon us.
ID. employs QR codes on ceramic tiles and installs them to notable sites. Each of these QR codes hyperlinks the location to a capsule of memory, containing a colloquially unique history told by a resident in a short video interview. These mini “landmarks” are located in often-overlooked places; an off-the-beaten-path street corner, a Mom & Pop shop, your grandma’s home. Every interview becomes a personal marker and a constructive pathway for connecting people to the fabric of a place. The mode for enabling these personal histories is to point one’s mobile camera at the QR code. By this simple action, all who happen upon these sites can readily watch the embedded content and be part of an accessible collective memory.
"The passing of oral histories is an ancient tradition that predates written language and technology and was a method for advancing the wisdom of tribal elders. Today, in an era quickly being shaped by artificial intelligence, where identity has become more and more comparable to a code, ID. uses QR technology to bring it back to human singularity.” —Anna Frants
With certain advances made over the centuries, we've deemed what histories are to be preserved based on large-scale impacts and influences - often losing small-scale reflections. This oral history project is to encourage us to cherish the smaller details that constitute our identities as humans and preserve the voices of those that often fade away.
As ID.project evolves into hundreds of non-monuments scattered around communities, augmenting physical spaces, and enabling connection of both the physical and the virtual community, an interactive emotional mapping system will be developed, slated to be available online in the near future.
ID. was realized and fostered during ID:CYFEST12 The International Media Art Festival, and later became an independent project curated by Isabella Indolfi and Paige King, geared towards examining how environment informs identity.
