My Grandfather's Journals. No 1. from Aisling Musgrove on Vimeo.
Video!
So, as a rough draft, this afternoon I made a little video of some of my classmates reading out some of the journal, and then cut it together. It's a bit rough and ready, as it was made in iMovie, and there is talking in the background. Some of the longer passages definitely need breaking up, however I think it's a good place to begin. Also, I was thinking of the idea of the public and the private, whether it will be different when family members rather than complete strangers [to my Granddad] read it.
Scans
I scanned in the first five pages from one of the journals, one from 1945, but got slightly worried about the front cover ripping off, so I stopped, but I'm going to do more (very carefully) soon, I think. The pages themselves scanned really nicely, and really give a feel for the texture and colour of the original, with the creases in the paper and folds at the edge of pages. I tried them out on watercolour style photo paper, which gives the pages a good weight, and then with normal printer paper, which doesn't feel quite as special, but still reproduces the pages well.
Me stopping because of the pages ripping brings up an interesting issue; do you allow the original to possible be damaged, to preserve it? and as a large question for the brief, is it better to simply accept that all objects have their time in the world, and at some point they either get lost or damaged. I think it's kind of interesting parallel with prolonging human life, whether the quality of life is better or not. I guess with objects it's more about preserving than prolonging.
Any way, slightly off topic. I think while scanning is good, it doesn't exactly work for a project, by itself, which wasn't the intention. but it was an experiment.
Me stopping because of the pages ripping brings up an interesting issue; do you allow the original to possible be damaged, to preserve it? and as a large question for the brief, is it better to simply accept that all objects have their time in the world, and at some point they either get lost or damaged. I think it's kind of interesting parallel with prolonging human life, whether the quality of life is better or not. I guess with objects it's more about preserving than prolonging.
Any way, slightly off topic. I think while scanning is good, it doesn't exactly work for a project, by itself, which wasn't the intention. but it was an experiment.
Catch up blogging
I have a new project now. Slow Down is post-poned until the weather gets better and there are more people down on South Bank. Now I'm working on a project which was set in conjunction with the Microsoft Research Lab, and some of the full time people will be going up there to present their projects soon.
The idea was to look at networks in crisis and to design something for this crisis. It's a really open-ended brief as it doesn't even set out what kind of format the response needs to be in, but the first part of research was done in groups and then we could either continue in a group of split off and do our own thing. My group looked the crisis in networks of communication, particularly with the internet, with one focus being people who don't want to use the internet for communicating and why they don't want to; mainly misunderstanding, privacy issues and the impersonality.
After splitting off from the group, I wanted to focus on looking at the issues with digital communication compared to more traditional forms, and inherent problems/issues with both. I hadn't really settled on anything, until I went on holiday to Ireland, and saw my Granddad, who recently had two strokes and has vascular dementia, so his memory is very poor. He had a lot of journals from the 1940's and 50's from time spent on ships between England and Sri Lanka and India, which he was reading, as a prop to help him remember.
So, initially I thought these were a great example of an old forum of communication, and they gave a beautifully detailed description of what life was like. In addition to this, they are starting to fade, so my Granny wanted me to type them up, so they can have another copy, which I think was an interesting way of preserving an artefact, because part of the charm of the journals is seeing the handwriting and the physicality of it, which would be somewhat lost in translation to a digital copy. At the same time, the ideas, thoughts and stories will be better preserved by having them typed up, and printed out, so there is then three different version of it.
With all the considered my project is going to be looking at ways of re-interpreting and representing artefacts such as old journals etc to preserve them, but in other ways than just typing them up. I guess it becomes about a variety of crisis within networks; of the material object, of memory, of communication and to some extent, family, as quite a few of my family members are using the journals as ways of addressing my Grandfather's failing memory, and how it impacts them.
And these are the journals:
The idea was to look at networks in crisis and to design something for this crisis. It's a really open-ended brief as it doesn't even set out what kind of format the response needs to be in, but the first part of research was done in groups and then we could either continue in a group of split off and do our own thing. My group looked the crisis in networks of communication, particularly with the internet, with one focus being people who don't want to use the internet for communicating and why they don't want to; mainly misunderstanding, privacy issues and the impersonality.
After splitting off from the group, I wanted to focus on looking at the issues with digital communication compared to more traditional forms, and inherent problems/issues with both. I hadn't really settled on anything, until I went on holiday to Ireland, and saw my Granddad, who recently had two strokes and has vascular dementia, so his memory is very poor. He had a lot of journals from the 1940's and 50's from time spent on ships between England and Sri Lanka and India, which he was reading, as a prop to help him remember.
So, initially I thought these were a great example of an old forum of communication, and they gave a beautifully detailed description of what life was like. In addition to this, they are starting to fade, so my Granny wanted me to type them up, so they can have another copy, which I think was an interesting way of preserving an artefact, because part of the charm of the journals is seeing the handwriting and the physicality of it, which would be somewhat lost in translation to a digital copy. At the same time, the ideas, thoughts and stories will be better preserved by having them typed up, and printed out, so there is then three different version of it.
With all the considered my project is going to be looking at ways of re-interpreting and representing artefacts such as old journals etc to preserve them, but in other ways than just typing them up. I guess it becomes about a variety of crisis within networks; of the material object, of memory, of communication and to some extent, family, as quite a few of my family members are using the journals as ways of addressing my Grandfather's failing memory, and how it impacts them.
And these are the journals:
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