Narrative Archeology
Definition
Narrative archaeology is the practice of treating a physical location as a site containing layers of story — recovering the histories, uses and events embedded in a place and making them accessible in situ through locative media.
The term was coined by the American writer and locative media artist Jeremy Hight, in connection with the work 34 North 118 West.[1]
34 North 118 West
The founding work, made by Hight with Jeff Knowlton and Naomi Spellman and first shown in 2002–03, is generally counted as one of the earliest locative narratives.[2] Participants walked an area of the industrial district of downtown Los Angeles carrying a tablet computer with GPS and headphones. As they crossed invisible boundaries in the street, fragments of narrative played — voices, sounds and texts drawn from the history of the railyards and factories that had stood there.
The design decision that matters is that there was no path and no order. The story existed as a field distributed across the terrain, and each walker assembled a different version of it by moving. Reading became navigation.
The Argument
Hight's claim is that every place is already a text that has been written over many times. A street contains the traces of what was demolished, what was rerouted, who worked there, what the land was before it was a street. Ordinarily these layers are inaccessible — visible only to a historian, or not at all. Locative technology makes it possible to annotate the terrain itself, so that the layers can be encountered in the position they refer to, by a person standing in it.
The archaeological metaphor is doing specific work. It implies that the material is genuinely there rather than invented; that recovering it requires excavation and interpretation; that the layers are stratified, with the most recent nearest the surface; and that the record is partial, because most of what happened left no trace.
Related Practices
Narrative archaeology sits alongside a cluster of related terms from the same period: locative narrative, annotated space, spatial storytelling, and the earlier tradition of psychogeography and the dérive (see Guy Debord). It differs from most augmented reality in emphasis: AR typically adds a synthetic layer, while narrative archaeology claims to reveal an existing one.
Relevance to Cyborg Anthropology
The practice is an early, articulate answer to a question the location-aware industry answered differently. Given the technical capacity to attach information to coordinates, the commercial answer was to attach commerce — reviews, offers, check-ins. Hight's answer was to attach memory. The comparison is instructive, and the concept remains a usable design brief for anyone building on location today.
Note also the resonance with persistent paleontology: both take an excavation metaphor for the recovery of buried material, one applied to terrain and one to personal archives.
Related Reading
- Beyond Locative Media
- Guy Debord
- Persistent Paleontology
- Yi-Fu Tuan
- Geocloaking
- Intimations of Everyday Life: Ubiquitous Computing and the City
References
- ↑ Hight, Jeremy. "Narrative Archaeology." Streetnotes; see also the discussion in electronic book review.
- ↑ 34 North 118 West.
