The Fairmount Miracle

In Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture, Alison Landsberg presents a different perspective with which to view the relationship between experiential history, mass media and collective memory. Landsberg lumps together a diverse array of novels, museums, television dramas and movies for their ability to create 'prosthetic memories,' which provide an audience with some understanding or experience of a history that they are not connected to. From the outset, Landberg's background in film and literature rather than traditional academic historiography is apparent. Nevertheless, it's a useful text to expand the boundaries of ideas we can incorporate into discussions of public history and media.

Landsberg opens the text up with two creative cinematic examples that deal with memory, Blade Runner and Total Recall. The central characters in both works grapple with 'inorganic' memories of experience that are either stripped from them or artificially added to their archive of experience. The implication it sets is that the modern consumer of new media can be affected with additive or subtractive memory much like the main characters in the films. This analysis is applied to three major historical issues, immigration and assimilation, slavery and the African-American experience and the Holocaust. 'Prosthetic memory' is used to different ends and distinct affects with regard to each. In the case of immigration it was used to create a new distinctly American identity but with slavery to try and mend the severed familial ties to pass down history. With regard to the Holocaust, it is used to create an understanding for an audience which shares no connection.

More so than any other reading, there were a variety of implications for a video project I've been working with. The Philadelphia-based Termite TV Collective (of which I'm a member) has been creating site-specific video pieces that are to be viewed on a hand-held device like an iPod or mobile phone with video capabilities. Although it's not specifically the type of experiential media Landsberg writes about, it's a logical extension of those ideas. The Termite TV pieces are open ended in their aim with some being more performance based or rooted solely in artistic expression but some occasionally confronting historic narratives or recording memory.

One of the pieces I collaborated on a year and a half ago somewhat playfully attempted to explore an event that had happened in Fairmount Park a few decades prior. The participant has to walk through the space with primary source material bridging the temporal gap. Although I wouldn't expect you to watch the whole thing (it's slow when not walked!) you can view parts of it here:



The video gradually leads the participant to a bush in Fairmount Park where in 1953 a vision of the Virgin Mary had reportedly appeared to two neighborhood children sending thousands flocking to the bush. Although Fairmount Miracle doesn't address a historic trauma or engage the history of a specific demographic or ethnicity, there are strains of Landberg's work or those covered in the book that intersect with the piece. Most notably it creates a 'transferential space -in which people are invited to enter into experiential relationships in which they did not live.' (p. 113) Much of how it unravels we hope encourages participatory engagement with the surroundings. It's shot from the point of view of the participant (you and the device) and tries to incorporate other senses (such as touch) that extend past the traditional cinematic experience. Although, there are three competing temporal spaces (the present, the time it was shot and the time presented by the primary source material) it pits the black and white photos against the color of the present to contrast the two time periods, another device Landsberg alludes to with Schindler's List.

Although this is brief and perhaps an oversimplified comparison, I'm sure I will create similar work in the future where I'll have to consider how to frame an issue in this format. Fairmount Miracle isn't confronting an issue with the moral heft that any of the issues covered in the text but leads me to question what types of challenges I'd be presented with in trying to do so.