Edinburgh and Environs, A review of the 1960 edition of the "Ward Lock & Co's Illustrated Guide Book" to the Scottish Capital

Last Thursday we could not chance on with our tutors, since the session with Chris Hand extended past "the one o'clock gun". Nevertheless, we will hopefully narrow down our ideas into one specific project by this week's class, and hence hold a much more furtive encounter with them.

Our original thoughts traverse two main lines of action, as Mei quoted previously:

1) Memory Map of the participants' appropriation of Edinburgh's environment

2) Geomapped story

Merging this ideas, I want to propose a way of reincorporating both the geographical and the mnemonic, as well as the literary and documentary aspects into one single narrative.

Broadstrokes of the proposal

The first week of my residence in Edinburgh I bought a re-print of a vintage travel book of Auld Reekie (Old Smokey): "A Pictorial and Descriptive Guide to Edinburgh". There are two sections of the pocket book in which I would like to focus: "The Story of Edinburgh", and "How to See Edinburgh". The first one includes an overall review of the history of the city, and the second comprises seven tours of the main attractions. My proposal is to "revisit" this guide and build an interactive multimedia environment both of the general historic features of the town and the tours.

The initial idea I have follows the logic behind MIT's interactive documentary Jerome B. Wiesner: A Random Walk through the Twentieth Century, "where a chessboard like structure, a 'Keyword Grid', is displayed on the Web Page to enable the viewer to map out the 'hyper-portrait' of Wiesner. The Grid marks out the 'time periods' of Weisner's life; the central themes of his lifes activities and the most significant people that affected him (family, friends and colleagues). The viewer, by clicking the mouse on the Keyword Grid, activates the 'Material Listing' of video clips and text documents. The Wiesner hyper-portrait not only enables the viewer to steer their own course through the documentary, but it has the facility for viewers to add their own personal contribution to the piece" (Wright, 2003: 188).

[Source: Wright, T. (2003). "The 'Creative Treatment of Actuality': Visions and Revision in Representing Truth. In Thomas and Penz (ed.), Architectures of Illusion: From Motion Pictures to Navigable Interactive Environments. Intellect Books, UK.]

Emanating from this approach towards the life of expired MIT's president (and the sources quoted by Mei and the tutors/previous participants of the Memory Traces), a transposition of this form of interactive documentary could be imagined for our project, but instead of a historical character, we would be taking the city of Edinburgh as the "object/subject" of our documentation. The initial 'blueprint' will be the aforementioned guidebook, and the realisation will compose a redefinition and retracing of both the seven tours and the main historical forces overlapping through these trajectories, involving the sites and people composing them. It should be added that, as active agents performing appropriations of the city landscape, our own perspective is crucial in the shaping of the final piece. In this line of though, the remediation of the "pictorial and descriptive" would be done –at least initially– through our own personal 'viewing', 'reading', and 'retelling' of Edinburgh.

At this point, the project could follow two distinct directions: either (a) regular documentation (including photographs, texts and video interviews or sequences of activity at different times of the day), or (b) the construction of a dramatic narrative (involving both participants as the main performers, or through the creation of a protagonist -I have been working with an actress/theatre directress which could help us out incarnating a previous character that I have imagined, and with whom she is already familiarised).

Either way, if the project gets the green light, we should address two main functions that could be distributed between Mei and myself: art/design director and 'script' director or writer. For our interests and backgrounds, Mei would undertake the design baton, and myself the writing bit. Both would have to be, if it is necessary to indicate, in constant dialogue and interaction, which means that the decisions will be taken as a team in most occasions.

So, Mei, what are your thoughts on this idea?