Pico-Palimpsests: Animating Projected Pasts

This presentation will present the research "Projekt-Project" from Coventry University. Conceived as an investigation into "disruptive media learning", it explores the use of image projections from portable Pico data projectors to animate memory sites for both artistic and pedagogical purposes. Images of and from the past are projected in small scale on selected sites, for and by UK media and performance staff and students, on educational walking tours in Berlin.

This method encourages participants to
• Interrogate unfamiliar historic/memory sites with images and light
• Interrogate lived experience with flexible mediated images
• Immerse subjectivities in representations of historic processes
• Connect performance techniques with urban environment

Sample feedback such as, "I felt like I was part of a part of the history of the site," "I can remember the specific pictures and images at which site they were presented - some of them are burnt onto my eyes," points to a range of interlinked new perceptual relationships in participants.

Drawing on theoretical literature on the technological mediation of memory including De Simine (2013) and Huyssen (2003) the paper will argue that by using the fluidity of the projected digital image in public space, combined with walking and talking, the projections activate new combinations of sensory, affective and imaginative response. These occur as palimpsests of dynamic meaning between image, site and participant; realigning subjective perceptions of time, space and place.

In response to the metaphor of "interweaving cultures" in this conference call, this paper will argue that "Projekt-Project" realigns visitor relationships to unfamiliar historic sites, in a novel "warp and weft" of reciprocal animation.