WORK 
Pervasive Monuments
Just how do we remember? How do we express this physically in space, and in public? Monuments are how we’ve done this since mankind has first started walking this earth. Most of the time however, monuments, like history, are written by the victors and those with the money and the power to make their memory the loudest.
Pervasive Monuments began as the Spomenik project in 2006 at the Royal College of Art, but in reality began while I was working with Dave Kirk ( now a lecturer in Human-Computer Interaction at Nottingham University) at Microsoft Research Cambridge where we were both working on the Family Archive project. Dave’s interest coincided quite accidentally with mine in memory, family and the digital and after four long years Pervasive Monuments is now in full swing now being run by Horizon Digital Economy Research out of University of Nottingham and began officially 10 Mar 2010. Dave says best just how we’re doing it:
The basic premise of the project is to explore how digital data can be repurposed in pursuit of the development of ‘Pervasive Monuments’. Pervasive Monuments are digital services / experiences which act as digital memorials (delivered potentially in both online and ubiquitous mobile formats) to specific groups of people. With this in mind we propose the development of two monuments (building on significant collaborations we have established), ‘Urwibutso’ and ‘Spomenik’, which, respectively, act as memorials to those killed in the 1994 Rwandan Genocide and Post WWII Stalinist purges in the former Yugoslavia. The project explores how such services / experiences should be developed, understanding their basic technological requirements, and the requirements of key stakeholders in their production (memorial associations, victims, relatives, users more broadly defined such as non-associated visitors to a memorial, governmental bodies, NGOs, educational services etc.), implements them as interactive experiences and then studies the user response to these experiences, in-the-wild. This will allow us to actively engage with and explore new forms of digital economy service (with an emphasis here on cultural aspects of the digital economy) and critically engage with some of the core ethical issues of Horizon’s program, namely the repurposing and longevity of digital data.
