Practising Heritage: Weaving Actions and Meaning in the Silence of the Lands
Elisa Giaccardi · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2014
The Silence of the Lands , a project initiated by the author in Boulder, Colorado in 2005 and completed in 2010, enabled people to capture and share sonic experiences of the natural environment in which they live, and use these experiences as conversation pieces of a social dialogue about the places they share. The project encouraged people to connect experientially and to unfold new understandings of the places in which they live — thus giving voice to a broad repertoire of personal experiences and interpretations with more than 1300 sonic experiences being collected. Its goal was to investigate how aspects of physicality, interpretation and ascribed value combine to produce and evolve people’s meanings and affects in their encounters with natural heritage. Participants in Silence of the Lands could capture their sonic experiences with a GPS-equipped field-recording device, and then create, share and remix soundscapes of the places where sounds were recorded. The result was an acoustic map that changed over time according to people’s perceptions and interpretations of their environmental setting. By combining mobile computing, collaborative web mapping and a tangible social interface, the project combined elements of sensorial experience, memory and imagination to create an engaging social dialogue, and sustain it over time. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.