Dear Carnegie Hall: Utilising Digital Technologies to Unlock Multiple Perspectives of the Past

Abstract

Accounts of history inherently vary. This single-piece exploration investigates how digital media technologies – specifically, an app – can be used to capture the complexities of understanding a history’s multiple perspectives and perceptions. Dear Carnegie Hall is an interactive storytelling app commissioned by Carnegie Hall in New York to commemorate the music venue’s 125th anniversary. This project was a collaboration between researcher and app producer Ruth Farrar and Barney Heywood and Lucy Telling from Stand + Stare: an interactive design company based in the UK.

In terms of process, Dear Carnegie Hall applies app, image recognition and augmented reality technologies in conjunction with archive material and messages from patrons, backstage staff and audience members. The project provides an original contribution to the emerging trend of museums and galleries mediating digital technologies in apps to create new modes of understanding history. Such apps typically provide a one-way channel of sharing history from the organisation’s app to attendee (see ‘British Museum Visitor Guide’ app (2016) and ‘Uffizi Gallery’, Florence (2017)). In contrast, ‘Dear Carnegie Hall’ explores how the affordances of an app can provide for a more democratic approach to narrating the stories of history. As well as the app curating stories of Carnegie Hall’s past, the user is also able to record an audio postcard (Farrar, 2015) of their personal story and experiences of Carnegie Hall, which in turn aimed to position the app as that which broadened the diversity of the venue. Dear Carnegie Hall thus demonstrates how using new digital technologies can encourage a sense of play with the seemingly fixed stories of history, which led to its users commenting on a deeper understanding of the organisation’s history.