The past remains essential - and inescapable. A quarter-century after the publication of his classic account of man's attitudes to his past, David Lowenthal revisits how we celebrate, expunge, contest and domesticate the past to serve present needs. He shows how nostalgia and heritage now pervade every facet of public and popular culture. History embraces nature and the cosmos as well as humanity. The past is seen and touched and tasted and smelt as well as heard and read about. Empathy, re-enactment, memory and commemoration overwhelm traditional history. A unified past once certified by experts and reliant on written texts has become a fragmented, contested history forged by us all. New insights into history and memory, bias and objectivity, artefacts and monuments, identity and authenticity, and remorse and contrition, make this book once again the essential guide to the past that we inherit, reshape and bequeath to the future.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2325548X.2017.1315261

The Past Is a Foreign Country - Revisited

The author considers the ideas behind her series of temporary audio (and video) installations collectively entitled A Record of Fear, made for the site of Orford Ness on the Suffolk coast....

Notes on A Record of Fear: On the Threshold of the Audible

discourse on the use and misuse of history. Many take refuge in the past as an antidote to present disappointments and future fears. They hark back nostalgically or formulaically to the fancied benefits, even to the fearsome burdens, of times of lost purity and simplicity, lapsed immediacy and certitude, in some Golden Age of classical serenity, Christian faith, pastoral plenitude, or childhood innocence. Sojourning in the past seems preferable to living in the present. And given the mounting surfeit of heritage sites and structures, more and more of the past is accessible. Critics find the collective legacy crushingly voluminous, backward looking, and crippling to present enterprise. Fifty years ago architectural historian Reyner Banham condemned “the load of obsolete buildings that Europe is humping along on its shoulders [as] a bigger drag on the live culture of our continent than obsolete nationalisms or obsolete moral codes.”1 The load is now heavier. In much of England one feels hardly ever out of sight of a listed building, a protected archaeological site, a museumworthy work of art. The treasured past is said to overwhelm French culture and politics. “Everything is indiscriminately conserved and archived,” notes a historian of the patrimony.2 “We no longer make history,” charges Jean Baudrillard. “We protect it like an endangered masterpiece.”3 The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas calls preservation a dangerous epidemic. Noting that UNESCO and similar bodies sequester one-sixth of the Earth’s surface, with more to come, he terms heritage a metastasizing cancer.4 The popular alternative to wallowing in the past is to dismiss it entirely. The past has ever-diminishing salience for lives driven by today’s feverish demands and delights. The sensory-laden penchant for computer gaming, coupled with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, betoken a hereand-now environment dominated by raw sensations, in which “we live perpetually in the present.”5 Being up-to-date now not only matters most, it is all that matters; knowing or understanding the past is an impediment in the present rat race. Thus, for some, the past becomes the only worthwhile time, while for others it seems of little if any account. Yet these two takes, which seem utterly at odds, reflect the same overriding tendency to fold past within present. Both nostalgists and amnesiacs smudge the line between then and now. Whether all-consuming or overlooked, betokening everything or nothing, the past is less and less distinguishable from the present. For the general public, to be sure, the past was never a foreign country. Significantly, the 1971 film script of L.P. Hartley’s The Go-Between omits his second sentence, “they did things differently there,” and shuns its implications.6 The cinematic past is not foreign or different. History vanishes; change is only life-cycle nostalgia. So, too, with most docudramas. Beyond their costumes, characters differ only in age and gender and status; the same motives and mentalities animate medieval as modern folk, elemental passions enacted on a timeless stage. The past is ever more comprehensively domesticated. “Just as easy travel eroded the differences between one country and another, and between one world and another,” say Douglas Adams’s time travelers, so we are now “eroding the differences between one age and another. The past is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.”7 Fiction that mimics history without being historical—Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1999), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Hari Kunzru’s Gods without Men (2011)—“inserts the contemporary reader into other locations and times, while leaving no doubt that its viewpoint is relentlessly modern and speaks entirely of our extreme present,” observes Douglas Coupland.8 In the Internet universe, past, present, and future coexist at once. Past and present are increasingly spoken of alike in the present tense. A British broadcaster interviews an aging celebrity about his past. “So, you’re a young undergraduate uncertain about the direction your life should take.”9 The false nowness presages the extinction of the past tense. The past itself becomes more and more like the ongoing present: messy, inchoate, and inconclusive. Whereas previous purveyors of history sought to order and explain, bringing coherence that made the past quite unlike the present, recent historiography stresses complexity and contradiction, disparate viewpoints, and inherent uncertainties, much like those that afflict the ongoing present. CONTENTS

The Past Made Present

This article provides an overview of initial discussions emerging from the Creative Methods Network, an informal organisation concerned with the use of the creative arts in research, teaching and practice in health and social care. Key issues are presented and contextualised with regard to the current conditions in which health and social care research and education is practised. Our own discussions have come to question the seeming dominance of governance within professional education programmes in which there is a primary focus on developing technical skill and capacity. Such governance often extends itself to the measurement of the implementation of these technical skills and this is set against concerns about the absence of creativity and the humanities in the educational programmes of caring for human beings. Consequently, the article reflects a view that the use of the creative arts and humanities in the education of the human caring professions is being eroded away in favour of technical-rational r...

/pdf/creative-methods-problematics-for-inquiry-and-pedagogy-in-4uko2k1n12.pdf

Creative Methods: Problematics for Inquiry and Pedagogy in Health and Social Care

Rover is a mechatronic imaging device inserted into quotidian space, transforming the sights and sounds of the everyday through its peculiar modes of machine perception. Using computational light field photography and machine listening, it creates a kind of cinema following the logic of dreams: suspended but mobile, familiar yet infinitely variable in detail. Rover draws on diverse traditions of robotic exploration, landscape and still-life depiction, and audio field recording to create a hybrid form between photography and cinema. This paper describes the mechatronic, machine perception, and audio-visual synthesis techniques developed for the piece.

Transforming the commonplace through machine perception: light field synthesis and audio feature extraction in the rover project

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