Making Pasts: Investigating the Sustainability of Family Stories in a Digital Age

Abstract

“Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance, on account of their scars.” (La Jetée)

Individuals have always spun tales from their experiences, and passed these stories down the generations orally and in the form of artefacts. Photograph albums, home movies or cine films, embroideries, quilts, letters and diaries – these artefacts are used to construct the family’s identity, and to fabricate collective memories.

Some of these craft activities have had a particular gender bias. The heirloom quilt often documents the women that made it; fragments of fabric representative of particular times and places, spliced together to form a picture of the individuals that crafted it. Embroideries handed down through the generations with stories inherently attached to them at each stage. Men have more often been responsible for crafting family stories through the lens, the ‘familial gaze’ of the stills or cine camera, capturing the family on film then later screening these fragments for the family members to collectively reshape the memories, to re-create, to re-remember. What these activities have in common is that they require craft skill and creativity. They are technologies of mark-making, fabrication, editing and memory-making that can be felt, held, passed around, and that have some durability.
This paper seeks to examine whether the digital age allows for artefacts of memory. It investigates our reliance on digital media to store our memories and identities, and whilst celebrating the obvious democratisation of image making that the digital age has allowed us, seeks to question the assumed durability of identity afforded us by the Internet. As our mark making becomes digital, relying on uploads, digital storage and blogging, should we seek to make a more permanent archive of our memories? Third wave feminism celebrated the liberatory potential offered by the Internet for new modes of communication and power. Yet the matrix has perhaps failed in its promise of emancipation and has instead allowed us only the chance to commodify our selves, our memories, our families and our visual records of family stories into a digital black hole with a semblance of permanence that is completely inadequate.

This study puts forward the notion that there is a need to explore more permanent means of capturing family stories. It suggests a return to the celebration of learned craft skills, embracing the creation of artefacts, re-awakening the notion of hands-on creativity and mark-making as crucial core elements of self awareness. It questions the legitimacy of the digital alternative that fails in its potential to leave a real mark, and proposes that the sustainability of memories and family stories is achievable only through tactility.