Crit Feedback

Notes from feedback today with (the amazing) Tanya:

• Discourse on new forms of memory preservation
• As the centenary is approaching, people will want to commemorate. People are going to do tried and true methods—which may not be connecting with users in new ways, simply recycling it.
• Gaynor Kavanagh—dream spaces memory and museum. READ
• CP: connecting and empathizing of a past event through the forgotten senses.
• Sensory output is usually limited to audio/visual. What about taste, smell, touch? Forgotten senses.
• How can smell create a sense of place—eg smell dirt to fabricate/frame the context.
• Do I focus only on the forgotten senses or all of the senses; but prioritizing the 3?
• Transition of food over time: degrade or amplified. Time ration of  the day, eg food released only at certain periods, even if you are starving to simulate sense of place. See Blake Fall-Conroy's Minimum Wage Machine.
  

• Story told by victims vs reality that happened.
• Generational diminish of story as they filter down.

The war took more than 100,000 New Zealanders overseas, many for the first time. Some anticipated a great adventure but found the reality very different. Being so far from home made these New Zealanders very aware of who they were and where they were from. In battle they were able to compare themselves with men from other nations. Out of this came a sense of a separate identity, and many New Zealand soldiers began to refer to themselves as ‘Kiwis’. 

'New Zealand and the First World War', URL: http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/first-world-war-overview/introduction, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 5-Apr-2013

Almost 60% of the 100,000 New Zealanders who went to war became casualties. More than 18,000 died of wounds or disease – 12,483 of them in France and Belgium. From a population of little more than a million people in 1914, this meant that about one in four New Zealand men between the ages of 20 and 45 was either killed or wounded.

'The human impact - Passchendaele', URL: http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/new-zealanders-in-belgium/soldiers-stories, (Ministry for Culture and Heritage), updated 20-Dec-2012

On daily life and food 

You had no soap. We never washed. Our knife and fork and spoon you dug it into the earth and then wiped the dirt off it, just clean any grease that might be on it. Bully beef in tins, that’s what we were living on and you’d put the tea in the lid and the stew that was stewed up in the other part, and when you’d finished it you cleaned it as well as you could and put it on your belt and waited for the next meal. When we were in the front line we used to get a piece of bread and that was our food for the 24 hours while we were there. And then we had dixies, we used go back and get tea, of a sort. And of course you couldn’t drink any of the water without it was tested because everything was poisoned before we got there.

Life on the battlefield Pictures


To look at:
Diaryhttp://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-CoxDiar-t1-body-d7.html
http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/media/video/gallipoli-diary

http://www.nzhistory.net.nz/war/researching-first-world-war-soldiers

Gaynor Kavanaghhttp://books.google.co.nz/books?id=xxuKLVrH0yEC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=gaynor+kavanagh+dream+spaces+memory+and+museum&source=bl&ots=svZyGLZIIc&sig=1twmtWraOYJrM__0ZvdHpGm7UYI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vnKMUbXsJIWgigeCnoD4DQ&redir_esc=y