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Paper short abstract

We explore how animations can convey sensory experiences and narratives of study participants as an engaging medium of reporting intangible cultural heritage associated with physical sites. The animations are grounded in ethnographic analysis of walking interviews, storytelling and archival data.

Paper long abstract

This presentation discusses how embodied, multisensory, and narrative knowledge generated by multimodal ethnographic methods can be translated into immersive audiovisual narratives that afford space for multivocality. To target the need for developing methods of reporting narrative inquiries through narrative representations, we introduce immersive installations of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) associated with sites, captured through multisensory methods combined with storytelling.

In the INT-ACT project, we are exploring emotional, experiential, and environmental dimensions of ICH related to cultural heritage sites. We use our multimodally generated ethnographic material for creating site-related audiovisual eXtended Reality (XR) exhibitions, used with local participants in case studies on different social challenges. In Scotland, we conducted on-site walking interviews at Calanais stone circles, and a transgenerational storytelling workshop about personal experiences of megalithic sites. In the Koli National Park in Finland, we combined recorded nature walks with artists and archival folklore data. In both sites, the resulting narratives were thematically analyzed for the creation of compilations presented multimodally. Here we focus on how the medium of animation can be used to narrate and convey different sensory experiences identified through personal narratives, as well as mythical stories into an affective mode of engagement.

We will show short animations created to communicate different perspectives to ICH, including feelings of timelessness, fears and hopes for the future, and environmental moods, related to ancient standing stones and extra-ordinary natural sites. Our aim is to better understand how such representations can make site-related ICH imagined, felt, experienced and shared across time and place.