'Heritage Site' (2016), in Media Archaeology - Excavations, NEoN Digital Arts Festival 2017

'NEoN proposes that artists are future media archaeologists, recorders of our current information-based society, and time-travelers highlighting the continued relevance of our long past. This exhibition will show how digital art and technology is understood now and will be in the future, in the creation of shared cultural experiences. NEoN anticipates that by putting artists’ concerns at the heart of our investigation of technological media, a more complex picture of the material culture of the digital age will emerge. Join us as we dig for the digital, brush the dirt off the non-material, and excavate the Internet. Joseph DeLappe (USA) William (Bill) Miller (USA) VOID (Belgium) Verity Birt (UK) Olia Lialina (Russia/Germany) Claire Hentschker (USA) Nicky Bird (UK) Patrick Lichty (USA/UAE) Adam Lockhart and Rhoda Ellis (UK) Elke Reinhuber (Germany/Singapore) Morehshin Allahyari (Iran/USA) Ele Carpenter (UK) Co-curated by NEoN (Clare Brennan, Sarah Cook, Mark Daniels and Donna Holford-Lovell). In partnership with Weave: Creativity, Community, Collaboration by Abertay University.' NEoN 2017: https://northeastofnorth.com/event/media-archaeology-excavations/ A new media art and archaeology project, 'Heritage Site' (2014-2016) centred on a major industrial heritage landmark in central Scotland known as the ‘Five Sisters’ on the edge of West Calder, a small town in West Lothian. Two hundred and forty metres high, the Five Sisters are spoil heaps (or ‘bings’), products of the oil shale mining industry active in this area in the nineteenth century. Since the demise of this industry the site has been the subject of various Land Art, Geo-Science, and community-led town planning activities. Once considered eyesores, the Five Sisters have now completed their transformation from utilitarian industrial structures to being a nationally recognised heritage site by being given Scheduled Ancient Monument status in the 1990s. This fascinating transformation was the context for the project, which was provoked by local community memory of a house that is buried deep within the Five Sisters bing. This living memory – belonging to the familial, domestic sphere - will soon become ‘history’ as a generation passes. In terms of intangible cultural heritage and social identity, as well as the practicalities of visualising an impossible to reach site, the project faced compelling challenges leading to two questions: how can the practices of new media art and heritage visualisation come together to investigate this site of layered histories and shifting identity politics? How did Heritage Site work with fact and hard evidence as well as memory, imagination, and speculation