Ghosts of South Carolina College

An Antebellum Augmented Reality Application

This upcoming iPhone application is designed to bring USC's largely unknown history of slavery literally into view. Our project enables participants to interact with ghostly inhabitants of the antebellum campus by using augmented reality to mediate between past and present.

Our goal is to honor the enslaved people who built and maintained the university, recuperating their historical erasure by giving voice to the human story of those in bondage. Grace Hagood, University of South Carolina

Attention and Memory in Augmented Reality

The video gamer acts in his world. It is participatory theater par excellence. But he must also, to improve his performance, become a student of his own attention and the attention structure designed into the game. He must become, that is, an economist of attention, studying his performance even while he is immersed in it or in a high-frequency oscillation between the two states. Richard Lanham, The Economies of Attention

According to the fading theory, the trace or mark a memory etches into your brain is like a path you make in the woods when you continually walk along the same route. If you don't take that same path, it eventually becomes overgrown until it disappears. In the same way, facts that you learn are forgotten when you don't review them. Meg Keeley, "Memory and the Importance of Review"

Memory as a Performative Reinscription of Attention

Grace Hagood, University of South Carolina

Haunted Rhetoric
What we are haunted by is what defines us as people, as families, as communities, as a country. Some of us cannot escape haunting; some of us are not haunted enough. Kate Gale, "Haunting, the Holocaust, Slavery, Beloved"

To be haunted in the name of a will to heal is to allow the ghost to help you imagine what was lost that never even existed, really. That is its utopian grace: to encourage a steely sorrow laced with delight for what we lost that we never had; to long for the insight of that moment in which we recognize, as in Benjamin's profane illumination, that it could have been and can be otherwise. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination

Invention and Trace as a Recuperative Project

Grace Hagood, University of South Carolina