The History Book Remixed
Culture’s byproduct is generally documented as history and confined to the realm of expert historians, at least when its formally packaged [think of the history book, photo essay, and the like]. As digital and analogue spaces mingle, the documentation of culture and its derivatives is mutating alongside the encyclopedia, video, and personal communications, just to name a few recently-shaken realms.
Two seemingly unrelated trends might help us see how digitally connected citizens are rethinking history influenced by [or influencing?] remix culture: New York City’s “urban explorers” and Tokyo’s “trial observation maniacs.”
The New York Times article Children of Darkness thoroughly discusses the concept of “urban explorers,” a term that can probably be best defined by Steve Duncan’s [an explorer himself] self-description as a “guerrilla historian.” These folks are devoted to “plumb tunnels, trestles and other abandoned places, often illicitly, and in those shadow cities find the pulsing center of New York.”
Graffiti artists have traditionally conquered the darkest and deepest corners of the city with the goal of creative intervention; urban explorers are focused on their discovery through documentation, generally producing a body of work that facilitates our understanding of the urban landscape and its history as a multi-layered territory, blurring fact with fiction... like history books.
In contrast, “trial observation” operates on the surface. According to a Monocle article, members of trial clubs find “their greatest pleasure” in watching “the slowly grinding wheels of Japanese justice,” documenting their experience in blogs following their own particular format, as another article in The Japan Times explains: “They are meticulous in their entries, recording serious yet funny exchanges heard in court, as well as describing the fashions and facial expressions of the protagonists.” One group, the Kasumikko Club, “have already published two books about their hobby, including The Kasumikko Club’s Guide to Trial Observation.”
The documentation of trials by “girls ‘who dress up to go to court in the afternoon, listen to hard-hitting cases and talk about love at the Art Coffee Shop in Kasumigaseki Station’,” can sometimes feel more like fiction and perhaps even more human than the standard news report. By taking court journalism in their own hands, the club is discovering new layers of society in the same fashion that New York’s urban explorers make us aware of an alien landscape right in front of us.
Both trial maniacs and guerrilla historians draw from the results of past and present cultural interactions to take its subjects to another realm: The trial becomes a fiction/diary/daytime TV hybrid while an abandoned urban space can equally be the subject of a National Geographic feature as well as of a highbrow art show.