Celebrating Community through the Power of Remembrance
Memory Train is a kiosk based application that Interactive Knowledge developed for the Mint Museum of Art. This multimedia project is funded by IMLS and support's the Mint's Romare Bearden Southern Recollections exhibition. This is IK’s eighth collaboration with the Mint Museum.
The Memory Train interactive kiosk application is designed to capture the emotions and memories of visitors to the exhibition. Visitors are invited to sit at a special kiosk in an alcove that is adjacent to the exhibition. There they are prompted through a series of questions along with images from the exhibition to recall important moments in their lives. Their response to these questions and images are recorded and archived as a digital video file. The Mint Museum is collecting these short videos and will curate a collection of them that will be included in the permanent Bearden gallery.
The Memory Train kiosk will be used for future exhibitions as well. The back-end can be easily repurposed for use with any exhibition. In addition, IK designed a process that allows a staff member from the Mint to travel to events around the community and use the laptop computer from the kiosk to collect videos.
The process a user completes to record their memories is simple: The first step offers the user some questions to base their remembrance on. Step two displays Bearden’s artwork. Step three asks the user to record the remembrance. Step four allows the user to view other users’ remembrances.
