Part 1 - For Public Readers

Project Title: What do we remember?

Project Subtitle: An interactive reflection journey on war, memory and loss.

Very Short Description: A reflective interaction experience on war and the national construction of it, along with a collective memory wall for the audience to share their thoughts or stories on war and how it had impacted them.

Abstract:

At first, with no context, visitors are simply drawn to the “click here” prompt as the most obvious interaction. Each tap, however, fires an actual bomb and triggers a shower of “national rewards” — medals, food rations, honors. By letting a casual click produce both destruction and reward, the piece visualizes how state narratives dress violence as duty, inevitability, or honor. The click stands in for an authoritative order: something people may feel they “have no choice” but to follow, yet can still refuse, no matter what cost it might takes. In that gap between following the order and stopping, the work foregrounds our own agency and moral judgment.

Gradually, the experience turns from impact to remembrance. Audience are invited to contribute to a live collective memory wall projection: a shared space to reflect, grieve, or recount stories. The notes they left from their own device will merge together as a flowing river and falling rain of notes, this wall suggests that what ultimately endures is not official justification, but the lingering record of lives damaged and lost. Like water in constant circulation, these memories do not disappear; they keep returning, the history always remember.

Detailed Instruction of the Experience:

1. When the project URL opened, the project will first request GPS location from the user.
2. After GPS access granted and they proceed to continue after trigger warning, user will see the satellite map of their location and the only button to interact for now is “click here”

The user’s real GPS location

The ‘click here’ button

1. After user click on “click here”, there will be a bomb shooting out from the audience’s location to a random selected location in the 10 real historical bomb sites that I have collected.
2. After bomb dropped, there will be particles of damage, archival newspapers or photography, but also the rewards that are used to construct the national narration of war will show up on the top left.

Archival Newspaper about the Vietnam war

The rewards after clicking

1. Each time after a bombing, there will be a prompt asking whether the audience want to opt out. If they choose to opt out, they will redirected into the context page, where I explain what my intention of the project is. If not, they can continue on experiencing the interaction, and after 4 times, they will be eventually redirected to the context page.

The opt out prompt

The context page

1. After reading the context page, they can choose to leave a note about their thought / memories on war, which will later be merging together as a memory wall. The note become strings in the memory river or rain.

Switch between ‘move’ mode & ‘note’ mode

The leave a note page

Notes will form a list here as well, for more direct reading

Photography: