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Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Main Menu Introduction Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Introduction, Start Marquee Survivals: A Multimodal Historiography of Cinema's Recycled Spaces Histories Concealed Histories Concealed landing page Projecting 1943 Sense of Pachuca Broadway as Background Splash page for Broadway as Background / Background as Broadway Photo Essay: Marquee Stories Intro to photo essay: Marquee Stories Prototypes Exploring project prototypes Portfolio Ejected Spectators and Inactive Users: Locating Multimodal Historiography In Repurposed Media Spaces

AR experiment documentation, group wide shot (2013)

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Prototype 3. Augmented Reality Rituals Walking along South Broadway, a traveler will find evidence of the street’s informal networks; for instance, posts advertising jobs in the garment industry, or stall rentals, or discounts on mobile phones and calling cards. Focusing on the street level, one is also more likely to notice how at the end of the day garment workers emerge from the ANJAC Fashion Building or from the back staircases of the Broadway Trade Center. Or to detect how some street vendors appear to hide merchandise deep in their carts, covered by black plastic bags, sometimes filled with nuts or other such inconspicuous commodities as decoy goods, while only displaying certain merchandise at only at specific moments, in particular encounters.[i] Paying attention to how these financial exchanges function within the street’s local economy, this rerouting of the tour form aspires to a simultaneously more embodied and informed understanding of how cinema’s infrastructure has been preserved on South Broadway.

Experiments in beginning to design this tour intended to push against the conventions of the augmented reality tour experience. As augmented reality (AR), an audio-visual platform facilitated by smartphone, especially for consumer applications, can be a restrictive medium to design for (users must have smartphones, some familiarity with new technologies, and potentially high data plans to use the tour), I became interested in how a tour could be complemented or supplemented by other practices and gestures connected to mediation that already augment the lived reality of experiencing South Broadway’s streetscape. An easy association between AR and gestures organically observed on South Broadway is the consumerist impulse of advertisement.

As research into how these performative gestures of selling function, I handed out cards distributing information about my project and eliciting potential oral histories with the same materials. While the experiment yielded no responses, the act of handing out cards tested the boundaries that are supposed to separate the practices of research, performance, and social interaction – as well as what keeps the spheres of professional scholarly inquiry, and consumerism separate.

This is further explored in the accompanying paper guide iteration that used the popular media form of the historieta (comic book) to frame the zine guide, adapting the covers of a “El libro seminal” comic for this prototype (purchased at a South Broadway newsstand, but easily found in similar newsstands across the country).[ii]

[i] While I am thinking primarily of pirated DVDs here, certainly this category of merchandise is diverse.
[ii] For more about the historieta (and El libro seminal specifically) in English, see Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); Bruce Campbell, Viva La Historieta: Mexican Comics, NAFTA, and the Politics of Globalization (University Press of Mississippi, 2009); and Lilia I. Bartolomé, “Literacy as Comida: Learning to Read with Mexican Novelas,” in Words Were All We Had: Becoming Biliterate Against the Odds (New York: Teachers College Press, 2011), 49–59.
Prototype 2: Augmenting through gestures
As research into how these performative gestures of selling function, I handed out cards distributing information about my project and eliciting potential oral histories with the same materials. The act of handing out cards tested the boundaries that are supposed to separate the practices of research, performance, and social interaction, as well as what keeps the spheres of professional scholarly inquiry and consumerism separate.