[ISEA2008] Stephanie Carrick & Deborah Kelly – bestweforget.org event

Abstract

 

http://bestweforget.org is an art project experimenting with the idea of communally developed and retrieved history. As such we have created a wiki as a collaborative archive that tackles the concept of ‘official’ history, and attempts to instead create an “open source” one.

It is also a delicious beer, sporadically available at events around Australia often paired with trivia highlighting little known history. Best We Forget is a project of the art collective boat-people.org who respond to notions of race, borders, and nationalism. It is made possible with support from the Graham F. Smith Peace Trust.

Our motivation for this project rose from the sacking of Dawn Casey as Director of the National Museum of Australia for failing to portray a colonial-heroic, triumphalist view of Australian history. Our wiki promotes an alternative view of Australian history that challenges colonial notions, at a community and national level. We are enabling communities to contribute information of archival importance into a public record without doctrine that anyone can add to, edit, challenge and discuss.

The art project uses our satirical beer and trivia events as the secret key to unlock the Australian public’s disinterest and apathy in social issues. Our gimmick, ‘Denial Beer’ creates interest in our serious and meaningful wiki of home truths.

Following several successful events in Australia, we propose for ISEA2008 an event where members of our collective conduct ‘pub trivia’ (a great Australian tradition) during a ‘not happy’ hour with our unique ‘Denial beer’. This serves both as a means of discussing the role of retrieved and folkloric history, and to present the wiki as a means of translating this into a global, accessible concept. The trivia would be tailored specifically for ISEA and an international audience.