Traditionally the hearth was the heart of the Irish home, the place where people gathered to bond, swap stories, laugh and cry, encouraged by the transformative energy of the fire’s light and warmth.

HEARth COLLECTIVE is a digital hearth supporting oral histories from Northern Ireland.

In moving forward from a narrative of division and shared grief, Northern Ireland is negotiating a shared history. The only way this history can be documented effectively is through collaboration allowing the narrative to transcend the personal and become interpersonal.

HEARth COLLECTIVE promotes a remembering that allows a more peaceful form of forgetting.

Through an interface of moving images of flames the work offers themes such as love, family and trust to the visitor. Each will be represented as a tag cloud where the size of the word is directly correlated to the number of stories available within the theme.
Each theme contains a selection of audio vignettes of relevant stories delivered in random order. This random sequence ensures each visitor will rarely hear a thematic narrative in the same order and plays on the idea that through interpretation the individual determines their own subjective version of history.

HEARth COLLECTIVE was shortlisted for the International Symposium of Electronic Art (ISEA) 2009.