This practice-based research builds on an aggregation of methods and themes from the artist’s personal practice. It adopts a critical visual-arts-based participatory methodology utilising qualitative methods to collect personal photographs from Iraqi diaspora, record oral history narratives surrounding those photographs, and explore the creative remediation of this memory material within simulated environments using Virtual Reality. The focus on Iraqi diaspora is informed by the artist’s dual Irish-Iraqi heritage. The research reviews and classifies the extent of photographic archives related to Iraq (both formal and informal), oral history and creative practice memory projects involving Iraqi diaspora, and the range of simulated representations of Iraq.
Visual research into formal archival collections of photographs from Iraq led to an observation that historical collections are predominately filled with ethnographic images taken in a colonial context, and contemporary collections dominated by images related to war. Digital simulations of Iraq are almost exclusively associated with the country as a site of conflict, be it representations within military training simulations, backdrops for first-person shooter games and combat flight simulators, or digital heritage preservation and reconstruction of cultural heritage sites damaged or destroyed due to conflict. These observations motivated the use of a participatory methodology combined withcreative practice to create sites of representation and explore the impact of this process on participants and audiences. The Iraq Photo Archive website was created as an online repository for personal archive photographs, and oral history interviews using photo elicitation method were conducted with consenting participants about their memories of the photographic moments. The memory materials generated through this process were creatively remediated into the House of Memory Virtual Reality experience, using aspects of the neonarrative method for interviews, and 3D design to reconstruct the photographs in virtual environments. The experience expands the photographic moment into an immersive temporal environment where the digital materiality of the space is inhabited by the voices and narratives of the Iraqi diaspora participants. This methodological approach forefronts memories and narratives about Iraq from Iraqis themselves, facilitating representation through participation, and counters dominant representations of Iraq in simulated media such as video games.
Following qualitative evaluation with participants and audiences, the research demonstrates how a participatory art-based project (informed by personal practice) can impact knowledge and desire for authentic representations of Iraqi narratives within and outside of the Iraqi diaspora community; communicate situated and relational knowledge on the experiences and memories of Iraqi diaspora using photography, oral history, and VR; present counter narratives to the representation of Iraq in simulations, and more generally by the media; and develop a technological and methodological approach for remediating vernacular images and narratives into VR as a means of contributing to the preservation and dissemination of individual (and collective) community histories for diasporic communities.