The collaborative t
eam of multimedia and radio producers Isaac
Kestenbaum and Josie Holtzman will invoke a pause to create a memorial for "Winters Past," an immersive
multimedia storytelling project that tells the tale of a lost natural world
through personal experience, memory, and history of the seasons—specifically
the New England Winter. Using sound walks, podcasts and online data
visualization, the project will tell stories that cut through the media noise
and rhetoric to create a sensory experience that helps us understand what the
erosion of our natural environment truly means. The resulting soundscapes will
be shared via an interactive website and public radio programs, creating an intimate
multimedia remembrance of the world as it was, and one that is in danger of
disappearing. By humanizing climate change data, the project aims to prompt a
call to preserve what remains in our natural world while we have the chance.
Winters Past Website Launch
After a summer spent collecting interviews, we're ready to show our project, Winters Past, to the world. We're happy to say that our website, winterspast.org,
is now online. We spent a lot of time thinking about the design behind
the site, and it's really helped us hone in on what we want the
"message" of our undertaking to be. The project is meant to celebrate
winter, while at the same time mourning the way that winter will be
forever altered due to climate change. We hope that both our icon and
our logo convey that something is being lost, something is fading away.We are doing a soft launch of the website right now. It hints at the trio of soundwalks that we'll be releasing over the winter, and is intended to give visitors a good sense of what the project is about. We'll be building out the site as we release more content, giving each walk its own page.
There will be space for additional audio as well: we're planning on several shorter pieces of audio (what we're referring to now as "mini episodes") that will be released in between the longer pieces. We will also be adding pages for users to submit content—written memories, photographs, links and comments.
Along with this, we'll be creating a social media presence (twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc) with the aim of building excitement for the project's official debut, scheduled for November.
Until then, we would love any thoughts about our web presence, and, of course, any favorite winter memories or stories! You can reach us at info@winterspast.org
