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Memory Co-Space:
Reconstructing and
Re-inhabiting Narrative Space
“Memory Co-Spaces” is a cross-disciplinary project that combines oral history methodology with spatial augmented reality (AR) to explore how personal and communal memories can be spatially re-experienced and reconstructed within their original environments. Grounded in the Dongming Neighborhood of Shanghai, the project collects residents’ life stories, emotional landscapes, and spatial narratives, and re-embeds them into physical space using photogrammetry, AR overlays, and interactive mapping.
The project responds to a fundamental limitation of traditional oral history: the loss of spatiality in narrative forms. Memories, once recorded through text or sound, often lose their connection to the physical environments that shaped them. In contrast, Memory Co-Spaces restores these memories to their places of origin by building an interactive narrative environment where people can move through and encounter memory as part of spatial experience.
Core Team and Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration
Memory Co-Space was initiated through the support of CEL at NYU Shanghai, which introduced the Dongming community partnership and facilitated the project’s local engagement. The project is conceived and directed by Professor Zhang Xingchen from the Interactive Media Arts, focusing on cultural spatial narratives and cross-media art research. The project is implemented by the Digital Heritage Lab, with student researchers Yuan Jiaxiang (Class 2027) and Gao Jingchen (Class 2027) contributing to system design, spatial modeling, and the development of interactive experiences.
The project is anchored in three core ideas:
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Reconstruction of narrative spatiality: Using spatial scanning and digital modeling to recreate the environments in which memory was lived, making space an active agent in storytelling.
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Augmented narrative experimentation: Overlaying voice, image, and story fragments onto physical streets, enabling users to “encounter” memory while walking through the neighborhood.
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Embodied, poetic experience: Merging sensory modalities—vision, sound, movement, interaction—to evoke an affective, auratic encounter that goes beyond documentation into creative re-inhabitation.
This project represents not only a technical endeavor, but also a methodological and aesthetic intervention. It aims to reconceptualize oral history and cultural preservation as spatial, embodied, and co-experienced. Through this approach, digital technologies become not merely tools for representation, but catalysts for a shared poetic memory space—a "co-space" where memory is made vivid, present, and participatory.
