The Team in the Stand: Building New Community Heritage Sites Through Interactive Multimedia

A team of staff and students at the Portsmouth School of Art, Design and Media came together to research the potential for interactive multimedia in museum programs to contribute to community regeneration. The project was part of the exhibition Play Up Pompey! which celebrates the centenary year of Portsmouth Football Club. The School's contribution was The Team in the Stand, a visitor-authored multimedia environment, as a newly created site of the cultural history of the supporters who have shaped the life of the city. Throughout the duration of the exhibition period the supporters' memories, everyday experiences and memorabilia were digitized as the multimedia objects on public display to create a living history archive in an immersive sound environment. The aims of the exhibition were to build new audiences amongst the large sector of the city's population for whom the museum affords little or no significance and to provide public access to new technologies within the context of New Labor's widening participation policy to make lifelong education available to under-represented and disadvantaged groups. National studies on the social impact of the arts have informed the exhibition and the three month outreach program.