On the talk shows there's been talk of rebuilding lower Manhattan, and replacing the World Trade Center. The shows I've seen consist of a couple land developers with dollar signs for eyes very close to drooling all over the studio babbling on about their plans. They can barely contain themselves. They blather on about how if we don't rebuild, the terrorists will have won.
These folks should hop in their limoes and drive out to a Civl War battlefield. Gettsyburg is probably close enough to New York for a nice day trip. One of the most striking aspects of a civil war battlefield is the enormous number of plaques and monuments. They'll be a marker for the first soldier who died on the field on each side, a marker for anyone remotely famous who died, a memorial for any division that camped at a certain spot on a certain night. They're are plaques with diary entries from soldiers near the spot where they were written. There are monuments with the inscriptions worn away so you have no clue what they were for
This over-abundance of monuments seems to be a central tenet in the design of collateral damage memorials in America. This raises a huge problem in the case of the World Trade Center attack. With the towers down, there is an incrediably tiny amount of land to memorialize thousands of people. It seems infeasiable to actually give some sort of small headstone or monument for each victim - you probably wouldn't be able to walk between the headstones, and finding a particular person's headstone would be very difficult. The alternative would be to have some sort of single memorial for all the victims, perhaps with the names of the victims like at the Wall. A name on a wall seems so insignificant, especially over time.
I've been toying with another idea. It is a way over-the-top techie pipe dream, but it's lead to some interesting trains of thought. I suggest turning to a form virtual reality popularized in Wiliam Gibson's novel _Virtual Light_ where special glasses are used to provide additional information over whatever the wearer may be looking at. In the case of Gibson's novel, the additional information had to do with real-estate information about whatever buildings were being looked at. In the case of a World Trade Center memorial, such glasses could be used to display virtual victim monuments.
Imagine the space around the World Trade Centers was converted into a simple park. You enter the park wityour glasses on. You will see a ghost-like transparent version of the towers superimposed over whatever you would normally see. You can enter the building, go to one of the elevators, hit the button for the floor you want to visit, and when the doors open, you are on a virtual version of that floor, completely with transparent, walkthrough walls, and correct views views of the New York skyline for your virtual altitude.
The most important feature on the floors though, would be the memorials - one per person at the location they were most likely to be at at the time of the attack, at the location where their desk was located. I suspect it is probably possibile to determine the seating arrangements for all the victims based on company records and survivors recollections. Each memorial would start out the same. I suggest some sort of flame burning about three feet off the ground, but a suitable artist should come up with an appropriate design. This design could be personalized by the victim's surviving friends and relatives, adding graphics and verbage to the memorial. Additional virtual monuments could be added at spots where couragous things happened, or other locations such as the planes points of impact.
Meanwhile the people around you would be walking around wearing their glasses, looking at the memorials present on another floor. They would be walking through the monuments you see. People would be paying their respects to what appeared to be empty space to you. Hopefully the impact would be one of a great density of rememberance - even though you didn't actually see anything when you took off your glasses, you would be on sacred ground - you very space you were standing in was being shared with what could be up to 110 memorials - one per floor of the towers. The experience would also be highyl personal since the people around you would be seeing totally different memorials, which depending on the degree of personalization applied to them could become highly charged with emotional energy.
One problem with this approach of putting memorials at victims workspaces is that it doesn't account for the rescue workers who died during the collapse of the towers. I suggest making a special memorial on the observation deck level for these people.
This was the original idea. Hopefully it is not to wackadoddle. As I stated above, the idea of a virtual memorial leads to a couple interesting side ideas. The original idea dealt with the interior of the towers, and the idea that you could visit a particular floor. The obvious extension to this is that if you have the glasses on, you should also be able to see the towers from other locations in New York. You should be able to see what the towers looked like as your taking the ferry over from Hoboken, or what the towers looked like when you're standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. This extension moves away from using VR as a form of victim memorial. Rather it provides a memorial to the buildings themselves, and to city of New York, or at least it's skyline.
The second extension would be that there is no need to limit the virtual memorial to just the original location of the Towers. You should be able to put on the glasses anywhere in the world and be able to see the virtual towers and visit any of the floors. This removal of the memorial from being tied to a fixed point in space is very exciting to me - the memorial is software - there can be billions of copies of it. Every person on earth could have access to a pair of the memorial glasses and pay their respects to the victims. This extends the density of remembrance idea I mentioned above to the entire planet - you could be sitting in a park anywhere, and you wouldn't know if someone close to you had a pair of the glasses on, and you weren't inhibiting the same space as some victims memorial.
The third extension flows from the first and second extensions. If the interior of the towers could be recreated anywhere on earth, then the exterior of the towers could be viewed anywhere as well. You could put on the glasses and see what the Towers would look like standing next to the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, or the Kremlin. You could see what the Towers would look like raising out of the rubble of Kabul. I think this would be useful for people in other parts of the world to get some feel for the extent of the destruction. There's also some gut level feeling of victory at being able to bring up the Towers anywhere you damn well feel like it even though the real Towers were destroyed.
The final extension will probably be the most controversial. I would not suggest implementing it until at least two generations after the initial release of the victims memorial, and not until after a lot of debate as to whether it should be implemented. This extension deals with the memorial of the actual attack. If it is possibile to model the view of the Towers from anywhere in the city while wearing the glasses, it should also be possible to visualize the actual attack. The viewer should be able to see the planes hitting the towers, watch the towers burn, and eventually collapse. The justification for doing this would be to provide a jolt to people so they would never forget the attack, and to provide young people a first hand view of the attack. It's purpose would be to leave an emotional mark. I would hope if it was implemented, that viewing the attack would become part of some form of coming of age ceremony. To maintain the emotional impact of the attacks, they would only be able to be seen on September 11th each year, at the actual times of the attack. It might also make sense to limit the ability to replay the attack from locations other than New York.
I have already shown how the idea of implementing a virtual reality frees the memorial from being limited to a specific place. The idea of a virtual replay of the attack also does much to free up the memorial from being bound by time. In this section I will show other implications of implementing a software based memorial.
First, the memorial can be saved perfectly forever, since it is information. It's source code could be etched onto one of the storage mediums being developed for the Long Now Foundation projects, and thousands of copies of it could be made. Such a memorial would be eternal, accessable unchanged to archeologists tens of thousands of years in the future.
Second, and at possible odds to the first point, is that the memorial could easily change over time, especially as virtual reality technology became better and cheaper. The illussion of the victim memorials could appear more and more real over time.
A third implication is that this memorial could be developed in an open source / free software manner, using volunteer labor from developers all over the world. This is desirable for a couple of reasons. First there were victims from all over the world. Second, the development cost becomes centered on the technology involved with the glasses rather than the cost of the software. Third, the development of software becomes a huge exercise in democracy, Finally the idea of giving the government a say in providing a memorial doesn't sit too well with me. By in large, it was a huge failure of government, especially the intelligence and military branches that led to such a tremendous loss. To have them provide funds for the development and maintenance of a memorial seems a weak compensation for this breach of trust. The same goes for industry participation - it will probably be a generation or two before people begin to honestly assess how much damage was done by the airline's the lust for greater profits at the expense of security. They did enough damage that I would rather they not be present in the design and implimentation of any memorial. By leaving the volunteer developers to build the system, there's a much better chance of the system finally expressing actual peoples desires of what should be saved and shown as history.
Also note that this wouldn't neccessarily end up as being a techie's view of history, since there would be many places for non-technical participation in such a project - historians would be needed to make sure the correct facts were being displayed by glasses. People would be needed to do grunt work to figure out wear everyone was seated in the Towers. Testers are always needed. Artists are needed to develop the victim memorials. It would be a huge project requiring an enormous skill set.
Keep in mind that the technology developed for this project could be used on other historical sites other than the World Trade Center. Possibile projects would be an enhanced version of the Colissium in Rome, in which a complete, unruined version of the structure could be superimposed over the existing site. The same thing could be done at Egyptian and Myan sites as well. The glasses could be used on civil war battlefields to actually show the battles using virtual soldiers, making it possibile to show the true scale of the battles, along with the actual bloodshed, which somehow gets lost with the gentrified Civil War reenactments. And going off the controversal scale again, the sites of various World War II camps in Eastern Europe could be enhanced, and historical moments such as the explosion of Challenger space shuttle could also be reenacted.
Note that one of the benifits of using an open source development model for such projects is that project branches could occur because of differences beliefs in what was historically accurate, not just because of technical issues. Suppose there was some disagreement over what how the Prymaids looked like when they were completed. The project could branch, and then a visitor would be able to download both versions and compare the final visions of each group. Governments and industry could develope their own spins on history by developing their own branches, and visitors could compare these offical views to the people's views.
A final implication would be the use of skins while viewing the memorial - there would be no reason why a visitor to the memorial wouldn't be able to code his glasses to display the victum memorials in the format most moving to him or her. If the idea of crosses appeals to you better than my idea of floating flames, well then, just key up the Christian skin and see all the memorials as crosses. Artists could make skins available that show off their personal visions. Religions could hold big-time councils to come up with the offical skins for their members. Of course, some wise-ass would come up with the idea of Present Day Skin, which wouldn't show any virtual extensions when the glasses were put on.
Hopefully the ideas here are enough to convince you that virtual reality holds a place in future of memorials and historical reanctments beyond the initial idea for a response to the World Trade Center attack, especially as the planet becomes more crowded, and space dedicated for traditional memorials becomes more expensive. The idea of being able to replay attacks and battles, while no doubt contraversial will also become more important as media saturation becomes more and more prevasive in the future - I feel it will become important for people to be able to experience their own first hand, all be it virtual, account of historical events, without a talking head giving play by play commentary and without commercial breaks every two minutes. It is also important that people be given some way to participate in the design and implementation of their memorials, either by researching and coding the memorials themselves or by being able to personalize and enhance the virtual memorials of their loved ones. Also in a world that will depend more and more on tolerance and accepting different visions, it will become more important to provide some sort of skinning technology so that memorials could be presented to visitors in a format that would be more effective to them, and so that visitors could expereince a memorial under a number of different cultural lenses.
But at the end of the day, when all is said and done, I've got to come back to the admission that this is all a world-class techie pipe dream that will never be implemented. Perhaps the idea of such a memorial is enough. Perhaps the hi tech VR glasses are optional and the software doesn't really need to be written. Perhaps the only virtual reality enhancements that are needed are the ones our own memories and imaginations can pull together, at any point in time wherever we happen to be at the moment. Perhaps we already have the artistic and cultural tools neccessary to pass on the impact of the attacks to future generations without undo influence of government and industry. Perhaps another hi-tech gadget is the last thing we need right now.
- Jude Nagurney , October 7th, 02001