The Future Cemetery

Cultural heritage is about the past but it is also about the future. The Future Cemetery Project uses an immersive, interactive, multi-media audience experience to engage heritage site cemetery visitors with the UKʼs dynamic cultural past. Our project will demonstrate what twenty-first century cemeteries can become, using Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust (AVCT) as a platform, academic research by Dr. John Troyer in the University of Bath’s Centre for Death and Society and multi-media technology created by Calling the Shots. In over 175 years of operation, Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust has handled 320,000 dead bodies, equivalent to ¾ the living population of Bristol city.

The Future Cemetery Projects user centred, technologically integrated system of hand held devices, moving images, and projections on cemetery spaces will use the reality of human mortality as a way to encourage visitors to discuss end-of-life planning. This entire project builds a future cemetery model, where both the Victorian past and the digital present are woven together in order to create a new kind of post-mortem space. We all know that death is in the future. We just want to make the future more visible.

The Future Cemetery Project pushes the REACT Heritage theme in innovative directions by embracing cultural heritage as an opportunity to create greater public awareness about human mortality. Our project will demonstrate that heritage involves more than old objects; it is also about living and dying.

Our project will produce many exciting opportunities for audiences/users. In order to achieve this goal we have three general audience provisions:

1. To provide a new event offer for existing audiences
2. To specifically locate new audiences amongst the Bristol and South West regional population for the pilot project
3. To encourage repeat visits to heritage site cemeteries from both groups

The main audiences identified for this project include:

• The general public interested in cultural heritage that have never visited a heritage site cemetery
• Existing visitors and users of heritage site cemeteries that will return multiple times to experience the multi-media environment
• Regional populations interested in the creative arts, alternative audience events, experimental theatre, and installation art
• Cemetery visitors interested in Dark Tourism
• Heritage Site Cemetery operators looking to attract more visitors through new event offers
• Academics who study innovative cemetery activities, designs, and uses

What we do not know is how much physical space our proposed Future Cemetery model can occupy at one time across all heritage site cemeteries. Each cemetery site will be different given its historical development so the project team will need to develop flexible technologies and tools that adapt to a given cemetery's design.

This project will be fully accessible to all potential audience members, with an added emphasis on accessibility for visitors with disabilities. By mixing soundscapes for the visually impaired, visual elements for the hearing impaired, and creating open physical access for the physically impaired, the Future Cemetery Project will facilitate visits by all users.

The project will culminate in a demonstration of the developed technology in June 2012.