The Member’s a Virtual Gentleman

Building on the work from our previous paper ‘A Community Kept Alive through Memory: Preserving the Essence of the British Working-Men’s Club, ' we here go into detail and theoretically frame this subsequent work which looked to develop an installation based on field recordings and interviews from the Working-Men’s Club we previously documented. This research looked to recontextualise aspects of the club environment via a resituating of objects from the space of a typical club towards an interactive experience whose narratives were embodied into - and explicitly responded to - everyday actions. Given the all-too-apparent fact that the Working Men’s Club places and people are moving in a slow trajectory towards extinction, we looked to lift and replay a unique sense of place away from onscreen mediation towards something which hoped to offer an opportunity to glimpse and navigate a facsimile of ‘authentic’ experience. This shift from surface to objects looks to question user relationships with screen-oriented narrative and attempts to explore, define and test approaches for hidden or invisible interaction and the potential narratives such relationships can make. The club experience (as installation) invites participation and interaction where user presence around the work triggers threads of visual and verbal narrative generated by members of Bingley Working-Men’s Club in West Yorkshire. The resulting images and sound conjure disembodied voices from a table involving the user in a performance or ‘digital séance’ that touches upon aspects of the uncanny.