A digital and spatial narrative experience by way of a website and physical photo album. It began with a series of zoom conversations between my grandmother, Sandra Moon Hightower and myself, in which she told me the stories around images she had passed down to me from her adolescence. The conversations introduced a series of parts — trips to Chicken Bone Beach in Atlantic City, two boys named one penny and two & an unexpected first date. These parts began to mimic the photo albums and drawers in which these family photos previously resided — seemingly disjointed, not necessarily in any chronological order and filled with access-points to more memories, internal thoughts and experiences from her life.
Taking a visual cue from customary home “the junk drawer”, the website houses a series of videos in which one can experience my grandmother candidly recounting these stories among various archival images, historical artifacts, gifs and emojis (lol). The website was created as a portal for one to enter this world by means of “digging” through the junk drawer.
![]()
![]()
![]()
The photo album was designed as a companion and navigational tool for the site. With the use of Arduino, the book utilizes light sensitive resistors that trigger the browser to load to new urls with when the pages of the album are turned. The book was built with a ready-made album and features many of the images as seen within the videos and website. The result is an experience in which one can thumb through the pages of the album while simultaneously launching an audio and visual telling of the physical images at their fingertips.
Thank You To
Sandra Olivia Moon Hightower
Documentation by Alex Pizzuti
Technical Guidance by Ed Brown
