A Digital Heritage Platform Exploring Cultural Memory Through Art, Sound, and Storytelling
This website was developed as a project for the Digital Heritage Master’s course. It explores the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 through artistic and cultural interpretations, focusing on how art transformed a moment of catastrophe into enduring memory.
Rather than documenting the event solely through facts or reconstruction, the platform examines how paintings, music, sound, and narrative contributed to shaping emotional responses and collective remembrance across generations.
How did artistic responses to the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 contribute to shaping collective memory and emotional understanding of the disaster?
This question guided the conceptual and technical design of the platform, allowing the project to move beyond documentation toward interpretation and engagement.
The project focuses on the cultural memory and media dimension of the disaster. Art is approached as a historical source that preserves emotion, identity, and social meaning, offering perspectives often absent from architectural or institutional records.
From the immediate aftermath of 1871 to later reinterpretations
Chicago as both a physical city and a symbolic cultural space
Interactive web platform
3D Souuntrack storytelling
Participatory digital archive elements
The website is organized into four thematic sections, each presenting a different artistic approach to remembering the Great Chicago Fire:
Visions of Fire Gallery
Paintings and visual artworks that translate destruction into memory and emotion.
Songs of Smoke and Memory
Musical compositions and sound-based expressions reflecting loss, resilience, and recovery.
Little Stories of a Big Fire
Songs, comics, and stories designed to introduce the event to younger audiences.
Echoes of the Great Chicago Fire
An immersive 3D sound experience that narrates the disaster without spoken words.
Interpret history through multimedia storytelling
Encourage emotional and sensory engagement
Move beyond factual listing toward interaction and meaning
Support evolving memory through public contribution
Availability of historical images, texts, and references
Use of sound reconstruction and digital prototyping
Modular website design allowing narrative and interaction