When my grandfather Rex built the house I grew up in, he made sure there were fireplaces in every room. If 1960s fire code had allowed for fireplaces on the second floor, I'm sure he would have put them there, too, but as it was, the total count today stands at three. Never forgetting that the house was situated on the solid limestone bedrock of north Texas - a place that rarely saw sub-freezing temperatures, much less snow - he was infamous for jacking up the air conditioning on Christmas morning so that he could have all hearths blazing together when the family arrived for dinner.

In later years my parents added a chiminea in the side courtyard, which brought the active fireplace count to four on Christmas morning. To say my family has a fascination with the fireplace would be an understatement, as evidenced by this tableau on Christmas morning:



As if four weren't enough, the crisp, vibrant colors of the Yule Log in HD were on continuous loop during the festive gathering. This holiday tradition, once limited to the New York area, but broadcast across the nation in the wake of 9/11, is now something of a cultural phenomenon. InHD broadcasts the crackling fire along with two spinoffs - a snowman, and snow falling on cedars. It has its own fan website. And, for a mere $1.99, you can have the Yule Log on your iPhone.

Mostly I find it all pretty entertaining, but it also makes me think about the ways that we use our gadgetry to recreate the basic human experience of sitting in front of a fire.

What compels someone to film fire and put it on television?

"Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees."
- Robert Irwin*

I've always liked the quote, and enjoy the idea of becoming as aware of the way we look at things as we are of what we're actually seeing. Its a concept that has floated to the surface many times over the course of the last semester, but this week, as my two home towns begin to overlap each other, I have seen this idea of Irwin's in a new way.

One of my primary "jobs" over the next couple of days is to gather a collection of images to put onto a digital frame, which will ultimately become a Christmas gift for my paternal grandmother, Mina, who is 87. Not only am I to gather them, put them in some sort of order, and format them for the 16:9 aspect ratio of the screen, but it is also important that I add in an easily-readable system of captions.

Captions like:
"Katy. Your granddaughter."
"Easton, your great-grandson."

My grandmother is in the advanced stages of Alzheimer's Disease. For her, forgetting the name of the thing she sees is a daily occurrence, and has nothing to the perception of art, or with a willing phenomenological experience of the world around her. It frustrates her, that she can't bring the words she clearly used to know into the part of her brain where she can speak them. Memories of her childhood and early adulthood are strong and clear, but the conversation she had an hour earlier is gone forever. Her socializing instinct is still strong, but in her condition that means she initiates the same conversation again and again.

What happens to your understanding of place when you literally cannot remember it?

* I have seen this quote a few times in the last few months. Once in my friend Elana's most excellent thesis presentation, and again in some of the phenomenology reading associated with my Network Landscapes class this past semester. As an artist, Irwin is interested in the way we perceive space, and my favorites of his of work attempt to shift the way viewers are experiencing the environment around them using light and color.

I am sitting here, in my childhood bedroom, surrounded by boxes. I am staying at home for the holidays for the next two weeks, and in the few days I've been here, I have not been able to stop myself from opening up a few of them and poking around inside. One was filled with reams of sheet music, and another filled with shoe boxes neatly packed with cassette tapes. The best boxes are marked with that magic word (for me, at least): genealogy.

[Although I never met her, I know from experience that these particular boxes contain the collected work of my great-grandmother Millie, whose passion was researching the family tree and collecting stories and photographs from the generations past.]

The first one I rummaged through yielded a photo album in remarkably good shape. It turned out to be a short collection of every contribution my great-great grandfather, Frank Albert Ernst, wrote to the class letter of McCormick Theological Seminary, class of 1892. They start in 1893 when he was called to the then-new territory of Nebraska, and continue well into his eighties, just one paragraph a year describing what church he was serving, how many new members they had added, and the state of health of his immediate family. It shouldn't have been as interesting as it was, but I spent several solid hours reading it from cover to cover.

Other than that, the stuff in that box was a completely boring collection - old letters, random snapshots, and newspaper front pages from important dates like JFKs assassination or the moon walk.

Knowing that they more than likely contain piles of useless paper, what is it about these boxes that I find fascinating? And once inside, what is it that distinguishes a single meaningful piece of ephemera from a pile of old rubbish?

I am once again pondering the idea of place, and how this new set of questions fits into it. In my thesis presentation in November, I talked about my working definition of place as a set of four things:

• about people
• built out of narrative
• instills belonging
• develops a history over time
  

In my review afterwards, several critics felt that I emphasized time way more than place in my talk, and Andrew pointed me towards the very interesting concept of the time capsule. Later, in a great email from Rob, he wondered how place related to the concept of setting in theater, and how place online might be related to the setting of a stage.

Having had several weeks to ponder it, I begin to wonder how much place, for me, is becoming space with memory.