Queer American Memorials
Ongoing · National memorial system: ceramic marker, carved waveλlength mark, augmented reality
Queer American Memorials is a national memorial system designed by Sean Fader: a dyed ceramic brick set permanently into the ground or wall, carrying a carved waveλlength mark (a lambda nested in the trough of a wave, connecting the 1970 gay liberation symbol to the physics of light and the rainbow flag), and an augmented reality layer that holds each story.
Developed with collaborators Maureen Towey, Michael Murphy and MASS Design Group’s Public Memory and Memorials Lab (national memorial experience), and Julie Rhoad, former director of the NAMES Project Foundation and the AIDS Memorial Quilt.
The project grows out of Insufficient Memory, Fader’s photographic archive of unmarked sites of anti-LGBTQ+ violence.
Draft page written for this prototype from project documents; imagery of the marker, the mark, and the AR experience to be added with Sean.