Felsing, UlrikeUlrikeFelsingCornut, MurielleMurielleCornut2024-11-192024-11-192023-12-01https://arbor.bfh.ch/handle/arbor/35740Our article introduces the image and sound installation Re-Imagining the Collection of the Kreis Family, which is part of the Participatory Image Archives (PIA), a web-based archival platform. It was developed as part of an interdisciplinary research project with the photographic archives of the Swiss Society for Folklore Studies. In the digital archive, “re-imagining” is of major significance to the presentation of historical photographs. Themes such as “materiality and the sensory in the digital,” “order and disorder in memory cultures,” and “ambivalence and polyphony through user engagement” are shifted into focus. This article aims to point out ways to present the Kreis Family Collection—a private collection dating from the years 1850 to 1980, in which many strands of cultural ideas are interwoven. We use storytelling with sound that makes it possible for viewers to immerse themselves in the past through the photos from the Kreis Collection. Initially, we began working with an animated sequence of photos accompanied by three separate audio tracks that viewers can choose from. Here, we are prompting three contradictory acoustic “moods” for interpreting the same pictures: an “everyday, intimate” mood, a “bourgeois, representational” one, or one that is “dramatic and disturbing.” To invite the users to compare the individual photos—to re-imagine them—we are also experimenting with a group of “loosely associated” pictures accompanied by a “sound mobile.”enN1conference_item