Stephen Guerin Salon

SantaFe.live: Every Pixel Has an Address, a Digital Acequia for Santa Fe's Shared Photographs, Maps and Stories
A Salon Talk by Stephen Guerin
Thursday, April 16, 3pm
Thaw Education Center
553 Canyon Road

ABOUT THE SALON
 

Santa Fe has always been a crossroads. The Old Santa Fe Trail met the Camino Real here. Artists, scientists, technologists, and spiritual explorers have gathered here for generations.

Spanish colonists, Pueblo peoples, the Church, Mexican families, and waves of new arrivals have layered their lives onto these same streets, hills, and waterways. Every person has a story. The result is one of the most culturally rich and complex histories of any small city in the Americas. Yet that history lives scattered across shoeboxes, family albums, newspaper archives, historical maps, home videos, institutional collections, and social media feeds. We share photographs on Facebook and Instagram, but these platforms scatter our collective memory across disconnected posts with no way to stitch stories together across contributors, query images for the subjects we care about, or keep certain photographs private to family and trusted circles.

This project is being developed with his team at Santa Fe native companies Redfish Group and SimTable, in collaboration with Peter Weiss, local historian and tour guide, whose deep knowledge of Santa Fe's layered past anchors the technology in the stories that matter.The platform is community-powered. Contributors decide what is public, what stays within a family group, and what remains entirely private. The devices we already carry, our phones and laptops, can serve as the hosts. We do not need to centralize our memories on the cloud.

Rather than uploading our digital heritage to the feudal clouds controlled by Google, Apple, Facebook, and the AI companies, we can share directly from our own devices with the privacy and control we choose, and govern our collective commons the way our ancestors governed water: as a digital acequia, the centuries-old community irrigation system where shared resources flow through infrastructure the community owns, maintains, and governs together.

Most importantly, this is a tool for discovery. Let our youth explore history spatially, find the connections between stories, and construct their own narratives instead of being told them.

This talk will demonstrate how the technology works, show early examples, and invite the Historic Santa Fe Foundation community to help build this living record together.

PARKING

Parking on Canyon Road, Camino Escondido, and Delgado Streets as available. Paid lots are located on Delgado Street and on Canyon Road across from El Farol.

CHECK-IN

Check-in starts at 2:40 pm. HSFF staff or a volunteer will check you in by asking for your name. Come early or stay late to view our history and art exhibitions.