Whenever I visited my grandfather when I was a kid, I would marvel at the many paintings and photographs that cover his walls. I always felt like the art in his house contained clues to solving some great mystery. I would pepper him with questions, like, how come he has a giant portrait of a stern-looking woman wearing a pendant shaped like a severed hand, and why does the painting have a bullet hole in it?
My granddad is 87 years old, and he lives in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere. It’s a 30 minute drive from the nearest grocery store. As he ages, my family has had many conversations about how long he can live independently in that house. I decided to use Scanlily to record my grandfather’s stories about the art that lines his walls.
I stuck Scanlily stickers to the backs of all of the picture frames in the house. On the app, I sorted the art into two categories on Scanlily: paintings and photographs.
I asked him questions about each item and recorded his responses using the audio record button in Scanlily. Scanlily gave me the option to take a photo using my phone’s camera or upload images from my files. I chose the second option because I used my DSLR camera to take the photos. Scanlily gives a space to take notes about each item.
I checked the box for “publicly viewable” so that anyone else who scans the QR code can hear my grandfather’s voice explain the art piece. If they don’t have Scanlily downloaded, they will still be able to view my recordings and notes about the artwork on their phone’s web browser.
This process helped us go through what pieces are important to him and which ones he didn’t care for, and it made my grandfather’s memories easily shareable to the rest of my family.
Even though I set out to record my grandfather’s memories to look back on in the future, recording him brought me closer to him in the present. I learned new stories about my grandfather– how he proposed to my grandmother on the third date, which he said was the best decision of his life. I learned about his first job herding sheep in the mountains when he was in elementary school. By the end of the day, I felt like I knew my grandfather more than I ever had.
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