Abstract
This chapter articulates the design thinking underlying the virtualization of “places of exception.” The Guantánamo Bay Museum of Art and History is a faux museum website premised on the imagined closure of Guantánamo. The site features artists who respond to the prison via mixed-media, photography, and art installations. Gone GITMO is a re-creation of the Guantánamo on the virtual simulated reality platform, Second Life. The projects’ designers upended phenomenological conceptions of place as concrete, material, or bound to human memory and histories. Not encumbered by human and geographical concerns, the designers fabricated the place of exception as it might be to educate public audiences, promote civic engagement, and stimulate dialogue about the imprisonment of suspected terrorists at Guantánamo Bay Prison.
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Notes
- 1.
To study GITMO and The Guantánamo Museum of Art and History, I interviewed the projects’ design leads, a total of three people. In addition to interview data, I drew on public talks and exhibitions on the projects that I either attended in person or viewed online. Extant documents, articles, and published research on the theories that underlie these virtual projects were also examined.
- 2.
For a detailed account of Second Life’s populaces, social practices, and economies, see Boellstorff’s (2015) ethnographic study of the platform.
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Goulding, C. (2020). Teaching and Learning in Virtual Places of Exception: Gone GITMO and the Guantánamo Bay Museum of Art and History. In: Zucker, E., Simon, D. (eds) Mass Violence and Memory in the Digital Age. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39395-3_7
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