Abstract
The Holocaust has gone digital. An interactive web tour of Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial Museum; Anne Frank’s secret annex online, which invites spectators to ‘wander around’ a virtual version of her original house and discover her ‘secret annex’; and the Shoah Foundation’s database ‘IWitness’, which promises mobile phone access to over 1,000 Holocaust survivor testimonies to enable ‘critical multi-literacies for the 21st century… [such as] ethical remixing’ are some of the recent examples of how Holocaust memory appears in the online era.1 To date, digital forms of collective memory have been variously termed ‘cyber commemoration’, ‘digital history’ or ‘cybermemorialisation’.2 For the most part they have been judged in terms of their effectiveness as accurate representations of established histories. Other analyses alternately emphasise the forms of collective agency that are made possible with changed ‘ecologies’ of memory.3 In this chapter I investigate how digital memories revision those material practices already established by the archives, memorials and museums prevalent in the latter half of the 20th century. I not only examine how digital practices transform memory texts, objects and sites, but importantly, how they repurpose the socio-cultural dynamics of memory that are held in the aesthetic frameworks they inherit. In this, I suggest that what they revision is the nascent materiality of the memory affect itself.
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Notes
Paul Longley Arthur, ‘Exhibiting History: The Digital Future’, re Collections: Journal of the National Museum of Australia 3.1 (2008), pp. 33–50
Giorgia Doná, ‘Collective Suffering and Cyber-Memorialisation in Post-Genocide Rwanda’ in Mick Broderick and Antonio Traverso (eds.) Trauma, Media, Art (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2010), pp. 16–35.
See, in particular, Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading (eds.) Save As… Digital Memories (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Andrew Hoskins, ‘Anachronisms of Media, Anachronisms of Memory: From Collective Memory to a New Memory Ecology’ in Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyal Zandberg (eds.) On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 278–88
Jose Van Dijck, Mediated Memories in the Digital Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007).
Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Vivian M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
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See Alex Burns and Ben Eltham, ‘Twitter Free Iran: An Evaluation of Twitter’s Role in Public Diplomacy and Information Operations in Iran’s 2009 Election Crisis’, Communications Policy & Research Forum, 19–20 November 2009, University of Technology, Sydney. http://eprints.vu.edu.au/15230/, page accessed 13 September 2013
Mette Mortensen, ‘When Citizen Photojournalism Sets the News Agenda: Neda Agha Soltan as a Web 2.0 Icon of Post-Election Unrest in Iran’, Global Media and Communication 7.1 (2011), pp. 4–16.
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Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 4.
Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 22. My italics.
Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2000 [1999]), p. 56.
Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading, ‘Introduction’ in Joanne Garde-Hansen, Andrew Hoskins and Anna Reading (eds.) Save As... Digital Memories (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 1–21, p. 14.
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Mark Seltzer, Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 254.
Caroline Wake uses this term in specific relation to theories of witness: ‘when witnessing a performance the spectator experiences a sort of “after-affect” rather than simply experiencing affect during the performance or the after-effects of that affect. The affect itself does not arrive during the performance but afterwards’. See ‘The Accident and the Account: Towards a Taxonomy of Spectatorial Witness in Theatre and Performance Studies’ in Bryoni Trezise and Caroline Wake (eds.) Visions and Revisions: Performance, Memory, Trauma (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013), pp. 33–56, p. 38.
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Marianne Hirsch, ‘Surviving Images: Holocaust Photographs and the Work of Postmemory’, Yale Journal of Criticism 14.1 (2001), pp. 5–37.
This idea might be connected to Caroline Wake’s characterisation of ‘hypermediate witnessing’, in which’ spectators [of video testimonies] are spatiotemporally distant and experience themselves as such because the medium does not recede but rather remains in view’. See ‘Regarding the Recording: The Viewer of Video Testimony, the Complexity of Copresence and the Possibility of Tertiary Witnessing’, History and Memory 25.1 (2013), pp. 111–14, p. 113.
Vivian M. Patraka, Spectacular Suffering: Theatre, Fascism and the Holocaust (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. 4; Senft, ‘Introduction’, p. 17.
Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), pp. 8, 10.
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© 2014 Bryoni Trezise
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Trezise, B. (2014). Affecting Indifference: Traumatic A-materiality in Second Life. In: Performing Feeling in Cultures of Memory. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137336224_5
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