Digital Media and Memory

In Transmitted Wounds, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about the deep association of media and trauma: media bear witness to the human failure to bear witness, making the traumatic technologically transmissible and reproducible.

Taking up a number of case studies--the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality exposure therapy for PTSD--Pinchevski demonstrates how the technological mediation of trauma feeds into the traumatic condition itself. The result is a novel understanding of media as constituting the material conditions for trauma to appear as something that cannot be fully approached and yet somehow must be.

While drawing on contemporary materialist media theory, especially the work of Friedrich Kittler and his followers, Pinchevski goes beyond the anti-humanistic tendency characterizing the materialist approach, discovering media as bearing out the human vulnerability epitomized in trauma, and finding therein a basis for moral concern in the face of violence and atrocity. Transmitted Wounds unfolds the ethical and political stakes involved in the technological transmission of mental wounds across clinical, literary, and cultural contexts.

In dealing with digital games that engage with the past, one inevitably steps into the academic field of historical game studies (Chapman 2016a). Nonetheless, of course, ‘history’ is not the only proper theoretical perspective to look at the past. Using the fantasy game Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Intelligent System & Koei Tecmo 2019) as a case study, I will suggest looking at digital games from the perspective of memory studies, understanding them as ‘memory-play-spaces’ in which players continuously engage with memory-making.

Between 1961 and 1974, the Portuguese dictatorial regime became involved in a war on three fronts to maintain colonial rule over its African territories of Angola, Guinea and Mozambique. After thirteen years of armed conflict, the coup d'état of 25 April 1974 put an end to the war and the dictatorship that sustained it. More than forty years have passed since then. This short essay is intended as a further contribution to recent academic output on the memory of the conflict. In particular, it contributes to the discussion of the importance of digital space in constructing a social memory of the former combatants and challenges the absence of a public narrative about the colonial war as an integrated event in Portugal's colonial past.

It is often claimed that modern media massively return the repressed yet unavoidable fact of death, which modernity had institutionalised and placed out of sight. Death is everywhere in the media age: in news, in fiction, and not least in the budding practices of sociality and memory on the internet. This article will revolve around what we may learn about media and death from the vantage point of how memory cultures are currently being transformed. Spanning a heterogeneous terrain, the ‘digital memory ecology’ comprises among other things the construction of a digital afterlife, commemorative communities of grief and remembrance, interaction in guest books, digital candles and commentary fields on digital memorials. This article argues that today death is far from the hidden supplement to culture as Zygmunt Bauman contends or that it is even making a mediated return to us, but is rather ubiquitous in the digital age. As such it is both de-sequestered and deferred. By launching the deliberately ambiguous concept of existential security, the article outlines a research agenda for how we may approach these tendencies.

PAMIĘĆ PROTETYCZNA, 1) w ujęciu Alison Landsberg  oznacza → wspomnienia osobiste jednostek nabywane w rezultacie osobistego → doświadczenia odbioru audiowizualnych i wielozmysłowych wytworów kultury masowej (oglądanie → filmu, serialu telewizyjnego [→ telewizja], zwiedzanie współczesnego → muzeum, zorientowanego na doświadczenie), w formie udramatyzowanej oraz kulturowo przekształconej uobecniających wydarzenia, których dana osoba sama nie przeżyła; 2) angielskie pojęcie prosthetic memory odnajdujemy także w dyskursie nauk społecznych jako określenie wielorakich strategii przekazywania wspomnień za pomocą przedmiotów (→ rzecz), urządzeń, technologii medialnych, stanowiących protezy wspierające → pamięć indywidualną oraz → zbiorową. W drugim przypadku zakres pojęcia silnie interferuje z polem semantycznych pokrewnych kategorii: → nośników pamięci; → implantów pamięci i → mediów pamięci

Total Recall (Bell and Gemmell, 2009) is a non-fiction book proposing a vision of a complete digital archive of everything we do, see or hear. Cameras and devices would constantly record out experience, creating a digital copy of one’s memory. I read this vision as a contemporary form of autobiography, expressing fantasies of self-representation, mostly the will for erasing the gap between one’s representation and oneself. The vision attempts to create a representation of oneself that would be identical to oneself and capture one’s past experience. Yet this dreamt-of faithful self-representation – direct, ongoing, automatic, objective – merely constitutes further proof of the difficulty inherent in autobiography. The outcome of the attempt to create the most exact representation, would be a dataset from which precisely the subject is absent. The perspective of literary autobiography thus helps shed light on new and evolving contemporary practices.

How does digitization reshape people’s engagement with their past? As ever more moments and interactions are objectified as digital data (photos, e-mail, instant messaging protocols) stored in digital archives that are constantly available and used intensively as memory aids, people’s engagement with their past is increasingly mediated by databases and algorithms. The article explores how the non-narrative, paradigmatic structure of the database then remoulds memory. More specifically, it is suggested that once encounters of people with representations of the past from their personal archives are mediated by search and sorting algorithms, memories lose their status as docile objects. When memory objects can appear in unexpected places and times, their agency qua memory actants can no longer be blackboxed. Rather than relations of possession, people then have neighbourly relations with the memory objects that populate their digital environments.

Packaging della memora in Facebook, cultura dell'effimero e della "non memorabilità" della vita in Snapchat, big data memory in Selfiecity. Come le interfacce modellano il nostro modo di ricordare? alcune riflessioni condivise al convegno "Contemporaneamente", http://contemporaneamente.piccolopificiosociologico.it/ Università di Firenze, 21-23 Novembre 2016.

Studija ispituje dinamiku posredovanja uznemirujuće prošlosti u okruženju kolaborativnih platformi usmjerenih k izgradnji konsenzusa o temama rasprave, poput projekta Wikipedija. U skladu s prijedlogom istraživača okupljenih unutar Inicijative digitalnih metoda, Wikipediji pristupamo kao “kulturološkoj referenci” za proučavanje politika pamćenja i pomirenja. Koristimo se metodom analize sadržaja. Rad predstavlja, u formi studije slučaja, rezultate usporedne analize članaka o masakrima civila na sarajevskoj tržnici Markale, počinjenim tokom rata u Bosni i Hercegovini, u bosanskoj, hrvatskoj, engleskoj, srpskohrvatskoj i srpskoj jezičnoj verziji Wikipedije.

Wie sehen wir Geschichte im Film? Wie machen wir Sinn aus dem, was uns in Filmen wie GOOD BYE LENIN! und SCHINDLERS LISTE als Zeugnis der Vergangenheit und kunstvoll gestaltete Geschichte entgegentritt?
Dass Filme das Geschichtsbewusstsein der Zuschauer prägen und – im Zeitalter der Massenmedien – die ›wahren Lehrmeister‹ der Geschichte sind, ist eine weithin geteilte Auffassung. Doch was so offensichtlich erscheint, erweist sich bei näherer Betrachtung als schwer kalkulierbarer Aneignungsprozess. Wenn wir Geschichte im Film sehen, blicken wir nicht auf eine abgeschlossene Vergangenheit. Vielmehr sehen, verstehen und fühlen wir Filme und begegnen ihren Deutungsangeboten mit eigenen lebensweltlichen Erfahrungen. Geschichte im Film wird vom Zuschauer gemacht.
Die Autorin führt auf innovative Weise Ansätze und Annahmen aus den Geschichts-, Film- und Sozialwissenschaften zusammen. Empirische Grundlage der Untersuchung sind umfangreiche Befragungen von Zuschauern in Deutschland und in den USA. Die Bandbreite der betrachteten Filme reicht von internationalen Kassenschlagern wie FORREST GUMP von Robert Zemeckis bis zu Arthouse-Produktionen wie AUFSCHUB von Harun Farocki.

MFA Thesis
(contemporary art, social theory, time and narrative theory, temporality, television theory, television studies)

‘Landscape’ is an active site of occurrence—a platform of media-influenced exchange. Reflected through televisual language, it offers a relative experience, tied to our sense of geography, time and shifting notions of history. The Cascade - Moments in the Televisual Desert engages TV-inflected landscape as a permeating condition. In this telescoping space, landscape conflates time and memory, location and topography, television and reality.

Rooted in a personal connection to Southern California, which permeates American television from the 1960s-80s, I hunt, excavate and deploy conceptual instances of the Mojave Desert and its entanglement with the real, the vividly scripted and the iconic. Mediated by television, Los Angeles County becomes mercurial, behaving as stage and script, environment and blueprint—a mythic, cultural hunting ground. This transitory televisual landscape informs our understanding of place and event, blurring fiction and fact. The Cascade arrests this instability as an interdisciplinary investigation: a hot-and-cool mosaic that asks viewers to seek, receive and connect.

Derived from a body of moments excavated from television, The Cascade suspends semi-narrative traces as elements removed from their physical location by the original filming and further removed by capturing and mutating temporal instants. The environments thus inhabit the actual, the imagined and the transient place of recollection—a collapsed space conflating personal history, geologic reality and cultural production. Using layers as an economical mode of storytelling (focused on suspension in the moment), I compress events and location into a system of surface-screens: layers provide non-linear depth and conversations between media offer different modes of viewing and consuming.


Thesis covers aspects of related social and art theory.

The cloud is a metaphor that helps to obscure the material realities that rest beneath our digital memories. However, a number of scholars in memory studies have suggested that cultural memory has always had a material basis and some, though limited, scholarly attention has already considered the toxic by-products and unethical practices involved in mining minerals that are used in making digital memories. This article draws on earlier work on the materiality of cultural memory as well as Tsing’s (Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, 2005) concept of ‘friction’ in global commodity chains to help analyse our own empirical research in Australia and Malaysia that looks at the production of rare earth minerals, whose use in making digital communication technologies is not widely known. Our analysis concludes that that not all citizens are equally bearing the burden of the risks and damages caused by our growing desire and addiction for information and communication gadgets and digital memory. We argue that any conceptualization of digitized and globalized or ‘globital memory’ must resist metaphors, narratives and concepts that attempt to remove digital memory from its material consequences; to do this scholars must incorporate an understanding of memory’s materialism into their research, rather than focusing predominantly or exclusively on its energetic or ‘virtual’ properties.

The American artist Molly Parker Stuart traces the untold biography in her generative digital video works, which are charged with the complexity of her experience as a transgender woman in the American Midwest. This paper is informed by my interviews with the artist in 2019.

Transmedia concepts are increasingly used at museums and historic sites in order to expand and intensify learning experiences. By linking real objects and places with digitised information through hybrid media concepts new entry points, learning processes and perspectives can be enabled. We will present key concepts and current approaches in the context of Holocaust education and memorials, museums and historic sites. at the Auschwitz Museum 1 Yad Vashem Museum 2 and Tower of Faces Holocaust Memorial Museum,

Impending death and the event of passing can leave one in a state beyond bereavement, leading to a penchant for rationalizing the entire process. Increasingly people turn to social media not only as a community of mourners who come together to share their grief, but also to create chronicles of hope for the deceased's life-before-death through acts of sharing emotional narratives, prayers of faith, as well as relational visuals awaiting the passing away. These digital networking communities have displayed the power to hold onto the fleeting. Social media possess an inherent quality of conceptual permanence that make them transitional public conduits for talking about the possibility of miracles to halt imminent death, fluidly followed by discussions of the transience of life. This essay critically evaluates extant literature on peri-and postmortem research with a focus on how the transitional narrative of sustaining hope and shared grieving is said to have been created on social network sites. We argue that digital acts of sharing prayers and intimate memories during the transitional phase (the period connecting the before and after mortem phases of a loved one) as done within social networking sites such as Facebook, conflates and complicates our accepted notions of social presence by reinforcing the digital enactment of what people do in offline grieving spaces.

O presente artigo propõe discutir o TV News Archive, projeto online de arquivamento de  programas de notícia de emissoras norte-americanas, vinculado ao Internet Archive (www.archive.org). Ao dissecar (Kilpp, 2010) e escavar (Huhtamo, 1997) algumas de  suas interfaces e lógicas operativas, identificamos devires da tecnocultura televisiva (mais
“editoriais” e da própria web (mais “formais”) produzindo tensões dialéticas que nos  permitem avançar sobre a compreensão deste fenômeno como um construto de memória,  ao qual associamos os debates de Kilpp (2005) sobre televisão e memória e Pierre Nora  (1993) sobre os lugares de memória.

Montaigne’s Essays are, in part, a reflection on the ongoing negotiation between the objects, aims, and uses of modern monumental memory, on the one hand, and postmodern plural memory, on the other. Written in the throes of the French Wars of Religion, the Essays grapple with proliferating and inevitably conflicting contributions to the collective memory bank. Montaigne unequivocally refuses to monumentalize memory, ultimately providing a model of a deep, and deeply dialogical, engagement with plural memories. The kind of memory that digital networks facilitate in the global age is unstable, dynamic, and polyvalent in a way that Montaigne’s Essays both perform and endorse. This is why, in their commitment to probing both the depth and the range of human experience, Montaigne’s Essays remain a record of and a template for productive ways to imagine the dignity of memory in our own age of variety and vicissitude.

This article examines how digital technology interacts with Holocaust remembrance in post-socialist countries. Using the Lviv pogrom of 1941 as a case study, it explores how Russophone and Ukrainophone web users engage with audiovisual tributes to this event on YouTube. The article scrutinizes user engagement with Holocaust memory on two levels: the level of representation (how the pogrom is represented on YouTube) and the level of interaction (how users interact with tributes to the pogrom). The article suggest that digital media can democratize existing memory practices, but it does not necessarily lead to more pluralist views on the past.

Этот текст задумывался как отчет о летней школе «Mnemonics 2018: экологии памяти», проходившей в Левенском университете в августе 2018 года, но в процессе написания трансформировался в эссе о memory studies как варианте новой экологии (научной) жизни. Рассказ о школе служит частным примером обсуждаемых мной тенденций.

In an era that celebrates instantaneity and hyper-connectivity, compulsions of networked individualism coexist with technological obsolescence, amounting to a sense of fragmentation and a heightened tension between remembering and forgetting. This article argues, however, that in our era of absolute presence, a netlore of the infinite is emerging, precisely in and through our digital memory practices. This is visible in the ubiquitous meaning-making practices of for instance personal digital archiving through the urges for self-perpetuation; it is evident at sites where the self may be saved for posterity; it is discernible in the technospiritual
practices of directly speaking to the dead on digital memorials, as well as in the tendency among some users to regard the Internet itself as a manifestation of eternity, “heaven”
and the sacred. This article shows that by approaching digital memory cultures existentially, and by attending to the complexities of digital time, we may gain insights into important and paradoxical aspects of our existential terrains of connectivity. This makes possible an exploration into how people navigate and create meaning in the digital memory ecology—in seeking to ground a sense of the eternal in the ephemeral.