Title: Affecting Indifference: Traumatic A-materiality in Second Life
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.
Publication Year: 2014
Publication Date: 2014-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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