The Alt-Right, and Holocaust Denial and Distortion Online
Presentations from our online discussion about 'the Alt-Right, and Holocaust denial and distortion online'.
Virtual Holocaust Memorialisation
Presentations from our online discussion about virtual Holocaust memorialisation
Playing the Holocaust – Part II
In late 2020, we hosted an academic discussion about the Holocaust and computer games called Playing the Holocaust - Part I. As a follow-up to that event, in early 2021, we brought together a variety of speakers working on the creation of such projects. Below you can watch the speaker's presentations from this event and find out more about how games designers, their collaborators, and museums have approached making games about this sensitive history. Our first speaker was Jörg Friedrich a game designer from Berlin and co-founder of Paintbucket Games, an independent game studio that made the historical resistance sim Through the Darkest of Times. Before he founded his own studio, Jörg worked for 15 years in creatively influential roles on big production games like Spec Ops:The Line, Dead Island or Drakensang. Jörg is also a freelance lecturer of game and narrative design at a number of schools and universities. https://youtu.be/zGUWSt7CYzk Next up, Noemie Lopian and games designer Dan Hett spoke about their work translating her father's experiences into a computer game. Dr Noemie Lopian is the daughter of Holocaust survivors Dr Ernst Israel Bornstein and Renee Bornstein. In the last few years, she has dedicated her time [...]
The Future of Holocaust Memory – Holocaust Memorial Day 2021
A recording of the online discussion: 'The Future of Holocaust Memory', HMD 2021
Interactivity in Holocaust Memory
When digital media was still being called new media, it was often referred to also as interactive media. The suggestion was, even by those critical of this term, that what distinguished this medium from others was its interactivity even if the interactivity was somewhat illusionary. This of course paved the wave for assertions that pre-digital media was and continues to be passive, whilst digital media introduces radically new ways to turn audiences into active users. Television and film audiences, newspaper and magazine readers, and museum visitors have always been active in one way or another. Digital media may offer new and different forms of activity, but it also continues and introduces methods of ideological control of audiences too. We would best think about interactivity via a number of spectra: From user agency to creator control (although we should never assume users can have fully independent agency in a way that means creators lose all control and vice versa) From cognitive activity to full-body involvement (and vice versa, from simply gestural involvement to bodily engagement which encourages critical thought) From encounter (dialogue) to a more networked, collective form of participation (although again we must be sceptical of the idea of full [...]
Comparing Online Commemoration Events
Does the form of commemoration events alter when organisations are forced to move them online? This blog considers the impact digital has on what commemoration events are and could be.
Holocaust Remembrance in a Digital Future: Towards Deep Truth or Deep Fake?
On Thursday 4th February, I was very honoured to join Stephanie Billib, Bergen-Belsen Memorial, and PhD candidate Tabea Widemann to discuss the tensions between 'deep truth' and 'deep fake' in digital Holocaust remembrance. The panel was part of a larger programme: The Digitalisation of Memory: Technology - Possibilities - Boundaries hosted in partnership between the Falstad Centre in Norway, and POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Poland. In this week's blog, I reflect on some of the themes that arose in that panel. The End of an Era? Whilst there were earlier instances of testimony gathering (including David Boder's immediate post-war recordings and the extensive Fortunoff collection at Yale in the 1970s), since the 1990s, the impetus to record survivor testimonies in a range of media formats has been heightened by the fear of an approaching post-witness age (Tanja Schult and Diana I. Popescu). This has been framed as an end of an era, as the Holocaust shifting from living memory to mediated memory (James E. Young) or from what Annette Wieviorka termed 'the era of the witness' to the 'era of the user' (Susan Hogervorst). Yet such framing makes three assumptions: That digital technology, or media [...]
Algorithmic Auditing, the Holocaust, and Search Engine Bias
In this guest post, Mykola Makhortykh discusses what algorithmic auditing of search engines can reveal about image searches and Holocaust knowledge online.
Capturing Experiential Authenticity at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum
For many people, a visit to the Auschwitz Museum is a highly affective and important event. The thoughts, feelings and memories created during a visit constitute an authentic experience, which museumgoers are keen to capture and remember. This is often undertaken through the use of digital devices and social media posts – but what are the potential challenges of using technology onsite, and how does the Museum respond to this form of memory-making? On Holocaust Memorial Day 2021, we welcome guest blogger Imogen Dalziel, who explores these issues and suggests how the physical and digital can come together to further shape visitors’ experiences. Auschwitz's Authenticities The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum prides itself on being an ‘authentic site’ (e.g., Cywiński 2015). This term is oft used in public discourse to describe historical places, particularly those where atrocities happened. These sites provide material evidence of the tragedies enacted here. In academic literature, however, the concept of authenticity is a complicated one, long-debated and widely interpreted across a diverse range of academic fields, reaching far beyond ideas of what is real or true (see: Trilling 1972; Handler 1986; Phillips 1997; Lovell and Bull 2018, and others). Due to spatial constraints, I shall not fully [...]
Student Competition: Thinking about Computer Games and the Holocaust
In December 2020, I had the honour of teaching students at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. As part of their course, we ran a competition to ask them to apply what they had learnt about computer games and the Holocaust to a proposal for a new game. This blog introduces the winning pitches.