Media,Culture & Society

In our globally mediated age our relationship with the past is increasingly interpreted through the lens of our presentist media. Conventional means of representing and remembering historical events have to some extent been superseded, with technological advances permitting increasingly electronically mediated viewpoints. Indeed, new generations, fed on a diet of instantaneous information, possess new expectations of how the past should be viewed. This creates a problem for historians keen to retain a purist perspective on events, and, especially in respect of the Holocaust, the contemporary representation of which is the subject of much critical discourse and debate. This article examines one site of contemporary Holocaust representation: the Holocaust Exhibition housed at the Imperial War Museum, London. I consider whether the designers’ objectives in seeking an ‘authentic’ sampling of objects of this event - providing real ‘signs’ of the Holocaust - is adequate to the expectations of visitors of a post-Holocaust generation. This involves exploring how the exhibition positions ‘history’ and ‘memory’, with the latter viewed as problematic in relation to an event constructed historically as both unique and incomparable.

This article examines the politics of representation around a 1997 exhibition of Cambodian atrocity photographs that were produced by Khmer Rouge perpetrators during the period 1975-9. I discuss the role of the Tuol Sleng archive in Cambodia, and the work of a private group in the preservation and publication of the prisoner portrait photographs. It is argued that responses of visitors and curators to the photographs, displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, provide significant insights into a contemporary propensity to memorialize, rather than specify and politicize, the past violence of ‘peripheral’ states and peoples.

This article will compare the narrative projects of nation building and dismantling as represented in the truth commissions of South Africa and East Germany. One of the most important aspects of truth commissions is that personal suffering on a wide scale is publicly acknowledged and written into the national fabric. The relationship between individual and collective memory is a powerful one; through the testimonies that it has documented, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has created the possibility for South African citizens to participate in the writing of a new official version of their country’s recent history. It has helped to establish a break with the past, so that the country as a whole can move forward. In contrast, the truth commission set up in East Germany was important in the dismantling of that country. While most truth commissions cover a relatively limited period of time, the truth commission of East Germany was unusual, if not unique, in that it covered the whole of that country’s history. And unlike South Africa, and other countries, where truth commissions function as a pivotal bridge between past and future, in East Germany, the truth commission marked the completion of the national narrative.

Historical events and social memories are increasingly articulated and accessed through the means of interactive digital technologies. Particularly in the context of history museums, interactive digital media kiosks and web-sites are used to enhance and in some cases constitute a key way in which the past is conveyed to the public. Yet in what ways are new technologies in such contexts constructing a different relationship to the past and how are visitors themselves using these technologies? This article uses empirical research from the Museum of Tolerance in the US to critically situate and theorize the uses of new technologies in relation to socially inherited memories of the Holocaust.

This article critically analyses the work and the ethos of the MIT Media Lab in the context of globalizing capital and the ICT revolution. It argues that the Media Lab owes its tremendous success in part to the public relations strategies of its founder, Nicholas Negroponte, and to the very real need for the Lab’s products to ‘fill in the gaps’ left by the broad and irregular dynamics of globalization and the ICT revolution. The Media Lab and its research products insert information technologies into the interstices of cultural, social and temporal life, stitching together an ‘informational ecology’ of interconnectivity. This ecology has its own temporality, a synchronized ‘chronoscopic’ temporality or real-time duration that obliterates the many other temporalities that interpenetrate our lives and give them meaning. It is argued the ‘informational ecology’ of interconnectivity constructed by the Media Lab and many other emulative ‘start-ups’, lead not to a world of ‘diversity’ as Negropontean philosophy insists, but a one-dimensional world of alienation.