Liberation App

New Sites of Memory Making: Augmented Reality and Holocaust Memory

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden Augmented Reality or ‘AR’ is still an emerging field in Holocaust memory. We explore examples from AR practice and theory and propose five recommendations for its future development. What do we mean when we talk about ‘augmented reality’ or ‘AR’ projects? Blancas et al. (2021) bring together several definitions which emphasise that AR does not refer to a singular medium or technology: Augmented Reality (AR) enriches the physical world with digital information, annotating reality and supplementing it with additional information (Feiner et al., 1997). A classical definition considers it a form of Mixed Reality (XR) in which a real-world view is supplemented by synthetic sensory input (Milgram & Kishino, 1994). For some authors, AR should fulfil at least three properties: combining real and virtual, interactive in real time, and registered in three dimensions (Azuma, 1997). An ideal AR system would make users believe the virtual and real objects coexist in the same space, blurring the frontier between real and virtual (Billinghurst et al., 2002). It might be best then to define augmented reality as: a particular mode of mediation, which produces a specific relationship between the body and the lived-world with and through media. [...]

Spotlight: Dachau Memorial

By Prof. Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden The Director of the Landecker Digital Memory Lab reflects on how digitally-mediated experiences of Dachau Memorial rearrange the site’s meaning and affect for her. On arrival at KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, most visitors close the gate which reads ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ so they can take a photograph of the infamous slogan. There is no suggestion from the site’s curators or educators that this is a proposed activity at the site – indeed there is no invitation to ‘touch’ historical things (although the gate in-situ is a replica), yet most visitors feel compelled to do this – perhaps due to the iconicity of these three words. This now ritualistic behaviour is illustrative of the fact that however well ‘curated’ or ‘managed’ memorial sites seem to be, their role as memorial spaces and the meaning and relations relating to the past constructed there rely on the performativity of the multitude of different agents who come to occupy the place – however transiently. As I walked through the gate the first time during a 5-day research trip to the site, my eyes and thus my whole-bodily attention were draw to two things immediately: the guard tower across the roll call [...]