Prosthetic Memory

This volume explores the multifaceted depiction and staging of historical and social traumata as the result of extreme violence within national contexts. It focuses on Israeli-Palestinian, German and (US) American film, and reaches out to cinematic traditions from other countries like France, Great Britain and the former USSR. International and interdisciplinary scholars analyze both mainstream and avant-garde movies and documentaries premiering from the 1960s to the present. From transnational and cross-genre perspectives, they query the modes of representation – regarding narration, dramaturgy, aesthetics, mise-en-scène, iconology, lighting, cinematography, editing and sound – held by film as a medium to visualize shattering experiences of violence and their traumatic encoding in individuals, collectives, bodies, and psyches. This anthology uniquely traces horror aesthetics and trajectories as a way to reenact, echo and question the perpetual loops of trauma in film cultures. The contributors examine the discursive transfer between historical traumata necessarily transmitted in a medialized and conceptualized form, the changing landscape of (clinical) trauma theory, the filmic depiction and language of trauma, and the official memory politics and hegemonic national-identity constructions.

Audio recordings and the corresponding transcripts are often used as prosthetic memory (PM) after meetings and lectures. While current research is mainly developing novel features for prosthetic memory, less is known on how and why audio recordings and transcripts are used. We investigate how users interact with audio and transcripts as prosthetic memory, whether interaction strategies change over time, and analyse potential differences in accuracy and efficiency. In contrast to the subjective user perception, our results show that audio recordings and transcripts are equally efficient, but that transcripts are generally preferred due to their easily accessible contextual information. We further identified that prosthetic memory is not only used as a recall aid but frequently also consulted for verifying information that has been recalled from organic memory (OM). Our findings are summarised in a number of design implications for prosthetic memory solutions.

Can landscapes be moved? What does it mean for a landscape not to have a place when the former is often equated with the latter in geographical terms? The following essay considers the relevance and resonance of place (and space) as related to landscapes of memory. By considering the increasing digitization of memory via the burgeoning geoweb, we aim to explore the future of memorial-making, which has long been a physical and material practice that treats site as a remnant of authenticity. While monuments often commemorate events that occurred elsewhere, landscapes themselves are frequently all that remains of histories long forgotten. The following considers whether these landscapes can be captured, transported and inscribed in the social imagination (as cultural memory) as an ex situ experience. We conclude with three illustrative memorial propositions and emphasize how geospatial media might be harnessed in contemporary memorial-making to transport us virtually to sites of memory and transport memorial landscapes into the space of our everyday lives. These propositions rely on the adaptability and accretional nature of new media technologies to commemorate ongoing processes of loss. Rather than commemorate the singularity of sites as uniquely sacred, these technologies enable awareness of larger networks of memory that draw people together across geographies and “chasms of difference.”

Nowadays, digital and paper documents are used simultaneously during daily tasks. While significant research has been carried out to support the re-finding of digital documents, less effort has been made to provide similar functionality for paper documents. In this paper, we present a solution that enables the design of cross-media Personal Information Management (PIM) user interfaces helping users in re-finding documents across digital and physical information spaces. We propose three main design requirements for the presented cross-media PIM user interfaces. Further, we illustrate how these design requirements have been applied in the development of three proof-of-concept applications and describe a software framework supporting the design of these interfaces. Finally, we discuss opportunities for future improvements of the presented cross-media PIM user interfaces.

En este trabajo se delinean algunos ejes de reflexión crítica en torno al potencial de la ficción televisiva en la construcción de la memoria cultural y en la articulación de dinámicas de transferencia del recuerdo a escala transnacional. Particularmente, se aborda este asunto a partir de la serie "Narcos" (2015), una producción original de Netflix, empresa de televisión en "streaming" de alcance global.
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This paper intends to delineate some axes of critical reflection on the potential of television fiction in the construction of cultural memory and in the articulation of memory transference dynamics of on a transnational scale. In particular, this issue is addressed through the analysis of "Narcos" (2015), an original production of Netflix, a streaming television company with global reach