Emotional Remembrance through Virtual Witnessing: Interactions with AI-based Representations of Holocaust Survivors (Working Title)
Primary supervisor: Prof. Dr. Christoph Bareither
As a PhD candidate on the DFG-funded project "From the Era of the Witness to Digital Remembrance", I am interested in interactions with virtual representations of Holocaust survivors and how this technology plays into the dynamic field of memory practices. Testimonies of and encounters with Holocaust survivors constitute a significant component of Holocaust commemoration. The emotional connections between survivors and their audiences form a crucial part of these personal encounters, making an unimaginable and not always recountable past tangible for several generations. As such, these face-to-face meetings shape our understanding of the past and how we generate its meaning in the present.
The number of living witnesses is dwindling, releasing the commemorative landscape from “The Era of the Witness”( Wieviorka 2006) into the “post-witness era” (Popescu/ Schult 2015). In response to the passing of the last survivors, initiatives have emerged to preserve the encounter with contemporary witnesses through technology: in the mid 2010s, the USC Shoah Foundation initiated the project "Dimensions in Testimony" and developed virtual representations of witnesses to continue meeting with survivors and enable an interactive, personal, and emotional access to history for future generations. These human-virtual encounters are based on video clips with answers of survivors, which have been recorded during an extensive interview process. The interaction is then enabled by AI-based technologies and natural language processing, matching the pre-recorded answers with questions posed by users. The virtual representations of survivors are accessible via large screens in selected Holocaust museums or online via personal computers at home.
Similarly to Walden’s notion of the “virtual as a methodology – a particular form of memory practice – rather than a medium” (Walden 2022, p.621), I approach the topic from a digital anthropological perspective, regarding the interaction between users and virtual survivors as productive socio-technical assemblage (DeLanda 2006/2016). This perspective helps to understand how all involved – human and non-human – actors reciprocally affect each other and how shifting relations between the assemblage's components modify existing memory practices. Further, following Schöneberger’s approach to analyze complexes of technology, humans and socio-cultural change with the concept of persistence and recombination (Schöneberger 2015), I propose that preconceptions of established memory practices feed into the development of virtual survivor testimonies, while the implementation of technology such as AI and the algorithmic practices coming with it simultaneously enforce changes in these memory practices, thus leading to continuations as well as disruptions of meaning making processes in Holocaust commemoration through survivors' testimonies. Presuming that the creation of a personal connection to the figure of the survivor and through them to history itself is largely based on “doing emotion” (Scheer 2016), I am particularly interested in how evoked emotions during the interaction with the AI-based virtual survivor testimonies are constructing users’ relationship to history and how this doing emotion through virtual witnessing affects Holocaust commemoration as a whole.
Hence, researching the algorithmic structures underlying the virtual testimonies in relation to user interactions and presentation practices at museums, promises a fresh perspective on these topics. I explore this complex of issues with ethnographic methods of qualitative social research and contribute a cultural anthropological perspective to this interdisciplinary field of research.