Future of the Past. New technologies in the context of commemorative practice

Technological progress and digitalization have led to more and more human experiences being shifted into virtual space. One of many is memory. The use of new technologies in memorial practices has increased significantly in recent years. Examples include digital time capsules, virtual or holographic memorials.

📲 New technologies are advancing our ability to document areas of land and space, allowing for for more complex relationships to existing memory archives. This has become incredibly important in the thinking surrounding commemorative practices and building new orders of meaning in how we understand and process memory which will be the main topic of our webinar.

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In regards to Holocaust Remembrance Day (April 18), we will also talk about Rywka Lipszyc, a teenage diarist from the Łódź ghetto. We do not know what Rywka Lipszyc looked like, not a single photograph of her has survived. What she left behind was a diary: the words she used to describe her personal tragedy, the difficult everyday life in the ghetto and her relationships with others. Together we will consider – using the example of projects carried out around the story of Rywka and her diary – how to reconstruct the fate of victims and survivors and bring it closer to recipients in digital form. Can an online repository be useful for teachers and educators? How can online materials be made valuable and useful?

We will talk about the possible forms of using the latest digital technologies in the practice of memory work with:
✔️ conceptual artist Jagoda Wójtowicz,
✔️ Dr. Łucja Kapralska, a sociologist from AGH’s Department of Social and Technological Studies,
✔️ legal advisor Dr. Bohdan Widła of the Jagiellonian University,
✔️ Dr Aleksandra Janus, anthropologist and director of Centrum Cyfrowe,
✔️and Dr. Katarzyna Suszkiewicz – a researcher of Polish-Jewish relations and head of the Education Department of the Galicia Jewish Museum.

Partners

The event is co-organized with the Galicia Jewish Museum in Krakow.

Funding

The program is implemented as part of the NeDiPa: Negotiating Difficult Pasts project, which we implement together with the Zapomniane Foundation and the Urban Memory Foundation, thanks to the support of the European Union under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) program.