Working in the context of cinema, Ebbrecht (2010) argues that “migrating images” are disconnected from their original context, transferred into visual tropes, and function as “memory cues”. The digital context adds another level of complication because digital images are, as Manovich explains, “modular” (2001). Digital Holocaust imagery thus appears in a modular context, sometimes relating to other images of the Holocaust and sometimes not, sometimes presented as whole and sometimes in part. Consequently, these images form new visual memories of the Holocaust and constitute new visual relations between digitised assets, which require new methods for their analysis and curation.
The presentation introduces two new visual methods for analysing digitised images: the single image method and the multiple image method. The former regards various images as modular components composed into a single image that relates to the Holocaust, while the latter attends to visual relations established between sequences of allegedly independent images that are actually co-dependent for identifying their visual relations with Holocaust-related images. The presentation demonstrates the methods with a visual analysis of digitised graphic novels, video games and historical footage that we examine in the research project Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age. Together, the two methods deal with the modularisation of images, and enable the forming of a new network of visual relations between contemporary and historic, digital and digitised, images of the Holocaust.
Migrating Images of the Holocaust in the Digital Age: New Methods of Digital Curation
Thursday, 03.06.2021, 15:00
Lital Henig and Shir Ventura: Presentation at the online conference “Digital Holocaust Memory from the Margins: Practices, Places, and Narratives”
