The entertainment, heritage and museum sectors increasingly invest in technologies that create three-dimensional simulations, immersive environments and virtual interactions to enable audiences to invest emotionally and imaginatively in past worlds and experiences. One of the most prominent examples is the so-called ‘World’s First 3-D Interactive Holocaust survivor’ which is supposed to enable an empathic encounter and personalised conversation with a Holocaust survivor beyond their actual life-span. The project, called New Dimensions in Testimony, was first devised at the Institute for Creative Technologies (University of Southern California) in collaboration with the Shoah Foundation. It is piloted as Take a Stand exhibit at the Illinois Holocaust Museum (Skokie, US) and is also currently adapted in The Forever Project by The National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Newark, UK. In this talk, Dr Arnold-de Simine (Reader in Memory, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London) will address the ethical implications and challenges of these simulations.

Dr Silke Arnold-de Simine

Memory, Commemoration and Uses of the Past Research Cluster, CASiLaC

Thursday 11 April, 5 - 6pm

ORB 1:24

Silke Arnold-de Simine is co-director of the Birkbeck Interdisciplinary Research in Media and Culture (BIRMAC), on the advisory board for the Memory Studies Association (MSA) and a steering committee member of the Centre for the Study of Cultural Memory (CCM). Her most recent publication, a co-edited book with Joanne Leal, is entitled Picturing the Family. Media, Narrative, Memory (London: Bloomsbury 2018).