Critical Digital Cartography of Traumatic Places in Europe

Abstract

Sites of Holocaust Memory in Europe are often represented with digital geomedia such as multimedia maps, augmented reality apps, or audio trails. The dissertation investigates how geomedia co-constitute real places and proximity-distance relations to place and how they are interwoven into different national and international discourses. Geomedia are thereby understood as components of discursive practices. In the context of the dissertation, geomedia will be analyzed comparatively at different sites of memory in Europe. In addition, the discursive environments in which the respective media production is embedded will be examined. For this purpose, qualitative expert interviews with producers will be conducted. Research will be conducted in four European countries: Germany, France, Austria, Poland. In the sense of a microhistory, individual places were selected where geomedia represent central media of remembrance. The places are in Germany the Dachau concentration camp memorial with the ARt app and the Memory Loops project in Munich, in France the city of Paris with the project Les parisiens racontent la shoah, in Austria the memorial on the grounds of the former concentration camp Gusen with the virtual guide, and in Poland the city of Oświęcim with the app project Oshpitzin and the virtual panorama tour of the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum. The aim of the work is to reveal the discourses in which places of remembrance and their digital geomedial representations are involved, to offer constructive criticism of them, and to elaborate proposals for a critical cartography, or critical digital geo-representation.

Short biography

Leo Dressel, born 1987 in Vienna, studied visual arts and film at the Université de Bordeaux and Concordia University in Montreal, and subsequently in the Master Time-Based Media at the University of Art in Linz. Leo Dressel is active in the field of historical-political education, as an artist, educator and researcher. Since 2021, Dressel is a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, since December 2022 as a DOC fellow of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Keywords: critical cartography – digital geomedia – memory culture – traumatic places – dispositiv