Attenuating Distortion: New Media and the Redemption of the 9/11 Memorial Museum

In May of 2014, the 9/11 Memorial Museum became the latest addition to Ground Zero’s chasmic geometry, inciting extensive debate about the spatial co-existence of museums and memorials. Critics of the Museum find its commercial and educative undertones to be inappropriate for a site of mourning. For mourners, it conceivably taints the sacredness of what is supposed to be commemorative space, engendering what Susan Crane (1997) describes as a disturbing confounding of expectation, or simply distortion. In Foundation Hall, there are four interactive tables (collectively referred to as the Beam Signing) whose function shows the Museum’s consciousness of and desire to meet mourners’ expectations. This paper will argue that the interactive tables provide an opportunity for mourning individuals to transform the museum space into a memorial that is more familiar in terms of its affective power. It will then illuminate how this works to attenuate distortion, ultimately arguing that the museum has tried to be more than just an inevitability of commercial culture