Memory process and frontier technology

This paper investigates the impact of digital technology on the aesthetic representation of trauma, conflict and memory in war. Revolutionary developments in and the aesthetic use of new media are significantly changing our everyday experiences and memories of war. These forms allow us to experience the memory not as a frozen section of past, but rather as a past that continues to transpire and affect the present. It is, as Gilles Deleuze states, equivalent to a scar that is a sign not of a past wound but of the present fact of being wounded. This paper describes an interdisciplinary research project to be undertaken at the iCinema Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, entitled iLETTER. The project records and archives testimony from troops in Afghanistan and their families at home and re-presents this data in a fully immersive 360 degree cinematic environment, allowing users to interactively navigate the archive of video correspondences, with the ability to generate links between the testimonial data and other archived data from memorial and war art databases. Interaction here, with considerable benefits in educational and historical contexts, becomes a way of aesthetically rendering stories and actuating memories through physically enveloping processes. Certainly, “Lest we forget” may be asserted as a general moral principle. But not to forget requires us to imagine the thing that is forgotten, to actively participate in the act of memorialisation, demanding a use of images and narratives that imbue them with an enduring affective trace of lost lives, able to move us in the present