Dematerialization, Media, and Memory in the Digital Age
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Technology and Cognition
Presentation Title:
- Dematerialization, Media, and Memory in the Digital Age
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Dematerialization, media, and memory in the digital age explores the relationship between the media industry’s representation of important events and our personal and collective memories of these events. The paper investigates what happens when an important personal and collective event is recorded to digital and neuronal memory systems. The paper also examines the space between an individual’s personal memories of real-time events and media’s influence over an individual’s constructed memories of these events. Because digital sequences of images are broadcast in real time to media outlets worldwide at the same time as important events unfold, an international consciousness is informed and influenced by these images both during and after these events. On the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, my paper explores and illustrates the effects that the repeated broadcast of lossless imagery of the fall of the World Trade Center has on the individual and collective consciousness.
The paper presentation will also include screening the author’s abstract 3D computer animation. The animation examines the author’s memory of the fall of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11. On that day, the author watched the tragic events unfold outside his apartment in lower Manhattan while simultaneously watching the events broadcast digitally to his television in real time. Screening the abstracted representation of this event to the conference participants opens up a dialogue between a newly formed collective memory of events and the author’s personal memory and representation of the fall of the World Trade Center in New York City.
