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Prosthetic Landscapes: Place and Placelessness in the Digitization of Memorials
Abstract
Can landscapes be moved? What does it mean for a landscape not to have a place when the former is often equated with the latter in geographical terms? The essay considers the relevance and resonance of place (and space) as related to landscapes of memory. By considering the increasing digitization of memory via the burgeoning geoweb, the authors aim to explore the future of memorial-making, which has long been a physical and material practice that treats site as a remnant of authenticity. While monuments often commemorate events that occurred elsewhere, landscapes themselves are frequently all that remains of histories long forgotten. The essay considers whether these landscapes can be captured, transported, and inscribed in the social imagination (as cultural memory) as an ex-situ experience. It concludes with three illustrative memorial propositions and emphasize how geospatial media might be harnessed in contemporary memorial-making to transport us virtually to sites of memory and transport memorial landscapes into the space of our everyday lives. These propositions rely on the adaptability and accretional nature of new media technologies to commemorate ongoing processes of loss. Rather than commemorate the singularity of sites as uniquely sacred, these technologies enable awareness of larger networks of memory that draw people together across geographies and “chasms of difference.”
... In their essay on "prosthetic landscapes," they discuss place(nessness), mediation and memory through examples of database aesthetics, immersive media and use of geospatial and locative media. 40 Working with historian Alison Landsberg's concept of "prosthetic memory," as one mediated through immersive technologies, in their speculative Memorials for the Future Gabrielian and Hirsch explore how "geospatial media might be synthesized with physical places in contemporary memorial-making to transport us virtually to sites of memory and transport memorial landscapes into the space of our everyday lives." 41 They imagine "prosthetic landscapes" as palimpsests of past, present and future, as supporting spatially distributed and networked communities to build stories "so far." ...
Between early 1959 and the declaration of Algerian independence in summer 1962, the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV) was the primary place where Algerian-French workers picked up during nightly police raids were triaged, interrogated, and far worse. Though this “identification center” and “administrative interment” site is consistently referred to in histories of the Algerian War, the CIV has, for over five decades, evaded location and escaped description as a space and place that was itself a contributor to the violence enacted against this community. Forensic architecture, as a set of methods developed through Eyal Weizman’s eponymous lab (Forensic Architecture or FA), expands the tools and purview of architectural practice to include the “production of architectural evidence and to its presentation in juridical and political forums.”1 These techniques “focus attention on the materiality of the built environment and its media representations”2 as forms of evidence. The relatively recent development of such methods may explain how the razed CIV’s space, place and events that occurred there remained obfuscated for so long. This paper discusses the architectural methods used to produce evidence of the CIV’s location, to virtually reconstruct its material architecture, to speculate on its immaterial atmospheres, and the centrality of these methods to make this architecture knowable as a contributor to state sanctioned violence. Forensic evidence demands a forum; thus, the conclusion discusses spatial and performative fora as potential frameworks for revealing and debating such hidden histories and for collective remembering.
Three different topological surfaces (Hopf links, handles and cobordisms) can be useful in cyber-geography as metaphors for the interactions between the cyber-space and geo-space and visual models for the changing topology of these interactions at various spatial scales (personal/local, regional, national etc). Hopf links (two non-intersecting tori) might model the interactions between physical and digital spaces when the physical and the digital worlds were non-intersecting and when all digital telecommunications were cable-based (e.g. up until the late 1990s). Topological handles can model the connections in the geo-space and the cyber-space (i.e. Internet connections). Cobordisms of manifolds can model the fusion of geo-and-cyber-spaces that take place with the introduction of ubiquitous digital technologies (i.e. the GeoWeb, Neogeography, and the Internets of Things, Bodies and Everything). Uncharted, disregarded, restricted places in the geo-space or in the cyber-space have often been associated with a sense of placelessness, while concepts of topology such as boundaries and path-connectedness, models (the topological whirlpool) and shapes (multiply connected spaces) can serve as visual metaphors for geographical interpretations of placelessness.
This chapter uses the ‘local’ as a methodological framework to explore imperial hegemonies in the iconography, location, and history of a monument: sculptor George Frampton’s 1905 Queen Victoria Memorial in the city of Leeds, England. It is divided into sections on geography, space, and time, which analyse how the monument was designed to work as a local extension of the imperial project. Focusing on interventions by artists, activists, and citizens, it analyses the destruction of monuments commemorating whitewashed versions of British colonial history as transformative acts of visual vandalism and how creative interventions have challenged the status of Frampton's monument as a relic of localised British imperialism.
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