Hannah Arendt begins The Human Condition by discussing the impact of scientific advancements on understandings of humanity in an ever-modernizing world. As rockets successfully carry passengers beyond the confines of gravity, Arendt asks, what do we share, if not an Earth to which we are bound? What becomes of our shared world of things when it is seen to be possible to exist outside of it? Arendt’s brief introductory remarks betray an anxiety about the future, specifically, the future of politics. And the anxiety points directly to concerns about the effects of modern thought and innovation on our historical sensibilities.
Today, Arendt’s premonitions from the middle of the twentieth century can speak to concerns about what Holocaust remembrance will look like when there are no more living survivors to deliver their accounts first-hand. One significant response to this real concern has been the USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony initiative: a library of holograms of survivors that, with the assistance of artificial intelligence, can participate in “real-time, lifelike conversation.” The Shoah Foundation conducted extensive interviews with “Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide” so that “[n]ow and far into the future, museum-goers, students and others can have conversational interactions with these eyewitnesses to history to learn from those who were there” (https://sfi.usc.edu/dit). At present, there are twenty four interviewees, and twelve domestic and international locations that feature Dimensions in Testimony exhibits.
But just like a rocket ship that leaves the orbit of our shared world disrupts our understandings of what we hold in common, a hologram of a Holocaust survivor that transcends the orbit of life and death disrupts our conventional memorial landscapes. Practices of memory always seek to transcend the bounds of human finitude, but the Dimensions in Testimony initiative seems to attempt to eternalize the survivor rather than immortalize their memory. What are the implications of a memory that is preserved artificially and definitively but engaged as though it is not? In this paper, I bring important questions of memory and archive to bear on the Dimensions in Testimony initiative.
Historians and theorists alike have long been asking what it means for a major component of the historical archive—testimony—to rely on what Primo Levi has called a “suspect source.” Dominick LaCapra, for an example, in Writing History, Writing Trauma, makes a distinction between two methods of historiography: on the documentary model, there is an overdetermined reliance on the historical record, whereby other forms of historical writing and memory are rendered inferior, if not superfluous. On the other end of the spectrum, the radical constructivist model accepts history and fiction as distinct “on the level of reference to events,” but structurally affirms an essential similarity between them (LaCapra, 8). And Yosef Yerushalmi, for another, opposes Jewish memory and Jewish history. Jewish history, Yerushalmi argues in his Zakhor, has emerged from the documentary pressures of modern historicist imperatives, particularly in the wake of the Holocaust. He is worried that these demands come at the expense of Jewish collective memory, which, following the close of the biblical canon, is the rabbis’ ultimate concern. Instead, Jewish modes of memory, like ritual and recital, assumed any efforts of recording historical events in the documentary sense. But the advent of new technologies of memory is changing the contexts of these debates and complicating the neatness of long standing schema. Such innovations in artificial intelligence are influencing how we engage with survivors of past atrocities (especially after they have died), and are redefining what counts as historical documentation.
So what kind of story does a hologram tell? What do we make of historical narratives that get carried out through artificial channels? What do the holograms do to Holocaust memory projects? In order to grapple with these questions and others, this paper approaches the hologram as a figure and a genre of Holocaust memory. It belongs to a larger project that is concerned with the ritualizations of Holocaust narrations, and the political possibilities that arise out of different kinds of narration. This paper accounts for important questions and considerations that the Dimensions in Testimony exhibitions present to us, as forms of memory/archive that are still very new and unknown. It advocates for an engagement with the survivor holograms to be situated within enduring conversations about the relationship between memory and history—whether they are figured as opposing projects, joint forces, or otherwise. I follow an Arendtian approach to memory to argue that historical representations must be contextualized and open to contingencies.
What will Holocaust remembrance look like when there are no more living survivors to deliver their accounts first-hand? The USC Shoah Foundation’s Dimensions in Testimony initiative is one response to this concern. The project has created a library of holograms of survivors that, with the assistance of artificial intelligence, can participate in “real-time, lifelike conversation.” But what are the implications of a memory that gets preserved artificially and definitively but engaged as though it is not? This paper approaches the hologram as a figure and a genre of Holocaust memory that demands attention to technology and the politics of representation. It advocates for situating these new forms of historical record within enduring conversations about the relationship between memory and history—whether figured as opposing projects, joint forces, or otherwise. With the example, I follow an Arendtian approach to memory to argue that historical representations must be contextualized and open to contingencies.