Talking with the Dead?: Technologies of Memory and Figures of Holocaust Representation

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.