Digital Art and Affect: Walking through Ukrainian Virtual Museums of War

• In Event: Museums: Virtual, Real, and Decolonized

Abstract

The paper explores instant forms of virtual memorialization of the Russian invasion of Ukraine since 2014. In particular, I analyze virtuality as a mnemonic practice applied by two Ukrainian Virtual War Museums (Meta History: Museum of War and War Fragments Museum) and the ways the visualizations of war affect the museum’s visitors. While both museums remember the Russian invasion, their goals are reaching beyond its mediation. Therefore, the museums rely on their agentic capabilities to affect visitors and ultimately to make them act. In this regard, I investigate how the mediated material exhibited by the virtual museums impacts the visitors, how people engage with the museums, and how they make sense of it. To this end, I visit the virtual museum together with research participants to examine how the museum encounter and its use of virtuality is affecting our bodies. Drawing on concepts from (digital) memory studies and cultural studies, I employ ethnographic methods to analyze the effects of the digital content displayed by the two museums on visitors. These encounters should deepen our understanding of virtual museums and the processes that shape the becoming and constitution of hybrid mnemonic practices. It thus adds insights to the interplay between the content of mnemonic practices, its texture, and visitors, which are at the core of digital entities.

Although this is an individual paper proposal, I would greatly appreciate the opportunity to attend the convention in Boston as I have already received funding and have been unaware of the new policy.

Author

• Sebastian Graf, Lund U (Sweden)