2025/10/31 by Gal Ravia · 1 voice
Psychology · Arts and Humanities · #Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration #Kierkegaardian Philosophy and Influence #Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/1369118x.2025.2581004
openalex publication_date 2025/10/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
While Holocaust memory presents the moral and political imperative to reckon with historical truths, digital projects of commemoration are immersed in a ‘post-truth’ landscape of suspicion over the technologies and institutions tasked with conveying them. The Dimensions in Testimony project, which allows museum visitors to ‘converse’ with virtual, supposedly holographic Holocaust survivors, brings such tensions to the fore. This paper examines how museum visitors construe and construct the holograms as ‘real’ or authentic. Drawing on interviews and participant observations, I identify three diverging orders of holographic authenticity. Under the authenticity of evidence, the holographic survivor is perceived as a first-hand witness to past events, who can then convey them to future audiences; under the authenticity of affect, the hologram is perceived as real inasmuch as the encounter results in visitors’ powerful emotional response; and the authenticity of immediacy draws attention to the sense of co-presence with an actual human being, while the holographic medium ostensibly becomes transparent. I then argue that these orders are rendered interconnected and complementary through the concept of hypermediacy, wherein the ability to distinguish between what is physically present and what is not grounds the ontology of the encounter and allows the hologram’s testimony and the emotions it evokes to be perceived as real. These findings serve to complicate monolithic notions of authenticity in emerging technologies, and to highlight that the political, moral, and historical discourses in which these technologies are embedded – and not only their material affordances – shape their authentication.