Places By Another Name: Digital Images and the Imaging of Historical Contexts
Dr. Renate Wickens Assistant Professor with TEL Appointment Faculty of Fine Arts / Fine Arts Cultural Studies York University 4700 Keele Street Toronto, Ontario, Canada. M3J 1P3 rwickens@yorku.ca
Don Sinclair Assistant Professor Fine Arts Cultural Studies York University 4700 Keele Street Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 dws@yorku.ca
Dachau and Mauthasen are hardly cities. The former is a well to-do suburb of Munich and the latter a picturesque Austrian village that prospers as a stopover on the bicycle route along the Danube. However, both share the enormity of an historical construction resulting from the names they share with the notorious concentration camps they helped sustain. Both communities have also shared an all but compulsive desire to restore themselves as the imagined ahistorical settings of transcendent European culture. Our project is a visualization of history in Dachau and Mauthasen through a video projection that presents a series of technologically mediated images that function, in the manner described by Nicholas Mirzoeff in his definition of visual culture as subject (rather than object). Our paper discusses our project as a disciplinary practice (photography) mediated by a post-disciplinary sensibility (the Internet) to produce a dialectic between the purely visual and its meaning. We will, in other words, be using a particular case study to discuss the strategies by which we use new media to both acknowledge and deconstruct the invisibility of history.