Artists Gabriel Barcia-Colombo and Joseph DeLappe and scholar Marita Sturken consider the new forms that memory and memorials take on in the digital age. Mirroring the speed and connectivity of social networks, creators of memorials avoid the permanence and materiality of stone in favor of the immediacy and accessibility of online media.
Gabriel Barcia-Colombo is a Senior TED fellow and an Assistant Professor of Communications at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. He has received an Art + Technology Lab grant to explore how future death memorials and rituals will deal with an abundance of personal data as well as increasing access to new media technology.
Marita Sturken is a scholar and Professor in the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University. Her work spans cultural studies, visual culture, and memory studies with an emphasis on cultural memory and the cultural effects of technology. She is the author of the book, “Tangled Memories - An Investigation of the Vietnam War, the AIDS epidemic and the Politics of Remembering,” as well as “The Practice of Looking, An Introduction to Visual Culture.”
Joseph DeLappe is a Professor of the Department of Art at the University of Nevada where he directs the Digital Media Program. From 2006 to 2011, he created dead-in- iraq, a “fleeting, online memorial” within America’s Army, a first-person online Army recruiting game, by entering the names of 4,484 U.S. military casualties into the game’s text messaging system. He also created Iraqimemorial.org, an online “Call for Proposals” to commemorate Iraqi war dead.
