A new poetics of exile and belonging: the place of memory in the new media environment

This paper explores how new media environments represent and create collective memories of trauma; how creative digital practice can be a key methodology for memory studies and the potential of digital interfaces for representing and reconciling collective memories of trauma, particularly in the context of Cyprus. My project MemoryBank will be used as a model to discuss the potential role of creative digital media practice in both community arts and the formal education process in order to enable participants to engage with the process of peace and reconciliation in Cyprus and circumvent and negotiate politically ossified collective memory narratives and chauvinistic histories. [From the Author]

Ghost/Machine: cinema in a digital age

Cinema, with its passive cinematic apparatus and linear narrative is often characterised as a contrast to new media narrative strategies, yet from Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera to Mike Figgis’ TimeCode and Wong Kar Wei’s 2046 cinema provides narrative strategies and spatial conceptualisations which prefigure or are contiguous with new media environments. Both our perception of what cyberspace constitutes and the technology that actualises those perceptions arise out of and are driven by fantasy and desire. This paper will explore the metaphors used to represent and understand new media aesthetics through cinematic representations of new media environments. Two key themes relevant to new media aesthetics emerge. Irigaray, Haraway, and Grosz are used to explore the de-essentialising haptic and penetrative potential of new technologies and their ability to collapse the boundary between the body and the machine. The second fantasy, of new media as a liminal space that expresses the memorialising function of technology and its relation to mourning, is analysed using Benjamin, Burgin and Rutsky. These altered spaces and perceptions of the body and memory of the post-cinematic subject are illustrated through an analysis of Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Jonze’s Being John Malkovich. [From the Author]