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]

Projecting the prison: the depiction of the uncanny in The Shawshank Redemption

The space of the prison is no longer on the margins in relation to societal `centres', but instead acts as an adjunct to the urban environment. With the disappearance of the Gothic prison from the archi-texture of contemporary cities, the meaning conveyed by its façade has lost much of its potency. It is now contemporary prison drama, as opposed to the physical façade, that represents the interface between the public and the prison. This article explores a dramatic representation of the prison (The Shawshank Redemption) through the lens of Freud's (1919/1955) notion of the uncanny and Bachelard's (1958/1994) poetics of domestic space. Incarceration, as depicted in film and television, reinforces the `place myths' of the prison (Shields, 1991). Contemporary prison drama portrays the prison as a marginal space in much the way that the Gothic façades of the 19th-century prison projected a particular message. The prison, as depicted on screen, is a simulacrum. It is a facsimile of an architectural idea that only ever existed as a façade - a façade that occluded as much as it projected.