Ghosting the Museum

Abstract

Abstract This chapter begins by reflecting on the evocative museum spaces in which Dimensions in Testimony is encountered, focusing on the pilot installation at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in 2016. The metatexts that shape a visitor’s experience of a space such as the USHMM, when combined with “survivor sacralization” and a metaphysical “eternity narrative” that positions interactive video testimony as miraculously transcending the border between life and death, have the potential to diminish the truthfulness of interactive testimony. In respect of this eternity narrative, we also consider the museum setting and promotional materials associated with the Forever Project in the UK. Noting that such metatexts are designed to safeguard the enduring relevance of survivor testimony, they also risk creating misunderstandings about the nature of the technology that users are engaging with. We therefore clarify the spatiotemporal relationships that are mobilized in interactive testimony, comparing them to those that characterize more traditional forms of written and oral testimony. We close by drawing on Jacques Derrida’s mischievous pseudo-concepts of “spectrality” and “hauntology” to imagine a post-survivor age in which these installations become haunting machines (or “ghostware”) that give beguiling new meaning to Holocaust memory.