Reflections on the New Dimensions in Testimony Project

Abstract

The New Dimensions in Testimony project integrates advanced filming and voice recognition techniques to present the possibility of interacting, in natural language, with the hologram of a Holocaust survivor who may no longer be alive. This article is an attempt to organize reflections around the initial estrangement caused by the contact with the holograms. For this, I mobilize notions such as of presence, broad present and presentism in order to think of holograms as a temporally non-belonging element, an excess of both past and present.