Sustainable Memory Ecology, Entangled Environments, and Multimateriality in a Post-Digital Age: A Case Study of MemoryBytes

Abstract

Abstract This article examines the interdisciplinary and epistemological possibilities in memory studies amidst the complex systems of sustainable memory ecology, entangled environments, and multimateriality prevalent in our post-digital age. This study situates the ontology and experience of memory through post-digital and posthumanist frameworks whereby the human/non-human and embedded/extended emerge as environmental entanglements that are part of everyday experiential and ecological realities which are often already augmented in quality. Likewise, we unpack the idea of materiality in the contemporary world and posit that a theory of multimateriality – asymmetric compounds of constructs, components, and affects – illustrates the modality of post-digital memory networks. Subsequently, the article attempts to offer a conceptual framework that draws on cognitive theory’s 4E model of cognition – embedded, embodied, extended, enactive – and a memory-ecology which is emergent as well as connective in quality. The key themes of this study are as follows: How can the concept of sustainable memory ecology correspond to interdisciplinary interpretative possibilities of preservation and reconstruction in a post-digital world? How can memory studies connect with cognitive theory to offer an original collaborative and epistemic apparatus using embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive engagements with environment and materiality in post-digital conditions? How do such collaborations anticipate the future of memory through a new order of post-digital memory ecology? Through its theoretical and conceptual convergences, and with a case study of the 2022 Augmented-Reality (ar) App and phygital exhibition MemoryBytes, our article offers an original framework for memory studies’ interdisciplinary engagements with the changing notions of ecology, sustainability, and materiality in today’s post-digital world.