Digital Art as a Space of Post-Memory and a Museum of Alternative History

Abstract

This article will consider the discourse of the past as a space for the reflection of artists and the embodiment of current trends in contemporary art, in particular, work with virtual space and digital media. Post-memory acts in such projects as a generative structure of memory transfer, included in various forms of mediation: by involving the imagination, projective and creative mechanisms, as well as tools of new media, artists create a platform for correcting and restoring “blind spots” of the historical process. In this case, digital art becomes a platform for a new generation of virtual commemoration, a museum of alternative history and a kind of alternative museum. On the example of artworks of the German artist Clemens von Wedemeyer, key working mechanisms of memory in digital art practices as samples and models public transfer of memory, having the potential to actualize individual memory. Among them are immersiveness and interactivity, personalization of the past through building an alternative historical reality, where the viewer loses museum unfreedom and could interact with history directly, the work with a connective form of memory, structured by technological media, regrouping and reintegration of historical heritage. The article explores how Clemens von Wedemeyer works with post-traumatic collective memory syndrome (“Open Objects”, 2021), how post-memory is worked in series “Against the point of view” (2016), where with the help of the aesthetics of computer games a look at German Nazi photography is deconstructed. Given discussions about the prospects of the medium of virtual art and its possibilities in areas of rethinking historical memory and reindetification in the era of postcolonialism. This article explores individual's post-memorial acts boundaries withtin creative works of Clemens von Wedemeyer as an example of constructing a commemorative space using the language of new media, in many respects different from traditional institutions of memory.