SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

SEPTEMBER 11 AND AFTER: A VIRTUAL CASE BOOK
Barbara Abrash
New York University
The burning towers may be the iconic image of September 11, but what stays in the mind for
most of us in New York is the vast outpouring of expression—the shrines, posters, photographs,
messages that filled the streets of Lower Manhattan and our rush to every possible form of
technology—e-mail, throw-away cameras, voice mail, cell phones, video cameras, websites—by
which to communicate and find meaning in the midst of catastrophe. Individuals trying to find
words, connect, give shape and meaning to unfathomable events.
This democracy of voices, this rich—often eloquent—outpouring of expression, stood in stark
contrast to mass media, which (after a stumbling start that featured weeping anchor men)
quickly settled on a narrowly framed story of “therapeutic patriotism”—nation unified in grief
and on its way to war.
How will September 11 be told and remembered—how will it enter national memory and
history? Will it be the television version—a kind of remembering that obscures the lived
experiences of September 11 and the many acts of meaning produced on the ground and in
cyberspace? Or will it, in Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblett’s words “Reveal the role of history’s
ordinary actors in creating the historical record even as they are living it.”
The events of September 11 produced an unprecedented shift in the global political landscape,
in which communications and media played an unforeseeable role in opening circuits of
information, connection and discussion, from the local to the transnational. This event brought
into relief the importance of alternative networks and systems of communication. It was a
moment when individuals, many of whom never before made media, created alternatives to
what the mainstream media had to offer.
As a colleague in Amsterdam wrote to us,
Everyone of us, from those at the fiery heart of events grabbing mobile phones,
to we the “universal eyewitnesses” scrambling to make contact with others
attempting to make sense of a world turned upside down, became transmitter as
well as a receiver…we all became nodes in the global media network.
9-11 and after: a virtual case book (www.nyu.edu/fas/projects/vcb) is a web publication
produced by The Center for Media, Culture and History at NYU and in collaboration with
designers Alison Cornyn and Sue Johnson of Picture Projects, that provides a snapshot of
responses to September 11. It brings together essays, first-person accounts, reports, visual
images, and websites to provide a composite view of the ways in which people (as opposed to
mass media ands government) used media on September 11 and in the days after.
Its central subject is that ephemeral material—the shrines, poetry, messages, banners, e-mail,
digital art, web logs, etc.—that filled our lives and is a kind of snapshot of what people needed
to express, how they expressed it, and their many webs of communication.
With its multiplicity of views and voices, its overlapping stories and connections—9-11 and after
demonstrates how new technologies and the development of network society have enlarged our
means of creative expression and produced a relocation in time, space, and memory.
The contributors to this “virtual case book” are based in places as diverse as Delhi, Jerusalem,
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