UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

image. That's it.‖ 241 The fact is that despite a very overt call for anyone to create a memorial the
majority of memorials are dedicated to celebrities (singers and actors), politicians (Yitzhak Rabin)
and, for inastance, a victim of 2009 Iranian protests, Neda Agha-Soltan, while some are dedicated
to ‗impersonal‘ causes or initiatives (Tsunami Indian Ocean Casualties, September 11, etc.).
Another interesting case in point is the Memory Loops.net; conceived by Michaela Melián, 242 the
memorial site is Munich‘s ―virtual memorial for the victims of National Socialism [... comprising]
300 German and 175 English audio tracks which can be found on a map drawn up by the artist [...]
Each track is a collage of voice(s) and music thematically tied to a place in the former ‗Capital of
the Movement.‘‖ 243 When the visitor surfs to a map that features circles—these stand on locations
where some event occurred during the Nazi reign—she can connect to an audio track. The tracks
are audio recordings of reports and interviews read by actors and actresses, while historical
documents are read by children. Clicking through the circles on the map the visitor can navigate
through the audio landscape of Munich in the period 1933—1945 and thus encounter audio slices
of history. Using oral histories and official documents (e.g. NSDAP memos, radio broadcasts) the
website creates an image of the past, devoid of any visual representation (bar the digital map), that
enables a connection to that past through the words and voices only. The method of reading the
transcribed texts by actors establishes an ‗interpretative distance‘ through which the ‗voices‘ and
the people interviewed are posited into a transtemporal historical landscape. Furthermore, the use
of children in reading the official texts makes this memorial even more detached from the then
reality, but at the same time—drawing on the supposed innocence of child readers—further
emphasises the gravity and intolerability of the Nazi rule.
241 ―Light a Pixel – New approach to Online Memorials,‖ PRLOG, Press Release Distribution,
http://www.prlog.org/10378312-light-pixel-new-approach-to-online-memorials.html, accessed 23 August 2011.
242 Michaela Malián, Memory Loops.Net, http://www.memoryloops.net/, accessed 21 August 2011.
243 Ibid.
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