UNIVERSITY OF NOVA GORICA GRADUATE SCHOOL ...

memory, economically unviable for ‗remastering‘ etc.—in a ―discontinuous sequence that finds
expressive significance only when considered in an arrangement of complex interconnections.‖ 61
Figure 2 | Aby Warburg, Mnemosyne Atlas 1924—1929, available from
http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/mnemosyne/images/3/.
Warburg‘s Mnemosyne concept can be seen as an externalisation of pre-digital logic and the
internet (or rather materialisation of content on a screen), consequentially, as offering a
representational plane, providing among others the space for historical/memorial representations
and mediations. Furthermore, the internet as a platform gives space for a produser to manipulate
―‗engrams‘ capable [note: engrams can only become capable of anything after they have been
manipulated] of recreating an experience of the past in a spatial configuration.‖ 62
One of the greatest challenges posed to understanding memory and remembering in DME are the
scale of production and the amount of available past related UGC, which is co-created and
distributed past the traditional gate-keepers and the usual interpretive authorities (historiography,
education system, etc.). By past-related content I refer to numerous re-appropriations, re-
61 Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the image in motion, 258.
62 An engram in Richard Semon‘s conceptualisation of memory (―the function charged with preserving and
transmitting energy temporally, allowing someone to react to something in the past from a distance‖) is a trace that an
event affecting a living being leaves in the memory. Quoted in Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the image
in motion, 255.
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