The camera supposedly contains an undeveloped film of shots from present-day Baghdad. The unexposed images trapped inside permit a future that is both imaginable, in relation to what the photographs may contain and their impact, and unimaginable, with regard to the contingency of the indeterminable moment of their exposure. In this way the intact camera challenges the highly media-saturated imagination of the 2007 aftermath of war in Baghdad, instead making it contingent on the moment and context – the emergence – of the exposure and mediation of the unseen images.
But the camera, placed as it is in a cabinet on a pedestal, “evokes the eventual ossification of the circulation of both people and images” (Galerie Martin Janda 2008). In this way, Snapshots from Baghdad, 2007 speaks to James E. Young’s notion of a “countermonument” (1992; 2000). Notably, it simultaneously draws attention to both the possibilities and the limitations of the traditional memorial. It challenges the notion of the monumentality of images in the unknowable future and the content of the photographs inside the camera; in other words, it reflects a profound uncertainty of future media memory. At the same time, the exhibit is ossified both in its truncation of the process of photographic recording, exposure, circulation, and through its form of display. The temporal delay of the analogue photographic process is stalled and that “spark of contingency” (Benjamin 1999, 150) characteristic of the photographic image is arrested and preserved within the plastic shell of the camera. It is doubly sealed, first within the plain black plastic case and then within a glass display cabinet, the latter fetishizing and emphasizing the sculptural qualities of the throwaway monument.
FIGURE 2.1 Roman Ondák, Snapshots from Baghdad, 2007. Single use camera with undeveloped film. Installation Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Private collection, Mexico City.
Furthermore, Ondák’s work and the wider ICA Memorial to the Iraq War can be seen to counter traditional memorial culture through a strategy of “premediation” (Grusin 2004; 2010; Erll 2009; Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010). That is, efforts to try to imagine, shape or challenge, future (as well as current) memorial cultures through imaging, conceptualizing, representing what a future memorial might or should look like. What is striking about this collapse of the future into the present is that the events that are subject to premediation or “prememorialization” are not only recent in living memory – compared to the more common length of passage of time between, particularly, twentieth-century nodal events and their memorializations – but in the case of twenty-first-century warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, for example, public memorialization becomes synchronous with the event itself. It is precisely this synchronicity that is denied by Ondák’s exhibit.
So, a new immediacy of memorialization is caught up in the politics of memory of the twenty-first century, in legitimizing or delegitimizing ongoing warfare. These memorializations include the potential continuousness afforded by digital memorial networks, archives, and databases, which set out the potential trajectories of future memory of present and recent past warfare and other catastrophes. For example, the artist Joseph DeLappe’s iraqimemorial.org project aims to commemorate civilian deaths since the onset of the 2003 Iraq War and its bloody aftermath (www.iraqimemorial.org). Its stated aims include: to “mobilize an international community of artists to contribute proposals that will represent a collective expression of memory, unity and peace” and to “create a context for the initiation of a process of symbolic, creative atonement.” The site lists over 150 artists’ works under “Exhibition of Memorial Concepts.” This includes diagrams, gallery plans, photographs, videos, and mixed media exhibits. The site is also open to public views and ratings of entries in addition to those made by “internationally based curators and scholars.” To these ends, the web provides a memorial platform that is dynamic, apparently democratic, and potentially highly expansionist. In this way, the project probes and extends the concept and practices of memorialization, affording the memorial new immediacy and an “extended present” (Nowotny 1994).
Welcome, then, to the “third memory boom” (Hoskins and O’Loughlin 2010). The first memory boom, set out by Jay Winter, is marked by the formation of national identities around the memorialization of the victims of the Great War after 1914 (2006, 18). And, for Winter, remembrance of World War II and the Holocaust in the 1960s and 1970s is indicative of a second memory boom. It is this latter era that is most often seen as the modern memory boom in the field of memory studies, most influentially by Andreas Huyssen (2003). This includes significant developments in the role of technologies and media in facilitating the reflexive audiovisual capture and representation of personal testimony, namely the mediatization of oral history.
Although the third memory boom overlaps with the second, it is the connective turn that makes it distinctive in shaping an inexorable media present and presence. Under these conditions, the museum can survive only if it becomes media archaeological, if it can offer new value amid the flattening of post-scarcity culture.
The connective turn has dislocated the memorial connection between the medium of the time of an event’s first mass mediation and its later representation (in museums and exhibitions). How an event is later represented, seen, and understood has always been to some extent determined by the medium through which it first entered into a collective or cultural imagination. As Lisa Gitelman argues, media, no matter how “old” or “new,” are “functionally integral to a sense of pastness” through the “implicit encounters” we have with the past via the media responsible for producing that past (2006, 5).
For example, the audio of radio and the audio/visual of television have become increasingly defining of the second memory boom, particularly with such media entangled in the actual production of the events they record, in which process they alter the moment-by-moment trajectory of events and so become inseparable from those events. But these (traditionally, at least) “punctual” media have always sat uncertainly in the museum space in terms of the curatorial organization required to shepherd the highly mobile and distracted visitor-as-audience. The common looping of audio and video content (unless prescheduled and advertised) inevitably finds the wandering visitor arriving (and departing) out of sync with the beginning and end, respectively, of the recording being reproduced. Here the visitor becomes, according to Jessica Morgan, “victims of its timing” (quoted in Cowie 2009, 127).
Digital media that have ushered in the third memory boom, however, effect a continuous time through mobile and pervasive connectivity (including the remediation of traditionally more punctual and cyclical media – radio, TV, press). And it is this greater connectivity of past with present that requires new kinds of excavation and interrogation. Whereas media history privileges continuities over discontinuities, “media-archaeology replaces the concept of a historical development, from writing to printing to digital data processing, through a concept of mediatic short-circuits” (Ernst 2006, 111). So, despite the seeming digital crushing of historical distance, the media archaeological museum has to reveal and interrogate the fissures, the unintended, and the gaps, against the apparent smooth and smothering immediacy and pervasiveness of memory forged amid and from post-scarcity culture.
“The persistence of vision”
In