Afterword: Digital holocaust memory futures: Through paradigms of immersion and interactivity and beyond

Abstract

Immersion and interactivity have become cliche terms to describe digital initiatives, promoted by tech innovators as the uniqueness of digital interventions it is no surprise that they dominate in promotional material for digital Holocaust memory projects. This chapter provides an archaeological rummage through both historical and contemporary uses of these terms in order to draw attention to their problematic and sometimes contradictory uses. It argues that 'immersion' and 'interactivity' are far less radical and innovative than the tech industry likes to tell us, and actually rather useless terms for helping us conceptualise what digital media can do for Holocaust memory. Inspired by the work of Barad and Hansen, the afterword for this collection proposes instead that imagining projects in terms of 'intra-action' and 'mixed reality' can help drive forward digital Holocaust memory futures in productive ways that particularly foreground the entanglement introduced in Chap. 1 as crucial to understanding this memoryscape.