Feeling through the screen: memory sites, affective entanglements, and digital materialities

Abstract

In this article we advance geographies of commemoration by focusing on digital screens, a common element of museum displays and other official memory sites, arguing that screens are crucial in how people not only think, but feel in and about such places. As a part of the ‘texture’ of memory sites, we will discuss how understandings of the content displayed on digital screens can mingle with screens’ material and immaterial qualities to constitute a range of powerful ways of ‘feeling’ this texture, in affective, material and sensory terms. By interrogating the experience of visitors to the Camp des Milles, an official French national memory site, we will consider how digital screens can thicken the experience of such sites by framing them as bodily and intimate–but also how encounters with such technologies can disappoint, disrupt or puncture the atmospheres of such sites, and draw out feelings of frustration or annoyance that might pull against the official aims of such places. We use in-depth visitor accounts to show how digital screens afford affective resonances for visitors and intensely shape how state-sponsored histories are encountered, understood and felt.