Holograms are accompanied by important promises for digital memory cultures: empathy, proximity, identification. At the same time, they are highly complex in their discursive, socio-technical and imaginary codings and, from an affect theory perspective, also prone to the reproduction of violence. Taking the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, as an example, I am interested in whether holograms function in the context of the digital memory of slavery and colonial racism in the grammar of computational blackface and thus represent a form of digital violence. By computational blackface, which I discuss in relation to digital blackface, I mean a mediatized suggestion of sameness or at least proximity, which is co-produced by computation and which – as in the case of the historical theatrical practice of blackface – can imply a mistaken sense of solidarity or deceptive empathy. It is discussed to what extent this suggestion, generated by digital means and algorithmic predictions, not only brings history as such closer, but also re-enacts colonial-racist mechanisms of dehumanization. However, drawing on a multidirectional approach (Rothberg 2021 [2009]), I am interested in the various historical references to the histories of violence of anti-Black and anti-Muslim racism, anti-Semitism, and ultra-nationalist anti-immigration racism in order to develop a concept of memory in the context of digital cultures that is based on solidarity, community, and even beauty. The Alternative Memorial for Germany (ADfD) is exemplary for such a concept and will be discussed at the end of my presentation.

Katrin Köppert is an art and media scholar. She is currently a substitute professor for media theories at Humboldt University Berlin and holds the junior professorship for art history/popular cultures at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig. She co-directs the VW-funded project “Digital Blackface. Racialized Affect Patterns of the Digital” and the DFG research network “Gender, Media and Affect”. Her research focuses on Digital Colonialism and Extractivism, Post-/decolonial Theories of Computation, Critical Theories of the Anthropocene in Art and Visual Culture, Queer Art History and Queer Media Studies.

Mo. 7.7. 2025, 18h – HFK, Bibliothek (R. 4.10.060), Speicher XI 8, Bremen