Memory, relational materialities and the web place

As digital technology alters ways in which knowledge is produced, stored, connected and shared, new spaces, tools and artefacts are formed; new cultural practices alter the ways in which we remember and the ways in which memory is processed, consequently destabilising traditional „historically encoded social habits: religion, authority, morality, traditional values, or political ideology? (Diamantaki, 2013). While within digital culture, new e-democracy takes place, challenging institutions and their „collective consciousness? (Diamantaki, 2013) and challenging the concept of personal memory and related rituals. In discussing the idea of memory, as embodied, embedded and extended, as it becomes more entangled with digital materialisation, mediation and circulation, as mediated memories, as traces and institutional texts are socially shaped (van Dijck, 2007: 21), leading me to question how digital technology intervenes in the process of memory; how the concept of digital memory is being thought about; what, then, can be seen as a digital and non-digital memories, materialities and aesthetics? McLuhan (1964: 46) points out how media brings forms of „numbness?, so how is that reflected in digital mnemonic practice and digital memory? In addressing these questions, I refer to Aleida Assmann?s memory deconstruction as Ars and Vis (2011:19). Framing memory as mnemonic practice, as a “process of storage”, as art and technology, as ars; and as an energy, as a “process of remembering”, a process of internalisation, as vis, whilst choosing to focus in their relational materialities, as there cannot be vis without ars and vice versa. A memory „force? needs to be there for the trace to be created or activated and, the trace needs to be there for the ars to be triggered. Assmann (2011:19) described both terms as „processes?, placing memory within experience and in the present moment, but also as relational process between bodies, traces, texts and place. I therefore ask, how does memory as a relational materiality between ars and vis and aesthetic experience, alter when its place become Web-based. In clarifying how memory materialities and aesthetics can be considered, I introduce how my own art practice, as installation art, can offer extended possibilities to the process and embodiment of the act of remembering, of memory, as a Post Digital experience, as complex temporal, social, spatial and material relations, overlapping and merging human and digital memory.