Streaming History. Moving Images of the Shoah and the Web 2.0

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Simon Rothöhler
• Subject Area: Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 261136291

The project explores streamed online videos from a film and media studies angle and analyses them as a novel mode of distributing the moving image and subsuming it under an archival order. More concretely, and by way of example, it will inquire into the changed status of cinematic documents of the Shoah which, under the conditions of the Web 2.0, have been transformed into digital images. For decades, this archival material - consisting of individual amateur recordings as well as, most significantly, of the images produced by camera operators of the Allied troops and, more broadly speaking, of subsequently recorded acts of witness bearing - circulated exclusively as an integral component of films, television broadcasts, and museum displays; today, however, it appears under the premises of an internet-centred image economy in which historical images can be accessed instantaneously, as well as copied, fragmented, appropriated and distributed at will. The project will explore the changed relationship between streamed archive footage and the viewer as well as the proximity of image repertoires which formerly occupied different ends of the spectrum of visual culture (in terms of epistemology and the economics of attention), and which now can be accessed in simultaneously refreshable «windows» of observation (on commercial video sharing platforms, where footage of liberated concentration camps is just one click away from other random content of visual culture; and also by browsing through archives of moving images such as the free online «Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive» of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum). The processes sketched above transform the aesthetic form but also the politics of memory of these precarious images in a fundamental manner. The project aims to provide a conceptual framework which deals with the aesthetics of streamed online videos as well as the corresponding digital order of knowledge which administers and distributes cinematically archived «history». This media theory of streamed moving images - taking the digitised archival footage of the Shoah as its point of departure - accordingly also examines the fundamental properties of the Internet as a post-cinematographic medium. The complex remediation of a specific corpus of historic documents, which have thus far not been analysed in terms of digital and new media theory - the fact that they can be distributed and viewed to a greater degree than ever before, under a regime of perception that is informed by the architecture of websites, search algorithms, browser functions, user interfaces and images codecs as well as by the increasingly mobile media technologies of «wearable computing» - shall serve as a concrete case study in order to gain a more encompassing theoretical perspective on the Internet as a global medium of circulation, access and memory for moving history images.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants