Return of the Testimony: The Intersection of Oral Testimonies and Artificial Intelligence in Difficult Heritage
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2025-08-29
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en
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In an age where the number of witnesses and survivors of the Second World War declines, museum and heritage institutions are facing a challenge. In response, interactive testimonies have been developed to display the embodied testimonies of witnesses in online and offline environments. This thesis explores the rise of these interactive, AI powered, displays through a comparative analysis of various case studies, emphasising their effect on memory making practices in difficult heritage. By confronting traditional binary methods of representation with interactive testimonies, it is revealed that interactive testimonies use anthropomorphism and the phantasmagoric dispositif not to draw the user into the testimony but to position the virtual witness in physical space. While interactive testimonies ascribe a certain immaterial subjectivity to the virtual testimonies of witnesses, the material nature of these displays impact memory-making practices globally and point toward the construction of a standardised framework for memory practices.
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