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Spectral storytelling. Social Engagement Through Technology in Traumatized Environments

Agnieszka Jelewska & Michał Krawczak, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

How to responsibly design open transmedia environments engaging audiences and using critical theories, speculative design, and distributed leadership? Can technology work for the benefit of excluded, both human and nonhuman actors, and reveal the essential problems of traumatized places, historically unclear and hidden events? The lecture will be focused on the analysis of two examples from the practice of the Humanities/Art/Technology Research Center: the interactive installation Post-Apocalypsis (2015) dealing with the problem of the spectral nature of the Chernobyl disaster as a multifaceted and long-term cultural trauma, and the Ecological and Social Archive of Lake Elsensee-Rusałka (2018-2021), which is a media platform for social interaction with the historical, urban and ecological problems of this place. Lake Elsensee-Rusałka, located in Poznań, is an artificial reservoir created due to Jewish prisoners' slave labor during World War II, rebuilt by the Polish communist authorities, currently undergoing a continuous revitalization. Through these processes and repressed stories, the lake as a place itself became a source of social emotions and tensions.

Dec 3, 2020 05:00 PM in Eastern Time (US and Canada)