As machines take over the work of producing, organizing, and curating culture, it becomes increasingly important to examine the influence of algorithms in public memory work, through which the past is selectively and subjectively reconstructed to make meaning in the present. Accordingly, this dissertation intervenes at the intersection of public memory scholarship, digital rhetoric, and media studies to examine memorial texts that incorporate computation as an essential element of their design, which I term algorithmic-memorial media. Algorithmic-memorial media explored in this dissertation, variously actualized and imaginary, include postmortem digital avatars, such as memorial chatbots and interactive holograms. Across these artifacts, invention takes place at the levels of author, artifact, and audience, each of which contributes influential yet interdependent rhetorical choices through black-boxed interfaces to convey a partial representation of an underlying archive. These artifacts thus raise pressing questions for scholars and curators of public memory: Who and what has power over their presentation of memorial contents? How is the power to make rhetorically meaningful decisions shared among human and nonhuman agents? That is, who and what are the authors of these media? Whose stories do these media tell? While these artifacts may seem novel, provoking unprecedented controversies, I adopt a media archaeological approach to demonstrate that algorithmic-memorial media, rather than being unique to this particular historical and technological moment, actually strongly resemble and continue the work of earlier and more commonplace telecommunication and recording technologies, digital and otherwise. After situating the dissertation’s case studies within an enduring history of the use of procedure in the work of memory and mourning, I identify two features that set some algorithmic-memorial media apart from otherwise similar examples: mimesis—speaking as an absent subject—and mutability—inviting audience contributions that alter how these media manifest. I find that while neither mimesis nor mutability are unique to algorithmic-memorial media, certain texts unite these features to powerful and persuasive ends. Such media exploit an ambiguous relationship between audience input and memorial output to encourage recursive play with memorial contents, which remain dormant until the right input is discovered. I argue that, by requiring experimentation with an underlying archive, mimetic and mutable algorithmic-memorial texts position audience members as curators of their own memorial experience. This dissertation explores how this positioning might make memory more unsettling but also potentially more critically engaging, evocative, and ultimately persuasive.

Creator

• Lingo, Sarah Katherine

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-pdqx-7k79

Subject

• Rhetoric

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_947105
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16370

Keyword

• public memory
• media archaeology
• rhetoric
• memorials
• media studies
• algorithmic culture

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright