Digital Memories

As noted by Mouffe (2005) and Ranciére (2004), the new millennium inaugurated a post-political phase where the idea of consensus replaced that of conflict: the political, understood in its agonistic dimension, is reduced to a series of administrative procedures, in which moments of tension and conflict lose their critical potential and are resolved through a technical and rational calculation. One of the most common expressions with which the post-political phase of consensus has manifested itself, especially in the European context, is the idea of shared memory. In the last twenty years, the development of digital media has radically affected the way collective memory can be constructed, represented, narrated, and disseminated (Blom, 2016). While the intrinsic risks of the digital revolution have been widely discussed (in terms of fake news, historical revisionism, and in general post-truth), the possibility to understand and to approach historical documents and materials as living matter opens up new research trajectories and design approaches able to question the idea of shared memory, and to move closer to the image of entangled memory and mnemography (Feindt et al., 2014). This paper analyses and discusses some projects and practices in the field of infographic design and counter-forensic that could lead to a conflictual or adversarial understanding of collective memory as a contested terrain.