MEMORIAL & MASS ATROCITY

UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative
Spring 2021
Location: California
Prof. Todd Presner + Partners Miranda Hoegberg, Yufan Wang, Victoria Tran

The purpose of this capstone is to explore -- through design thinking -- the limits and possibilities of physical and digital memorials that commemorate events of human atrocity. Databases, digital interfaces, and data visualizations present compelling (but not unproblematic) ways of “seeing” and interacting at a macro-level, but how can they also individualize and humanize victims? At the same time, physical memorials struggle with how to represent the totality of an event (in terms of the number of victims, scope, complexity), sometimes relying on abstract symbolism to capture the scale of an event. How can we imagine both ethical and aesthetic forms of representation that humanize individuals and also represent the “whole” of an event?

Our teams proposal is for a joint digital and physical memorial. A migratory physical memorial travelling around California tasked with leaving smaller memorials, acquiring testimonies in all their forms, and connecting resources to people in need. At the same time the digital memorial acts as an interactive 3D space, available for download online. The world includes an archive of the travels of the physical memorial, a library of activist resources and a collaborative exhibition space. Please see more below on these subjects.

MEMORIAL & MASS ATROCITY

Morgan Jacobs