DIGITAL TRAUMA

Full screen, HD mode and headphones are strongly recommended, thanks.

(and the Crystal Image)

2017 Experimental documentary. 8 min.

If we can access our past at any moment, to what extent can we detach ourselves from it and move forward? What does this seemingly inexhaustible digital memory mean for societies attempting to rebuild after conflict? While acknowledging the crucial role of historical memory in confronting the past and rebuilding after violence, Digital Trauma explores its more troubling potential to become a political weapon: how images and narratives of past violence can be continuously retrieved, circulated and instrumentalized to reinforce nationalist identities, reactivate old divisions and keep conflict alive in the present.

Digital Trauma draws on Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the “crystal-image” (the moment when images of past and present coexist until they become indistinguishable). In the film, post-production becomes a conceptual tool for “traumatizing” the digital image itself. Through slit-scan techniques, different temporal layers are superimposed within a single image, generating a liquid temporality in which the present merges with an incessant flow of images retrieved from online searches about the Bosnian War, carried out by a young second-generation Bosnian woman. An inherited, digitally mediated memory that not only preserves the past, but continually reactivates it in the present.

Distribution: Cinesud

AWARDS:

VIS Vienna International Short Film Festival 2018. Jury Award Special Achievement.(Animation Avantgarde). (Austria).

Jury Award MADATAC. (Spain)