Digital Digging: traces, gazes, and the archival in-between

Traces and gazes have become leading paradigms in dealing with the (visual) history of the Holocaust within academia. This multi-modal project, composed of the following paper and the video essay “The Archival In-Between”, reflects on the connection between traces and gazes, proposing to think of them as a gaze-trace ‘entity’, which resides in an in-between state. Connecting, juxtaposing, manipulating, and fragmenting various textual and filmic traces from the audiovisual heritage of the Holocaust, the project explores this gaze-trace entity in a self-reflexive manner. It performs a theoretical, empirical, ethical, and poetic investigation into the “in-betweenness” potential of the archive footage by digital means. In so doing, the project aims at exploring and demonstrating the inherent potential of videographic methods to study audiovisual memory.