iRemembr: materialising memories

This paper introduces iRemembr, a practice-research project that re-thinks the digital object as a ‘memory object’. iRemembr brings together digital photographs as instruments shaping our personal and cultural memory (Hirsch, 1997:14), combined with the use of online social networks, photo galleries such as Flickr, alongside art practice, to analyse mechanisms and rituals used in online remembering. In addition, it examines the relationship between embodied experiences both with and around these new artefacts – ‘bodiless’ digital objects, in the context of transitional phenomena and illusion (Winnecott, 1974) and cultural memory. iRemembr traces the digital memory object through its locative, corporeal and temporal experience, highlighting complex forms of memory (from the act of forgetting to hyperamnesia and third-memory) whilst ultimately contributing to the debate of how digital memory objects alter and shape cultural memory.