In this respect, the studies of Andreas Huyssen (2003) and Lübbe (in Huyssen, 2003) are more distinct as they explicitly focus on musealisation instead of lieux de mémoire in general. As they see it, museums can prevent the disappearance of the stability provided by the past. But how do museums create this continuity through time? Which human desire do museums actually fulfil? If we rely on Gumbrecht’s argument (2004), people want to extend their own lives outside the ‘life world’. They want to trace back their being to the time before they were even born and they want to be sure to have some existence in the world after their deaths. The museum fulfils this desire because people are now able to touch, smell and see the same objects as their ancestors did.

Whereas Gumbrecht (2004) speaks of people’s ‘fascination’ with the past, the return to the past is according to Huyssen (2003) not that much a fascination but more an ‘obsession’. As he argues, people are obsessed by the past because they are afraid to forget. The obsession with cultural amnesia is often experienced within groups because remembering is an important aspect for social cohesion (Halbwachs in Coser, 1992; Connerton, 1989). Maybe even more when collective memories are contested by others. Memory, after all, is an important source for identity and when memories are not acknowledged, one’s identity might be experienced in threat (Das, 2004; Jenkins, 2004). So, museums do not only enable the extension of one’s own life outside the ‘life world’, they also contribute to inner peace because they record, write down and provide the illusion of consistency.

On this weblog you have had the opportunity to be an eyewitness of our discussions on the specific qualities of either the physical or virtual museum. We have been discussing ‘remembering’ as social sharing within both kinds of museums. The virtual museum might not seem  like a social environment, but in reality it can be. The accessibilityof both ‘spaces’ and the sensation of ‘being there’ are the aspects that we have addressed as the second quality. The virtual museum might be accessible for a wider audience, it misses the feeling of ‘being there’ completely. Or does it? Maybe even the most important quality we have been arguing about is whether the physical museum feels more authentic and ‘real’ than the virtual museum or whether it is more real. We found out that ‘reality’ isn’t that easy to define, and we could even ask ourselves the question whether it exists at all (cf. Grosz, 2001). The fourth and final quality we discussed is that of the extent to which a visitor can control his/her visit, and how far (s)he has the freedom to manipulate the environment. Whereas the virtual museum seems to be more ‘designed’ by the visitor him/herself than is the case in the physical museum, the question is whether this is true. Virtually, you are not even able to visit the toilet or to stroll down the hill.

All these different qualities make that  the memories mediated by the physical museum are mainly grounded in emotions; its memories are experienced as real, entangled with the everyday life of the user and historically – and thus inextricably - linked with its place. When people remember the Armenian genocide within the physical museum, they experience this mnemonic power. Conversely, the virtual museum isn’t able to count on such assumptions of exposing ‘the real’; they simply lack the quality of authenticity and historicity. That is probably why the virtual museum emphasizes different aspects of the remediation that the physical museum; mainly by showing ‘factual’ numbers (which bear the assumption of being ‘facts’) and impressive pictures (which bear the assumption that the camera does not lie). Because of their different qualities, the physical and virtual museum convey different kinds of memories, but all in order to reach the same; to be ‘politically’ convincing. And so it is that the medium shapes not only the message, but also that interested parties choose a specific medium in order to convey a particular message.

We interpret different media based on our preconceptions on what these media can show us. We assume that camera’s don’t lie. We assume that statistics are real. We trust the cold stone of a ‘physical’ place more easily than a ‘video-game’ representation of it on the internet. These preconceptions are not individual assumptions; they stem from our socio-cultural frameworks (Plate & Smelik, 2006). That is why investigating the medium as the message should not stop here. Try to reflect upon the question why you use the mediums you use to convey a certain message, and which implications this has. The emerging new media are just now beginning to reach puberty. They offer remediations of older media, and they enable new forms of communication. Think for example of writing a scientific paper in the form of a blog, and the changes in its form and message this brings about. Such changes urge us to rethink our messages, our ways of communicating, and ultimately, ourselves.

Whether our comparison of the virtual and physical Tsitsernakaberd space concerns immediacy or hypermediacy is a matter of how one looks at it for a number of reasons. First, there is the difference between the windowed and the full-screen option of the virtual museum, which is shown in the images below.

While the left-hand picture has a clearly present interface, the right-hand image fills the screen and can be said to have a higher degree of immersion. More importantly, however, whether we’re looking at (a desire for) immediacy or hypermediacy depends on what is remediated. If we think of the virtual museum as a way to remediate the memorial complex, and the complex alone, then one can say that the virtual museum is designed with immediacy in mind. However, if we consider that the physical museum itself is also a remediation of other media (after all, ‘the medium is the message’, see McLuhan, 2001), then looking at the physical museum through its virtual museum has important hypermediate elements. Obviously, immediacy and hypermediacy are not mutually exclusive, and their constituent elements reinforce each other.

See also our other post: Immediacy, hypermediacy, and remediation.

Perhaps the most important scholar in this respect is Pierre Nora (1989). According to him, people currently feel the need to embody their memories “because there is so little of it left” (Nora, 1989, p. 7). But because they do so, they lose the connection with the ‘real’ environments of memory; the milieux de mémoire are overruled by the lieux de mémoire. In Nora’s vision the living memories are all turning into dead history, which makes that real memories  will inevitably disappear. Museums therefore do not remember, but destroy memories instead, as his main point of departure is that real memories only exist as long as people are not aware to have them.

Bolter, J. David, & Grusin, Richard. (1999). Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Connerton, Paul. (1989). How societies remember. Cambridge: University Press.

Coser, Lewis A. (Ed.). (1992). Maurice Halbwachs on collective memory. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Das, Veena. (2004). Language and body: transactions in the construction of pain. In N. Scheper-Hughes & P. Bourgois (Eds.), Violence in war and Peace: an anthology (pp. 327-333). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Drotner, Kirsten. (2005). Media on the move: personalised media and the transformation of publicness. In S. Livingstone (Ed.), Audiences and publics: when cultural engagement matters for the public sphere (pp. 187-211). Bristol: Intellect.

Eberbach, Catherine, & Crowley, Kevin. (2005). From living to virtual: learning from museum objects. Curator, 48(3), 317-338.

Forty, Adrian, & Küchler, Susanne (Eds.). (1999). The art of forgetting. Oxford: Berg.

Grosz, ELizabeth. (2001). Architecture from the Outside: Essays on Virtual and Real Space. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. (2004). Production of presence. Stanford: University Press.

Handler, Richard. (1986). Authenticity. Anthropology today, 2(1), 2-4.

Huyssen, Andreas. (2003). Present pasts: urban palimpsests and the politics of memory. Stanford: University Press.

Jenkins, Richard. (2004). Social Identity. London & New York: Routledge.

Kavanagh, Gaynor. (1996). Making histories, making memories. In G. Kavanagh (Ed.), Making histories in museums (pp. 1-14). London: Leicester University Press.

Linnekin, Jocelyn. (1991). Cultural invention and the dilemma of authenticity. American Anthropologist, 93(2), 446-449.

Maleuvre, Didier. (1999). Museum memories: history, technology, art. London: Stanford University Press.

McLuhan, Marshall. (2001). Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. London: Routledge.

Nora, Pierre. (1989). Between Memory and History: Les lieux de Memoire. Representations, 0(26), 7-24.

Plate, Liedeke, & Smelik, Anneke (Eds.). (2006). Stof en as. Amsterdam: Van gennep / de balie.

Roscou, Jane, & Hight, Craig. (2001). Faking it: Mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality. New York: Manchester University Press.

Ryan, M.L. (2001). Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Electronic Media. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Uricchio, William. (2005). Simulation, history and computer games. In J. Goldstein & J. Raessens (Eds.), Handbook of computer game studies (pp. 327-338). Cambridge: The MIT press.

Van Dijk, José. (2007). Mediated Memories in the Digital Age. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Van Loon, Joost. (2008). Media Technology: Critical perspectives. Maidenhead: Open University Press.

Võsu, Ester, Kõresaar, Ene, & Kuutma, Kristin. (2008). Mediation of memory: towards transdisciplinary perspectives in current memory studies. Trames, 12 (62/57)(3), 243-263.

Wurth, Kiene Brillenburgh. (2006). Multimediality, Intermediality, and Medially Complex Digital Poetry. RiLUnE, 5, 1-18.

I think that at this point it isn’t that big of a deal to conclude that the virtual museum leaves much more space for personal control than does the physical museum. In the physical museum the environment is in some sense forced upon the visitor. But when we dive deeper into this question, we see that the extent of control in the virtual museum is also fairly limited, in some way even less than in the physical museum. Take the simple fact that you cannot escape sunset in the virtual reality of the museum. So, Jeroen is right when he states that people of the Armenian diaspora can visit the virtual museum whenever they like to, but he overlooks the fact that the impression that stems from the virtual museum is one of eternal sunset. In other words, you have the freedom to determine the opening times yourself in ‘real time’, but miss the freedom to determine at what time of the day to experience the museum virtually.

Let’s imagine a virtual genocide museum that evokes the impression of virtual reality more than does the virtual museum we have been studying. In the first place it would be more ‘real’ if the virtual space was based on webcam images, so that virtual visitors experience the virtual museum ‘live’ and therefore more as an ‘authentic experience’ (Plate & Smelik, 2006, p. 26). You would be able to see time pass and you would be able to see the other visitors of the museum. In some sense such moving webcam images would enable you to experience the social sharing of memories of the Armenian genocide. But, the experience of sharing would not be mutual; the ‘real’ visitors do not experience to share their memories with you, because they are not aware of your presence. Secondly, the virtual museum could therefore be made more ‘real’ if you would be able to interact with on the one hand the visitors, and on the other hand the museum staff. Thirdly, it could have been made more real if you would have been able to hear and smell the same as do the visitors in the virtual museum, without having the opportunity to switch it off. And you would have to be able to buy books and other museum souvenirs.

Is this just a dream formed by merging my physical and virtual reality into one framework, or will there be some day that it really comes this far because the technological developments allow us to?

Western Anatolia: 344,800
Cilicia and Northern Syria: 239,000
European Turkey: 31,000
Province of Trebizond: 58,390
In total: 673,190 individuals murdered or deported in this part of the region.

Horrific figures indeed, but as I try to grasp the magnitude of the event and to imagine the atrocities and bloodshed that must have occurred when whole schools were massacred and families were torn apart, my phone rings. I pick up and it’s my friend asking if I want to go out for a beer or two later this week. I happily agree to meet him, and after ending the phone call I switch on the coffee maker and grab a piece of bread. I turn on the radio and decide to get back to work after my lunch break. After first checking my e-mail, I return to my visit and the horrible, graphic pictures on the wall of the museum give the cold numbers on the opposite walls human faces…

Simply put: the virtual museum allows the visitor to tailor her own visit to a much greater degree than during a visit to the physical museum. A virtual guest has the freedom to manipulate and construct her own experience (cf. Grosz, 2001, p. 77). A member of the Armenian Diaspora in the United States, for example, may like to bake Armenian ‘gata’ (Գաթա, which is a traditional kind of sweet bread) while she visits the virtual museum in order to create a smell of ‘home’. Alternatively, she could switch on any music or background noise, or experience the virtual museum in complete and utter silence. Also, she can visit the museum whenever she likes, unbothered by opening times restrictions.

These ‘customizations’ can add to the experience or interfere with it (or have no effect whatsoever). This, of course, differs from individual to individual, but this customizability allows the visitor of the virtual museum to tailor her visit to her own preferences and current wishes in ways unimaginable in the physical museum (cf. Grosz, 2001, p. 79). Even the simple thought of going to the Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex while listening to an iPod seems very disrespectful (consider Inge’s description of the atmosphere there), let alone spreading your own favorite aroma or walking on the eternal flame. And these are just the physically possible customizations of one’s memorial visit – imagine the potential customization of being able to ‘fly’ anywhere and ‘teleport’ to different places.

To illustrate, I’ve created the following four Youtube clips of the virtual experience. Enable the annotations in the clip (they should be switched on by default) to read my additional comments in the clip itself.

This clip shows how the virtual museum allows for added maneuverability vis-a-vis the ‘physical’ museum in Yerevan, and the potential perspectives this adds to the experience (this is expanded upon in the following clips).

This video shows how the perspective can be changed into that of a ‘mouse’, while this would not be socially acceptable in the physical museum in Yerevan (nor would it be easy to perform physically).

Here, the perspective is be changed to that of a ‘bird’ (which is not a pre-programmed option, but a ‘creative’ way to interact with the virtual space). For some, such usage of the virtual museum may lend an added ‘emotional’ freedom of movement within the Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex.

Does this clip show disrespectful behavior in an otherwise ‘sacred’ site, or does it display a specific usage of this remediated space? As a ‘visitor’, I’m able to tailor my experience exactly the way I find it most appealing, so if that means acting visiting the museum upside-down and standing on the eternal flame in the memorial, I’m free to do that. Also, if your computer has speakers attached to it, you have probably noticed the music in this particular clip, which I added later. Most would deem such music ‘inappropriate’ for this particular setting, but it shows how a virtual guest can create a specific experience and set a certain mood.

When it comes to social restrictions/freedoms, I remember that, walking through the museum during our visit to Armenia, we were constantly watched by museum personnel. Pointing us in specific directions, telling us not to touch the glass of the display cases (because our ‘greasy’ fingers would smudge the impeccable surface), and watching our every move. I remember feeling ‘observed’ and ‘controlled’ by such a social situation, instilling a sense of being in a place of worship (much like being in a church, temple or mosque). When thinking about this experience now, in the light of my thoughts on the virtual museum, I think there are two important conclusions to be drawn. First, the virtual museum offers more than the physical museum offered. It offers freedom. Online, there’s nobody checking to see if I smudge the glass. If I want, I can look at one specific photograph for the whole day, and no one would get suspicious of my lingering at that spot. I can look at all the items at display in reverse order, I can run from place to place, or bump my head to all the walls and ceilings if that’s what I’d like to do, and not a soul would stop me. However, it is exactly this freedom of movement that also limits my experience.

I didn’t particularly enjoy the feeling of ‘being watched’ in the physical museum, and I didn’t care much for the obligatory visiting order and the fact that I couldn’t even point to interesting items on display without being afraid to touch (and stain) the glass. Nevertheless, it was – among other things – exactly this ‘ritual’ of visiting the museum that bestowed a sense of reverence upon the atmosphere. Had it not been for this specific social situation, the museum would have been simply a number of (somewhat eerie) rooms, which is why to me, the virtual museum more or less ‘feels’ like a computer game (see Uricchio, 2005). Inge will undoubtedly have more to say about what the physical museum has to offer in terms of being a social environment.

What kind of mediations are we looking at here? Does the virtual museum remediate the photographs on display in the physical museum, or does it remediate whatever is mediated by these photographs? Or should we think of the virtual ‘version’ as a remediation of the physical museum itself after all? A definitive answer to these questions all depends on how you look at it (see Van Dijk, 2007, pp. 48-52, for a discussion). In the most straightforward view on the virtual museum, one can think of the virtual space as ‘a way’ to ‘extend’ the physical museum into cyberspace, in which case the virtual simply remediates the physical (or, rather, ‘extend’ human senses through the use of digital technology, cf. McLuhan, 2001). On the other end of the spectrum, we’re entering a vortex of remediation in which one could consider the virtual museum a remediation of the physical museum. The possible remediating steps in this process are virtually infinite (see McLuhan, 2001, for a discussion).

What does this tell us about the difference between the feelings of authenticity this instills in both pictures above (and the physical space that both re-present)? Would you say that the remediation of this physical space in (a screen capture of) the virtual museum is ‘less authentic’ than the remediation of the same space in a digital photograph, even though the camera does lie (Roscoe & Hight, 2001, p. 11)? Or would you say they’re equally (in)authentic? What does this say about the photographs in the pictures? How ‘real’ are they? And, ultimately, how ‘authentic’ can any mediation be, and are all experiences equally (in)authentic, as they are all mediated through our own senses?

Authenticity is a (social) construction. Likewise, our realities are always constructed based on what we experience through our bodily senses. In a way, our bodies and minds ultimately mediate our environment as well (Van Loon, 2008, pp. 1-19). Our ‘traditional’ understanding of ‘reality’ is that it exists in physical space. Remediations of these realities into virtual spaces doesn’t make them any less ‘real’ – it exposes that what we have been calling ‘reality’ is in fact imagined as well. As Grosz phrases it: “[…] the computer and the worlds it generates reveal that the world in which we live, the real world, has always been a space of virtuality” (2001, p. 78).

The ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ should therefore not be conceptualized as two separate or even oppositional spaces for two important reasons. First, they are equally (in)authentic, as I have argued above. “The virtual reality of computer space is fundamentally no different from the virtual reality of writing, reading, drawing, or even thinking” (Grosz, 2001, p. 78). Second, virtual and tangible spaces are inextricably linked. The visitor may be aware that the virtual museum is ‘just’ a representation of the ‘real thing’, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it lacks the emotional connotations that it could have had. Moreover, experiences in physical space potentially reflect on behavior in virtual space and vice versa.

There are some differences between both ‘flavors’ of reality, however. One important aspect of the virtual Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex seemed that it offered specific bits of information that were also presented in the physical museum, but put less emphasis on other things. Consider the difference in image resolution between both remediated (virtual) museum objects below (click on them for enlargements).

The readability of the image on the left is much better than the image on the right (while in the physical museum, both would be equally well readable). The sharper image shows the number of victims of the Armenian genocide in a particular region of historical Armenia. The right image shows more anecdotal materials to support these numbers. This implies a sense of political urgency behind remediating some specific museum objects, and to make them accessible to a larger audience. The Armenian genocide is acknowledged by many political and social groups, but it is still denied by some (notably Turkey), or the scale of the event is trivialized. Another clearly readable museum object in the virtual remediation is the United Nations definition of genocide. Presenting ‘factual’ information thus becomes a priority in the virtual museum. While the physical museum is very effective in communicating an emotion, the virtual museum is primarily effective in communicating ‘facts’ (especially when visited in combination with the institute’s website).

Even though a selection of objects is shown (in a readable way) in the virtual museum, and these are not politically neutral, I am not implying that this is a distortion of reality. Physical museums have been criticized for taking objects out of their ‘original context’, which would make their representation less neutral (i.e. ‘anxiety of influence’, see Bloom, 1997; Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 49). Digital media (such as the virtual museum) may seem to be even more easily manipulated than ‘conventional’ museums, because people in today’s Western societies have mastered (general) tools for digital image manipulation themselves (the existence of the verb ‘to photoshop‘ in internet slang proves this very point, see Van Dijk, 2007, pp. 48-52). ‘Analogue’ media usually require skilled professionals in order to ‘distort’ reality. Nevertheless, the physical and virtual museum are potentially equally subjective in their representation of the Armenian genocide.

Because I can see their handwritings, can hear their voices and touch their letters I feel an inextricable link between my own life and that of the Armenians whose lives are displayed in this museum. These museum objects mark the continuation between the time of the event and the time in which I live, and are therefore able to write the experiences of the Armenians into my personal biography, into the ‘personal experience’ of the audience (Handler, 1986, p. 4; Linnekin, 1991, p. 446). Furthermore, the fact that I am able to touch the letters written by an Armenian during WWI is not only a proof that the letter exists and that this particular Armenian has existed, but also proofs the existence of – in this case – the Armenian genocide. Therefore, such ‘authentic’ objects are able to create a direct relationship between the self and the particular event (Handler, 1986, p. 4).

On the one hand the authentic objects in the Armenian genocide museum apparently enable and sustain a relationship between the audience and the Armenians that lived during the genocide. On the other hand the curator of the exhibition aims at authenticity instead of replicas because authentic objects embrace the quality of being unique (Eberbach & Crowley, 2005, p. 317). They are chosen by the curators because they have something special to say to the visitors; they are ‘historical evidence’ for what they are supposed to symbolise (Kavanagh, 1996, p. 6).

It is not only by authenticity that museum objects have the quality of being historical evidence. Museum curators also aim at portraying the ‘real’ or at least, at achieving the ‘illusion’ of reality. Real then is defined in terms of the immediality of the viewer’s emotion (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 57). In the Armenian genocide museum this has been done by the use of documentaries and photos. Both objects bear the assumption that their images have a direct relationship with the socio-historical world, the so-called “assertive stance” (Roscou & Hight, 2001, p. 8 ). “[…], the image and the record of that image are seen as being one and the same, […]” (Roscou & Hight, 2001, p. 6). This is especially the case when the photographer or documentary maker takes an observational mode, in which they depict everyday life. Because this mode is not that centred around an argument, the images are presented as “a window on reality” (Roscou & Hight, 2001, p. 19). The viewer simply forgets that photos and documentaries are made by people, and are therefore by definition selective and subjective.

And so it was when I was looking around in the second room of the genocide museum. The photos told me not only that the event had actually taken place; they also convinced me of the emotions involved in this historical event. With the cultural belief in mind that ‘the camera does not lie’ (Roscou & Hight, 2001, p. 11), I observed the undernourished women, destroyed families, and crying children. Furthermore, the documentaries and photos gave me the feeling to be in direct contact with eyewitnesses. In some sense, eyewitnesses have similar qualities as have authentic objects; the direct link with the particular event. By seeing and hearing the stories of the eyewitnesses, I gained direct access to the Armenian genocide, because of the idea that they “have seen it with their own eyes” (Roscou & Hight, 2001, p. 16).

It is especially because of these qualities of authenticity and reality that physical museums mediate collective memories in a very convincing and emotional way.

Obviously, the virtual museum is not able to bridge the gap between the website and the physical museum completely. Just because it is re-mediated, it loses the direct relationship with its location. The feeling evoked by the emergence of museums in the 19^th century stresses as well that location is something very important. In those days people complained that museums would destroy history instead of preserving it. The museum was said to endanger the ‘authentic’ relationship between the exposed objects and their social origins. Until today museums attempt to emphasize the tie between the exhibition and the surrounding society (Maleuvre, 1999, pp. 1-2).

The website of the Armenian genocide museum explicitly describes how the museum ‘fits’ into or ‘belongs’ to the location on which it is founded: “Set high on a hill, dominating the landscape, it is in perfect harmony with its surroundings. The austere outlines convey the spirit of the nation that survived a ruthless campaign of extermination.” As a visitor it is almost impossible to miss the intertwined relationship between the museum and its location. Being located on a hill, you see Yerevan from above; its human and lively character with mount Ararat dominating the skyline. Especially this mountain has a very strong symbolic power, because this national symbol is clearly visible from the museum but in the same time detained by the Turkish border.

The physical museum is obviously not a ‘window on the actual physical space’, it is that physical space. Or is it? It depends on what we mean by ‘physical space’. In case of the virtual museum, the physical space is the space in which the physical museum exists; the ‘reality’ on which the medium provides a window (cf. Bolter & Grusin, 1999). But, the physical museum in turn aims at depicting another physical space; the space in which the Armenians lived in times of the genocide. Or, to put it differently, the virtual museum remediates the reality of the physical museum, which subsequently remediates the reality of the letters, photos and documentaries (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 45). In fact, one might argue that remediation has no end, as everything is in some sense mediated (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 58).

Even though the qualification of remediation on second thought does not seem to differ that much between the physical and virtual museum, people still experience the physical one to be more real and authentic. This is therefore one of the tricky qualities of the physical museum; it evokes the feeling of ‘being there’ (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 48), but in the same time it is no less a mediation and representation as is the virtual museum.

Armenian Genocide Museum: Հայոց Ցեղասպանության թանգարանը (Музей геноцида армян)
Memorial: հուշակառույց (Мемориал)
Bus: ավտոբուս (автобус)
Subway: թունել (метро)

Once you’re in the city centre of Yerevan, the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute is easily accessible. Just follow the instructions on their website: “From the Sport Music complex or Athena Street walk to the memorial complex approximately 15-20 min walk”. To help you just that last bit further, the memorial complex is located here on Live Search Maps (Google maps has no information on Yerevan). Try to find some signs pointing to the entrance once you reach the hill of the memorial complex that is called ‘Tsitsernakaberd‘ (Ծիծեռնակաբերդ / Цицернакабéрд).

Alternatively, click here for the virtual version of the museum (requires Internet Explorer 5.0 or higher), which shows you the exact same thing, or does it?

As the text above clearly shows, access is a crucial difference between any ‘physical’ and a ‘virtual’ museum. While the ‘actual’ museum/memorial in Yerevan doesn’t charge for admission to the site, it remains limited in its public access to individuals who ‘happen’ to be at that specific location. As a consequence, it is practically inaccessible to most of the people on the planet. Besides the inhabitants of Yerevan itself, and the surrounding regions of Armenia, the museum/memorial is only available to those lucky few with sufficient economic, political and cultural resources to visit the city. Economic resources, because flying there is relatively expensive (and land-travel problematic from most areas in the world). Political resources, because Armenia has rather ‘problematic’ political relations with two of its neighbors. The country is landlocked between Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Iran, and its borders with both Turkey and Azerbaijan are closed to all traffic due to the Nagorno-Karabakh War of the early 1990′s. Finally, potential visitors are required to have specific ‘cultural resources’, because they have to be interested in the Armenian genocide in the first place in order to harness their other resources to visit the museum/memorial.

The virtual museum, on the other hand, only demands one thing of the visitor; to have an internet connection (and to have specific software (i.e. Microsoft Internet Explorer) installed, which is free). The potential pool of visitors to the virtual museum, therefore, is only limited to the number of people on the planet who have an internet connection. Or is it? As a medium, any publicly available website on the internet (such as this one) is in principle accessible to all people who have access to the internet. Nevertheless, actual visitor numbers will be restricted to the people who are interested in Armenia and/or the Armenian genocide. Google finds “about 475″ websites that link to the museum website, and only one website that links directly to the virtual museum itself (which is accessible through a link on the museum website). Therefore, people visiting the virtual museum are not only required to have an internet connection; they should also be interested in ‘visiting’ the museum/memorial site. They will have to actively search for information on the Armenian genocide, and since the only website linking to the virtual museum itself (beside the museum website) is in fact in Armenian, they are most likely to ‘stumble upon’ the virtual museum rather than find it directly. This significantly reduces the potential number of ‘visitors’ to the virtual museum, and thus limits the added ‘advantage’ of the virtual museum over the physical museum.

Nonetheless, for the select group of people who are interested enough in the Armenian genocide and the museum/memorial in Yerevan, ‘visiting’ the virtual version of Tsitsernakaberd is much easier than visiting it in the ‘physical world’. The remediation of Tsitsernakaberd into ‘cyberspace‘ thus potentially enables the Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute to communicate its message to an audience infinitely larger than it would have had just a couple of short years ago. Sure, the institute has an extensive website, which may offer even more extensive and up-to-date information on (research on) the Armenian genocide than the actual museum in Yerevan, but simply putting this textual and even photographic information ‘out there’ doesn’t allow the visitor of the website to undergo the experience of ‘going to’ the actual museum/memorial space. It offers a lot of information, but no sense of ‘closeness’. The specific interface offered by the ‘virtual museum/memorial’ can therefore be seen as an attempt to bridge this ‘gap’. The architectural layout of Tsitsernakaberd in physical space is quite impressive, on a hill overlooking Armenia’s capital city with Mount Ararat in the distance (the Mount is one of the most important Armenian national symbols, but it’s located in Turkey – it is also prominently featured on their website, by the way). The institute’s website cannot convey the ‘emotional’ experience of ‘being there’. The “logic of transparent immediacy” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 23) behind the virtual museum remediates the physical space into the web browser of any interested individual, and thus places the online visitor ‘on’ the Tsitsernakaberd hill, in a way striving to a more ‘immersive’ mediation than the regular website offers (see Ryan, 2001; Wurth, 2006, p. 3). With the moderately realistic three-dimensional rendering of the museum/memorial complex filling the computer screen, the interface to the information (and emotion?) becomes immediate – ‘transparent’ to some degree.

“To some degree”, because the user is unlikely to forget that she is “confronting a medium” (Bolter & Grusin, 1999, p. 24). Bolter & Grusin’s words apply to the virtual Armenian Genocide Museum/Memorial as well: “We notice immediately the cartoon-like simplicity of the scene […]” (1999, p. 22). It is a ‘window’ on the actual physical space – a remediation of it. It shows a medium (the physical museum) in a medium (the virtual museum). What’s more, it offers new possibilities for navigating the remediated space, finding the information you want, and undergoing the ‘emotional’ experience of ‘being there’.

Nevertheless, I argue that it is a socially relevant space – or it least it can be.

Virtually remediated space doesn’t limit the social impact of Tsitsernakaberd because it is ‘just an online space’. It is not ‘just’ a 3D rendering on the flat surface of a computer screen. To an equal degree as the physical remediation of the Armenian genocide at the Tsitsernakaberd memorial, it can be a symbol and a medium through which collective memories are conveyed.

Imagine people calling each other from the privacy of their own homes, asking to ‘meet’ online in the virtual museum. Even if they wouldn’t be able to ‘see’ or ‘hear’ each other online, simply knowing that the experience of ‘visiting’ the memorial is a shared experience can add a layer of meaning to the endeavor. What is more, it could possibly make the experience even more intense by adding the possibility of customization of the visiting experience. This – so we can imagine – can be a collective (e.g. “let’s both play this-and-that song and pray at the eternal flame”), individual (e.g. both individuals playing their favorite music in the background, and one looks at the museum and the other at the eternal flame), or ‘hybrid’ (e.g. both listen to different music, but go to the same place) customization of the visiting experience.

Moreover, the virtual museum should not be seen as an alternative to the physical site; it is an addition to it. As Grosz (2001) also mentions, virtual spaces are intertwined with physical spaces and both social spheres can influence each other. It would not come as a surprise if website statistics indicate that the virtual museum attracts significantly more visitors on the 24^th of April (see Inge’s post), even though the online remediation is not bounded by date or time. In such a case, the virtual acts is an extension of the physical. The virtual museum can thereby reinforce the shared feeling in physical space, as members of the Armenian Diaspora can join in on the commemorations (e.g. on the 24^th) acted out in physical space.

Conversely, the physical Tsitsernakeberd memorial may attract more international visitors as a result of its online presence. Also, as the virtual museum is accessible regardless of geography, and its symbolism and presentation of historical events is far from neutral, it could potentially become a political symbol in virtual as well as physical space.

To further add to Inge’s comment on Nora (1989) in the final lines of her post on collective remembering, the virtual Tsitsernakaberd memorial complex is (potentially) as much a lieux de mémoire as the physical space itself. And not only does it extend collective memories through time and into public space – it extends collective memories through geography and political relations, simultaneously making it a potent political symbol and statement.

To conclude, the virtual museum as a medium can have a much greater potential than it currently displays. Consider, for example, the social interactions people engage in on social networking sites (such as Facebook, Myspace, and Twitter), or – even closer to the virtual museum experience – web communities such as Second Life, or ‘Massively Multiplayer’ online games such as World of Warcraft. In all of these ‘web 2.0‘ applications, individuals engage in social networks with other ‘real’ individuals. They share experiences, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and discuss major life events. Such a framework for social interaction, I believe, might be the next step in remediating collective memories in on- and offline Tsitsernakaberd.

But as soon as we have a closer look at the scene on top of this hill, it is not just the buildings that attract our attention. People stroll around in groups. The atmosphere is gloomy. A teenage girl bursts into tears. Her friends support her, but her tears keep falling. It is obvious that these people share her sorrows. But what are they so upset about? For sure these people are too young to have experienced the Armenian genocide themselves (or their (grand)parents, for that matter). Why do they feel so involved? When we enter the genocide memorial we can better understand why. The Armenian genocide is not a personal memory; it is passed on within families, schools and other public areas. It is a shared memory.

Maurice Halbwachs (in Coser, 1992, p. 22) was the first to address the distinction between personal and collective memories. He argued that although it is individuals who remember, they remember and recreate the past in a specific context, because they are members of social groups too. Therefore, remembering is by definition a social act. Collective memories are part of a “whole ensemble of thoughts” that belong to a specific group. That is why remembering supports the social cohesion and existence of that particular group. It is by constituting a community of thoughts rather than by a resemblance of thoughts that memories have the quality of marking the borders of the group (Connerton, 1989, p. 36).

Assuming that remembering is indeed always socially constructed, the museum and memorial complex in Yerevan can be seen as frameworks in which memories are localized and shared among members of the group (Connerton, 1989, p. 37). It is especially because of ritual performances that memories are conveyed and sustained in such places (Connerton, 1989, p. 38). From this perspective it becomes clear why the teenage girl felt so emotional by what she had experienced in the museum and memorial. Because she belonged to the Armenian nation, the memories that were commemorated at this location were her memories too. She might not have experienced the genocide herself; being socialized in Armenia, she does have the memories.

Apparently, the public character of the memorial is very important. Imagine that every Armenian family would have its own memorial in its garden and commemorates the massacres individually, then remembering would loose its social significance. Or maybe even ‘worse’, when every Armenian would visit a virtual model of the memorial, and would commemorate the fallen victims online. When we visited the memorial it was because of the social aspect of commemoration that the setting made such an impression. People were crying, flowers were laid and you could just feel that these people were not alone, that they shared their thoughts and memories with those other people.

The social sharing is especially important on the 24^th of April, when hundreds thousands Armenians commemorate the victims of the Armenian genocide at this place. The website of the museum describes the feeling at that day as follows: “As each mourner brings flowers to place around the eternal fire, a sea of flowers can be seen encircling the area creating a solemn visual impact.” It might be obvious that the mourning Armenians feel connected to those others who have made an effort to commemorate their common ancestors. And by doing so, they do not only share their sorrows with those Armenians that live now, but in the same time they explicitly claim continuity with the lives of those Armenians that were killed during the genocide (cf. Connerton, 1989, p. 45). Or to put it differently, it would diminish the mnemonic power of the commemoration to state that it only reminds Armenians of the genocide; according to Connerton (1989, p. 43) we should rather say that the audience ceremonially gives the genocide an embodied form, a re-presentation of the event.

Obviously, Tsitsernakaberd is what Nora (1989) calls a lieux de mémoire; a place where memories are ‘stored’ and recollected. And maybe even more important; where people experience that their memories are not limited to the private sphere in contemporary times, but are shared in the public space and through time.