Shannon Biederman, Senior Curator, Sydney Jewish Museum, presents at NDF23.

Abstract

How can you carry a story into the future? Is it possible to create a personal connection to someone’s history when they aren’t there to tell it? Can technology allow you to bring humanity to the forefront? The Sydney Jewish Museum was founded by Holocaust survivors. By sharing their stories, they put humanity at the forefront of history that creates a meaningful impact that lasts a lifetime. Reverberations: A Future for Memory is a new exhibition that looks at how to enable future generations to have a meaningful and memorable interactions with survivor testimony.

This is not an exhibition about the events of the Holocaust – it’s about the people who experienced it. A key objective of the exhibition is to put the survivors’ humanity at the forefront and to test methods of delivering testimony to future generations.

On display are interactive biographies that use artificial intelligence (AI) and next-generation language processing, to transform hours of testimony into interactive biographies capable of lifelike conversation. Opened on December 1st 2022, audiences have been ‘meeting’ these biographies for the first time and the SJM is now gathering data on its impact and whether building a connection with technology is possible.