Petar Odak

Junior Visiting Fellow in the Cluster Cultural memory and cultural heritage in Europe in the context of digital transformation

The project looks into the possibilities of augmented (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to articulate and mediate history, particularly the European state socialist past in the post/socialist timespace. By approaching virtual reality as a new, still developing technology that, through its employment of our bodies as multi-sensory affective complexes, might help us better see/feel/understand what is gone, one of my aims is to account for the ways the VR and AR sites of experience economy participate in tacit affective politics of post/socialist Europe. I will explore both the ways in which they reinforce the narratives of state socialism as a monolithic historical block of political violence, as well as the ways in which the same sites - sometimes willingly, sometimes unwillingly - put into question this very narrative.