Virtual Remembering
Virtual Remembering is Julian's doctoral project at the University of Regensburg, in the field of media informatics. It develops the concept of the virtual memory object, a cultural bearer of meaning that transfers an object together with its memory into a digital form. The empirical frame comes from the research project hand.gemacht at the Freilandmuseum Oberpfalz. Before such an object can be designed, two terms need clarifying. What does virtual mean, beyond online and unreal? And what does a museum collect when it keeps not the object but its digital capture? The dissertation answers both and tests the answer against a real collection.
The word virtual denotes very different things. A tour, a reconstruction, a communication situation, a platform interface. In the museum field this sharpens, because collections are increasingly digitised but rarely worked through conceptually. Hidden depots with purely physical access are no longer adequate, yet digital visibility alone does not produce a living culture of memory. The work takes this twofold vagueness as its starting point. It asks not whether digital objects are real, but under what conditions a media arrangement becomes a situation in which perception, action and meaning come together.
Virtuality is determined here not as a technical property but as an ordering dimension of media constellations. Following Stalder, the culture of digitality names the frame within which virtual phenomena arise, while Steuer’s terms of presence, sensory richness and interactivity allow a gradual account. Norton ties the virtual to a horizon of reference, since it gains its reality only in relation to what should actually be the case. Virtual here means neither unreal nor merely digital, but an effective, media-accessible mode of non-physical objecthood. From simulation, illusion and fiction it remains conceptually distinct.
On this basis the virtual memory object emerges as a cultural artefact, defined through four aspects: the digital snapshot, the three-dimensional digitisation, the human-object relation and the underlying data structure. hand.gemacht tests the concept with an in-situ strategy. Objects are captured on site at their owners’ and remain in use afterwards, which is what makes it possible to collect things in continued use, with emotional attachment or of perishable form at all. Unikathek then presents the objects as a navigable network, in guided tours and in the annotated model. A design-research expert study examines how robust the mediation formats prove to be.
The yield lies on two levels. Conceptually, the work shifts the question from the property of a medium to the ordering achievement of a constellation. Not whether something is virtual, but how and through what it brings forth its own reality. Practically, the virtual memory object opens access to cultural heritage that had no place within the institutional logic of ownership. Because an object stays in use after being captured, it can be recorded again at different points in time, and its changes themselves become an object of research. Beyond the museum, the concept reaches into education, social media and industrial applications.