This paper draws on Andrew Hoskins' concept of the connective turn and Astrid Erll's notion of new media ecologies in memory which examine remembering as a distributive activity entangled with minds and machines, affects and materials. This paper extends those concepts and map the same on to the mnemonic entanglements in a COVID-19 world which triggered a massive digitization of educational institutions' pedagogy and events. Our working definition of memory events in this paper is ceremonies which are spectacular and public in nature while at the same time involving intimacy, involvement, and pride at a personal and emotional level. Such events operate with an entanglement of emergence from the participating subject and convergence of the many subjects situated within the event frame. The paper will use the convocation ceremonies of two Indian higher educational institutions as case studies: the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB), and the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), to examine how such emergence and convergence in memory events have been digitally deterritorialized in the COVID-19 world where human intersubjectivity is replaced by technological transplants.
This paper will study how the creation of digital avatars in place of the real participants and awardees in the convocations of the year of the COVID corresponds to an extreme extension of the connective turnand new media ecologies in memory whereby the human actants in such memory events are replaced by their digital lookalikes. The Mixed Reality (MR) technology used to reconstruct the digital selves who emerge and converge while their human originals practise compulsory social distancing – all students and scholars in the IIT-s were instructed to evacuate the campus as per COVID guidelines in India – will be read in this paper as a new mainstream machine in the connective memory ecology. This study will also explore how this enacts a digital deterritorialization in the ontology and experience of memory in the COVID-19 world. The animation and digital movements in the convocation ceremonies – specifically in the two events chosen for this study – will be examined as contrasts to the stillness of the subjects practising the rituals of lockdown as per COVID-19 norms. With close examination of the technology recreating human selves and movements, this paper will offer a philosophical framework of how memory operates and will operate in the post-COVID world mediated by machines that reterritorialize rituals of remembering. Lastly, this paper will allude to a similar process of reconstruction with Augmented Reality (AR) technology that was used in October 2019, shortly before the outbreak of COVID, to re-member a major historical event in the first Memory Studies Conference at IITM which produced an AR-animated mural depicting the 1919 Amritsar Massacre in British India. The paper will study how that re-construction of the 1919 event of imperial brutality sought to animate the past while the convocation ceremonies digitize the present using similar AR/MR technology, thus depicting the reterritorialization of reality and remembering in a post-COVID world.
