New Dimensions in Testimony. Interactive 3-D exhibit (review)

Hiroshima Archive. Interactive digital archive. Hiroshima Archive Production Committee. http://hiroshima.archiving.jp/index_en.html.

Kubota:

Can you tell me your name and your birthday?

Schloss:

My brother's name was Heinz and he was born in 12th of July, 1926. So he was three years older than me.

Kubota:

Um, can you tell me a little bit about how you grew up?

Schloss:

I was born in Vienna in Austria.

Kubota:

Umm, that sure is a little bit…

It was the most difficult oral history interview I have ever experienced. I spent forty-five minutes, and I was exhausted and could hardly remember what we talked about. And yet, I was delighted and thrilled to know about her, or should I say, "it."

New Dimensions in Testimony introduces a new wave of innovation in how we present oral histories. Developed by the University of Southern California Shoah Foundation, it is an interactive 3-D exhibit using artificial intelligence (AI) technology, in which an audience can have virtual conversations with holographically projected images of Holocaust survivors. The interviews were conducted and stored with specialized recording and display technologies. The audience actually talks to AI that controls the archives using natural language processing technologies; one can ask questions, and the holographic survivor will respond conversationally with relevant testimony.

I was skeptical about what AI could do, especially since I know, as an oral historian, how complicated human conversations can be. Seeing is believing. Therefore, I visited the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York to examine a special exhibition of New Dimensions in Testimony and conducted an oral history interview with it. As I entered the room, there were two projected survivors, swinging their bodies slightly to left and right and staring at me. They were in white frames raised above the floor, so they looked like life-sized portraits. There was a microphone and a computer mouse in front of them. As I pressed the mouse and spoke into the microphone, the projected survivor naturally switched to listening mode, and after the question, began speaking and gave (sort of) relevant responses.

There were times the technologies failed to react properly, as highlighted in the excerpt of my AI-facilitated interview at the beginning of this review. I assume that the computer might have misunderstood "birthday" in my first question as "brother," and answered accordingly. Indeed, there were times I realized the projected survivor replied to me in response to one particular word in my question, and not to the question as a whole. Also, the responses sometimes became awkward when the questions were open-ended, such as the second question I asked above, and follow-up questions also produced somewhat odd results. It worked best with short, simple, and specific questions, which is understandable since, in reality, AI works as a search engine to derive the best answer from its repository. Many of our oral history methodologies, therefore, could not be applied to dialogues with New Dimensions in Testimony. As a matter of fact, New Dimensions ruthlessly flattens the subjectivity which oral historians value so deeply.

Needless to say, the hologram survivors cannot see our reactions, and therefore could not alter their answers accordingly. Thus, although the viewer may be engaged in a conversation with the survivor, reacting emotionally with its account, the hologram never changes what it says and will end its story without any emotional reflection. Therefore, the more one becomes emotionally attached to the survivor's story—which can happen easily since the technologies successfully preserve dynamics and realities of survivors' voices, including their silences—the more one feels abandoned in the end. For example, when the survivor described how she lost her father at the concentration camp, I nearly burst into tears, but she continued her story heedlessly, leaving me feeling vulnerable as I continued to listen. Ironically, this made me understand and appreciate the importance of intersubjectivity during oral history interviews in...