ABSTRACT
The creation of an online virtual commemorative practice aims to support the public-private circuit of mourning by taking into account the various embodiments of the ‘bar’ line in the hypericon of ‘sign.’ A me-morial is peripheral to an existing monument (or memorial) in the computer sense of the term (an extra device, added on to the basic computer hardware, to give new functionality to the machine). The purpose of the peripheral is to open to further thought the relation between private and public experience, individual and collective actions, events, behaviors. The premise of an existing memorial is that the loss it commemorates is recognized as a sacrifice on behalf of a public, collective value. The prototypical memorial is a war monument such as the Vietnam Wall. The more than 58,000 lives lost in that war were not wasted, the memorial proclaims, but represent a sacrifice made for a value, something in which the community believes and for which it is willing to pay with the blood of its members. The value may be stated abstractly – ‘freedom,’ for example – but it is understood that certain actions and behaviors in daily life embody and perform the belief. A monument condenses an inferential sequence, in other words, moving in either direction along a chain of reasoning that might be spelled out as follows: behavior, belief, value, cost-benefit, sacrifice, public recognition, memorialization. Within the apparatus of literacy it has been difficult to sustain an awareness of this entire sequence. Indeed, the point that usually is forgotten is the specific behaviors bought by the sacrifice. A me-morial patches this break in the chain.
