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Conceived as artistic research, the project investigates how digital platforms structure the conditions under which Holocaust memory is expressed, circulated, and valued. The reviews function as testimony, complaint, recommendation, and data trace, shaped by rating systems, character limits, and commercial imperatives of visibility. The project asks how these infrastructural conditions contour affect, authority, and legitimacy, and what forms of speech fall outside their frame.
At the centre of the work is a board game developed from a curated archive of real anonymised reviews. Participants must decide how to act in relation to these texts: to preserve, delete, reform, or instrumentalise. Each action requires the review to be read aloud. Speech is not supplementary but constitutive, staging a shift from silent scrolling to embodied articulation and foregrounding voice, hesitation, and complicity.
Methodologically, the project treats the archive as a site of subjugated knowledge: vernacular, affective engagements with historical atrocity that are both solicited and disciplined by platform logics. The game's rule-based structure mirrors the administrative rationalities it interrogates, inviting players to experience their own implication in systems of ordering and extraction.
The presentation traces archival reading sessions, design iterations, and playtesting as moments in which ethical and formal tensions became operative rather than resolved, proposing gameplay as a mode of inquiry that mobilises discomfort as a critical resource while remaining accountable to the histories it engages.
- Chris Groenveld is an artist, filmmaker, and practice-led researcher in the completion stage of their Art PhD at Goldsmiths, University of London. Their MA in Film (UCL) produced moving-image works examining community displacement and institutional critique. Their current research investigates how Holocaust memory is systematically processed on consumer review platforms, developing game-based methodologies that expose the extractive logic embedded in both digital platforms and academic analysis of historical trauma. The board game Never Again. Five Stars is the central artistic output of this doctoral work.
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