History, AR, and Following Benjamin: A Train Journey
December 10, 2024
I barely manage to throw myself onto the train I’ve just caught at the last moment. Before I can even wave goodbye from the window, the train begins to move — as if to remind me that farewells are not made in final glances, but in first ones. On a train too modern for me to indulge in nostalgic musings, despite my own wealth of memories gathered along life’s long tracks, I’m heading home.
I think this is my first time seeing a small German town — one that, for someone born and raised in Istanbul, might as well be called a village. After a brief journey lasting a day — or was it a night? — I am back on my way to Cologne, continuing the book I had started on my outbound trip. I find myself wanting to repurpose a phrase I often use to describe certain films: “Some directors make films for other directors.” While its primary meaning is that only fellow directors possess the intellectual depth to fully grasp such works, the second and more salient interpretation is that directors, while watching these films, are inspired to envision their own future works. The book I am reading aligns with this latter meaning: A dialectic tension, with your gaze set on distant horizons while your heart remains firmly in the present.
Reading Walter Benjamin’s journal from his two-month trip to Moscow — undertaken after the Bolshevik Revolution to observe Soviet life firsthand, to resolve the decisions he had been unable to make in Germany, and perhaps most importantly, because of his great love for “a Russian revolutionary from Riga, one of the most remarkable women I have ever known,” Asja Lacis — stirs a quiet rebellion of ideas in my mind. I think of many things, but mostly, I reflect on the phenomenon of history: great loves, forgotten dead, fallen empires, armies, cavaliers, those remembered with gratitude, those cursed, those condemned to damnation, rebels tearing masks from their flesh, defiant souls, intellectuals, poets, workers, peasants, bourgeoisie, artists, avant-gardes, organizers of popular art, French revolutionaries, German romantics, inventors, magicians, fortune tellers, black-market traders, bankers, merchants…
At the end of what could be considered a brief two months, Benjamin not only casts a clear gaze upon the daily life, political, cultural, and artistic climate of a new country for the entire world but also recounts his great love with unflinching courage. This astonishes me — not necessarily for him, a man who insists on handwriting letters even in an era dominated by the typewriter, but for me, an incorrigible devotee of Benjamin. History, stretching across centuries, begins to fold; the intervals narrow; the dead are remembered. As someone who is now spending their third month in Germany, I find myself shaken by the intensity of those two months. Is this a kind of reckoning? The bewilderment of a new world? The intoxicating thrill of creation? Regret? Or is it an uncrystallized journey — one that finds its path as it is tested by life, transforming and evolving along the way?
The train approaches Cologne, and the accordion of history in my mind continues its opening and closing rhythm, now in quicker, more frequent intervals. I remind myself that the next day, I will head to class and continue working with my classmates on our Augmented Reality (AR) project. Through AR, I ponder the representation of history in spatial contexts and the possibilities for time to open and collapse — just like the accordion of history in my mind. How might audience/user, sharing the present moment of the space around them, encounter the past through AR? If this past belongs to an augmented reality — a reality inherently impure — how should the experience of encountering history be evaluated? Is it possible to construct an artificial history bound to place through AR? If so, what kind of debate might it provoke regarding “objectivity” in historical representation? For those who doubt the objectivity of history and know the undeniable subjectivity of its chroniclers, what potential does AR hold?
We’ll discover the answers together.