18 sept 2026

Jelewska, A. (2024) ‘Postdigital Collective Memory: Media Practices Against Total Design’, Postdigital Science and Education, 6, pp. 259–278. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-023-00421-9.


Jelewska proposes postdigital collective memory as a form of remembrance co-produced by humans, nonhumans, environments and technological media. The article develops this idea through field practices and design workshops at Lake Rusałka in Poznań, a landscape whose wartime history had been materially transformed and publicly suppressed. Its central device, the Sensitive Data Lake, is not conceived as a neutral database but as an experimental environment in which archives, sensors, ecological processes, narratives and artificial intelligence can generate friction around the past. Critical Media Design supplies the methodological operation: remembrance is produced through situated making rather than deposited after the fact into a stable archive. The paper thereby challenges “total design”, understood as the attempt to render environments fully ordered, legible and controllable. Memory instead becomes plural, spectral and transitional. The wider bridge joins posthumanism, media archaeology, transition design and critical infrastructure studies, establishing digital memory as an environmental relation whose politics depends on how heterogeneous agencies are allowed to enter the record.