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Title: A NEW WAY TO KEEP HOLOCAUST SURVIVORS ALIVE FOREVER
Source:
Taki's Magazine
URL Source: http://takimag.com/article/the_week ... hed_june_15_2015#axzz3d7AB94my
Published: Jun 15, 2015
Author: Taki's Magazine
Post Date: 2015-06-16 14:42:45 by X-15
Keywords: Holocoust, holoco$t, holohaux
Views: 44
Comments: 2
When they said, “Never forget,” they weren’t kidding! Seventy years after World War II ended, the world is facing a dearth of Holocaust survivors. This, naturally, threatens the existence of a highly profitable industry that is cynically referred to as “Shoah business.” A group of crafty survivors/entrepreneurs has hatched an ingenious idea to ensure that Holocaust survivors never die: It plans to create a series of Holocaust holograms whereby self-proclaimed camp survivors live forever through recorded interviews designed to answer every possible question tossed at them in perpetuity by eager young supplicants who’ve been beaten over the skull since infancy with the idea that only six million people died in World War II. Based on the assumption that non-Jewish human beings will never tire of hearing about the Holocaust, investors recently spent $1 million filming octogenarian Pinchas Gutter “answering 1,800 questions about his Holocaust experience, surrounded by thousands of lights and cameras.” The assumption is that although Gutter survived the Holocaust, he ultimately won’t survive life, but his three-dimensional likeness will continue talking about the Holocaust long after he draws his last breath. “This is mind-blowing,” gushed Holocaust survivor Aaron Elster about the new technology that enables digital guilt-mongering from here to eternity. Elster’s associates plan to film ten more survivors at a presumed cost of $500,000 per interview, which would, as luck would have it, bring the project’s total production costs to a clean and unassailable $6 million.
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#1. To: All (#0)
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20150611/NEWS07/150609803/as-holocaust- survivors-dwindle-a-surprising-way-to-keep-their-stories-alive June 11, 2015 Holocaust survivor Aaron Elster envisions a bright future for himself—as a hologram. Elster speaks regularly to groups at the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Skokie, where he is vice president, but he knows that the era of in-person lectures from Holocaust survivors is running short. (At 82 or 83—he is not certain of his age—Elster is one of the younger survivors.) So Elster hopes to achieve his long-term legacy through a new technology that's being tested at the museum: a holographic representation of Holocaust survivors that uses a Siri-like artificial-intelligence system that allows museum guests to converse with holographic survivors. In effect, the technology will let Elster and his peers continue engaging museum guests in question-and-answer sessions for decades. “This is mind-blowing,” Elster said. “There's nothing like telling a story in person, but the survivors aren't going to be around that much longer. This technology is the closest thing, and it means we'll still be able to have an impact.” The program being tested at the museum features Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter, who spent years working in a concentration camp in Poland after lying about his age to avoid execution. Gutter, 82, flew from his home in Toronto to Los Angeles, where he spent five days answering 1,800 questions about his Holocaust experience, surrounded by thousands of lights and cameras. The project was developed by University of Southern California researchers. The testing at the Skokie museum is the first live-audience tryout for the technology and runs through the end of June, as the university team fine- tunes the algorithms that determine the answers elicited by the questions. For now, Gutter appears as a two-dimensional image, because the museum lacks the technology for three-dimensional display. Yet Gutter and his story still are larger than life, and he appears startlingly lifelike and responsive—except for a mouse arrow floating mysteriously above his right shoulder. His delivery is intimate, grandfatherly and varied, depending on the story he's telling; his voice rises and falls, and while sometimes he sits rigidly still, at times his brown loafers bob up and down in jittery motion. Many survivors have told their stories on film and in other media (Elster, for example, has written a book), but the interactive storytelling model here is powerful, especially when it yields surprising answers. For example, a question about the days after Russian soldiers liberated Gutter's camp anticipated a triumphal answer, but instead Gutter recalled seeing the soldiers abuse German settlers. “When you suffer and you see other people suffering, the empathy flows from you.” Now the challenge for the university researchers as well as the museum is to capture as many survivor stories as possible, as soon as possible. The Chicago area boasts America's largest speakers bureau of Holocaust survivors, and the world's second-largest, according to the museum. Mary Gold, the museum's marketing chief, says there's a rush to take advantage of the new format. “We are going full speed ahead, because there's an immediate need” to capture stories while survivors are able to tell them, she says. The biggest hurdle is cost. Filming Gutter cost about $1 million, and the university team estimates that it will cost at least $500,000 to record additional survivors. The museum is already raising money for the task and lobbying the university researchers to ensure that Illinois survivors such as Elster are included in the next group. The plan is to capture about 10 stories in the new format, covering a range of Holocaust experiences (Elster, for example, evaded concentration camps by hiding in an attic). Gold hopes three of the 10 come from the Chicago speakers bureau. Elster wants to be one of them. “This gives us some immortality,” he said. “Some kid can look at my hologram, and I can be just as open as I am with the kids now.” 
-Alex Kurtagic
#2. To: X-15 (#1)
Whatever technological wonders are hatched, they're immediately prostituted for cynical, nauseating and/or frightening establishment purposes.
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