New Dimensions in Testimony, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in Battery Park City, Manhattan, is an interactive testimony installation—created by USC Shoah Foundation— which allows visitors to have “virtual conversations” with Holocaust survivors Pinchas Gutter and Eva Schloss.
Visitors ask questions and lifelike projections of Gutter and Schloss answer in real time—offering personal reflections about life before, during, and after the Holocaust. Specialized recording and display technologies, coupled with next-generation natural language processing, revolutionize the ways visitors can communicate and learn from these two eyewitnesses across time and space, long after they’re gone.
Schloss, the stepsister of Anne Frank, is a survivor of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp who now lives in London, England. Gutter is a survivor of six Nazi concentration camps in Poland, who now lives in Toronto, Canada.
The installation’s technology draws on the rich resource of 1,500 recorded answers triggered by visitors’ unique questions—allowing direct, seamless conversation.
This presentation is made possible by the Murray and Frida Krell Testimony Fund. The Krell Testimony Fund enables the Museum to preserve and present survivor testimony – documenting personal experience of global significance.
New Dimensions in Testimony is on view through December 22, 2017, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, 36 Battery Pl, New York, NY 10280, phone: 646-437-4202.
