What should we remember, what should we forget, and who decides?

The Future of Memory: Jewish Culture in the Digital Age is a new installation, exhibition, and digital research
lab where museum professionals, scholars, students, and the public, discuss the meaning of memory and
the many facets of digital history.
Five hundred years ago, the encounter between Jewish culture and technology produced incalculable results.
The advent of the Hebrew printing press canonized the layouts of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud as
hypertexts, in which Scripture and commentary, knowledge and expertise, archive and repertoire, began to
seamlessly coexist. The resulting knowledge greatly impacted learning processes, inter-cultural exchanges,
and the ongoing dialogue between tradition and modernity. This revolutionary synergy took place in Europe
and across the Mediterranean Basin, in port cities like Venice, Amsterdam, Salonica and Istanbul, which
at the time were epicenters of world culture, trade, and innovation, and expanded on a global scale.
Today, Jewish culture is faced with the weight of its own history, and its global reach has become the
currency of countless other cultural traditions and practices. Online databases, collaborative tools, and social
media platforms continuously prompt us to create new forms of knowledge. The San Francisco Bay Area,
a contemporary epicenter of technological innovation, is a privileged observatory from which this cultural
evolution can be both appreciated and evaluated.
The Future of Memory stages a digital humanities research lab within a museum installation. Objects,
books and documents are displayed, studied, digitized, and published on the web via institutional and
emerging platforms. New contexts and associations are discovered. Online conversations are instigated
and monitored, and the results are discussed and analyzed, so that they can further benefit the long-term
study and development of The Magnes Collection.
For one year, the installation will operate as an incubator of critical perspectives on the nexus between
the humanities, cultural heritage, memory and technology, centering on the combined local and global
connections that Jewish culture continues to elicit.
Each day, faculty, students, classes, undergraduate research apprentices, and the public, will work closely
with museum professionals, interacting with collection artifacts and digital tools, experimenting with new
platforms, and providing feedback. This work will be complemented with public programs in which project
participants, scholars, developers, and the public can continue to evaluate the results of ongoing research.
The protagonists of this project are the visitors. Everyone, beginning with the public, is invited to explore, and
to use The Future of Memory to contribute stories, details, and their critical perspectives to the collection,
reflecting on the changing notions of knowledge, culture, and memory, in the Digital Age.
Francesco Spagnolo, Curator