Tisha

//Remembering the AIDS Quilt// is a collection of essays that are helpful for understanding the political history, controversies and diverse meanings of the Quilt, and provide a foundation for situating our work on the digital Quilt.
 * //Remembering the AIDS Quilt//**

The political context that is offered for the Quilt is one in which the epidemic of AIDS was not recognised or labelled by the Reagan government or the medical institution at the time. As Yep describes, “AIDS is actually an amalgamation of two parallel epidemics – biomedical and cultural – mutually influencing each other” (46).

From this starting point, contributors to the AIDS Quilt have seen it both as a memorial, as well as a site of political activism, which are seen to be complementary: “mourning and activism are more intertwined than opposed. Just as mourning takes on many forms – individual and collective, public and private – so does activism – social, cultural, political, and academic, to name a few. Together they can generate energy for continuing political work” (58).

The AIDS Quilt is predominantly interpreted as a postmodern text for several reasons. In contrast to more traditional memorials – such as the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial – that mark the transition from life to death with solid materials such as stone to solidify the passing, the AIDS Quilt is envisioned as disorientatingly surreal: “The Quilt is a surreal monster of inexhaustible beauty; a cacophony of color and texture that allows the mourned and the mourning to speak death with evanescent and glittering breath” (87). The Quilt is also fragmentary, piecing together thousands of individualised contributions that commemorate the uniqueness of the life of the deceased and their mourners. Moreover, the ongoing evolution and shifting meanings incorporated by the Quilt as a text(ile) mark it as a postmodern memorial: “The Quilt … is a productivity, for it is a //production//, not a product. It does not generate //a// meaning or even several meanings, for it is never finished; it proliferates meaning endlessly, not just by the constant addition of new panels, but by the never-ending performances it stages” (122).

This notion of the postmodern AIDS Quilt is a useful way to envision the digitisation of the Quilt. As a memorial, the Quilt is an archive, commemorating the individuality and the lives of those who have passed. Given this role as a memorial, the use of such delicate materials is both meaningful and somewhat ill-suited: “The Quilt is aging, decaying. It is the patient of preservers, a salvation project. At the cost of millions. Second, the softness of the material sets up a relationship of becoming what the hardness of stone conceals” (90). In this way, the transformation of the Quilt into a digital archive is a way of preserving the archive and organising the information it contains in a meaningful way. Although in a sense the digitisation flattens the Quilt, as the individual colours and textures of the panels give way to a relatively homogenous visual representation on screen, its searchability also puts a much greater emphasis on the individual. Rather than being lost in a sea of panels, the digital Quilt adds another dimension to the Quilt, allowing for individual panels to be honed in on and given new visibilities, for example in the metadata that is not readily available on the tangible Quilt. The sense of scale is also altered through digitisation. While the physical Quilt is purposefully overwhelming in its sense of scale, and unable to be laid out in its entirety, the digital Quilt also provides the disorienting sense of scale through the ability to rapidly zoom in and zoom out of the archive. Again, this provides an alternative way of conceptualising the scale of the problem and the contributions that have produced the Quilt.

It is appropriate to think of the Quilt as an ongoing project, and its digitisation is an appropriate way to commemorate this memorial. It is important not to conceive of the digital Quilt as a replacement for the tangible Quilt or its political project, but to see it as a portal through which new understandings of the Quilt as an archive and memorial, and new meanings can be derived.