Memory Repair and Affective Reshaping in the Digital Age
艺术如何疗愈幻痛：数字时代的记忆修复与情感重塑
Originally published in Fine Arts & Design 《美术与设计》, Issue 4, 2026, pp. 136–142.
Overview
What happens when a place, history or form of belonging disappears, yet continues to be felt?
This article approaches that condition through the metaphor of phantom pain. Just as an absent limb may continue to produce sensation, vanished homelands, interrupted histories and inherited traumas can remain active within individual and collective memory. In an era shaped by migration, urban transformation and digital acceleration, such absences are continuously reactivated by images, archives and algorithmic circulation.
Art, the article argues, does not heal by recovering what has been irreversibly lost. Its reparative potential lies elsewhere: in giving pain an external form, creating a necessary distance from it and making it available for renewed perception and narration.
Memory Outside the Body
Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s concept of “tertiary retention,” the article understands artistic media as external supports for memory. Writing, photography, painting, film and digital simulation allow experience to survive beyond the limits of an individual body.
This process unfolds through three movements:
- Externalisation transforms diffuse or inexpressible pain into a perceptible form.
- Grammatisation reorganises continuous experience into repeatable images, gestures and sequences.
- Objectification establishes a distance between the subject and the traumatic experience.
Through this distance, the person affected by trauma is no longer positioned only inside the experience. The memory becomes something that can be observed, reorganised and shared.
Phantom Memory in the Digital Age
The article connects this process to Alison Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory: memories that do not originate in direct personal experience but are acquired through cultural and technological mediation.
Digital media have intensified this condition. Images of distant wars, displacement and historical violence can enter everyday life without warning. Stored in networked archives and repeatedly returned by algorithms, the past no longer fades in a linear fashion. It remains available for perpetual reactivation.
If algorithmic systems repeatedly activate pain in order to capture attention, art can perform a different operation. It can slow the image down, transform it and create a structure in which pain may be encountered without overwhelming the viewer.
Artistic Paths of Repair
The article examines several distinct approaches to this transformation.
Gerhard Richter’s blurred photo-paintings produce a perceptual distance from traumatic historical images. Works such as Aunt Marianne and October 18, 1977 neither resolve history nor offer reconciliation. Instead, their ambiguity creates an open space in which memory can continue to be examined.
Han Qian’s Missing Paths uses walking and moving-image documentation to retrace a childhood route erased by urban redevelopment and familial loss. The body becomes an instrument for remapping a vanished landscape.
Chen Ruofan translates sensory and emotional memories into digital environments. In Warm Trees, the image of a deceased companion animal is reconstructed as a breathing virtual wisteria tree, creating a transitional space in which grief can assume a perceptible form.
Harun Farocki’s Serious Games examines virtual-reality systems used in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. His work reveals both the therapeutic possibilities of technological reenactment and the institutional power embedded within such systems.
Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death assembles archival and contemporary images into an intense shared field of perception. Historical violence becomes present not only as information, but as collective affect.
Together, these practices show that repair may take embodied, virtual, clinical and political forms.
Art as an Affective Prosthesis
Art cannot restore a lost homeland, reverse historical violence or return the dead. Nor does healing require the disappearance of pain.
Instead, art can provide pain with a form capable of carrying it. Through materialisation, mediation and perceptual reorganisation, an unbounded internal experience becomes something that can be approached, narrated and transformed.
The familiar parable of “marking the boat to find the lost sword” ordinarily describes a futile attachment to a fixed point within a moving world. Here, however, the act of marking takes on another meaning. The mark does not recover the lost object. It records where loss occurred, enabling the subject to locate themselves again within the flow of time.
中文摘要
在全球迁徙、城市更新与数字媒介加速的背景下，已经消逝的故土、断裂的历史与未曾亲历的创伤，仍可能以“幻痛”的方式持续作用于个体与集体。
本文借助贝尔纳·斯蒂格勒的“第三持留”理论与艾莉森·兰斯伯格的“幻肢记忆”概念，讨论艺术如何将难以言说的创伤外化为可感知的媒介形式，并在主体与痛苦之间建立必要的感知距离。通过格哈德·里希特、韩倩、陈若璠、哈伦·法罗基与亚瑟·贾法的实践，文章梳理了具身重访、虚拟再生、临床介入与集体动员等不同的情感修复路径。
艺术的疗愈性并不意味着消除创伤或复原过去，而是为痛感建立一种可以被承载、重新叙述与持续转化的结构。
关键词： 记忆外化、艺术疗愈、幻肢记忆、第三持留、情感修复
Publication
Chen Jiaying, “How Can Art Heal Phantom Pain? Memory Repair and Affective Reshaping in the Digital Age,” Fine Arts & Design 《美术与设计》, no. 4, 2026, pp. 136–142.
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