The Digital AIDS Memorial Quilt: A User’s Guide

Abstract

This paper treats the AIDS Memorial Quilt (1985 -) with the care and attention that fine art objects traditionally demand. Specifically, it focuses on the digital Memorial Quilt, an interactive grid that registers the entire 48,000-panel quilt as a publically accessible online database. The interface allows user’s to view the intricacies of each memorial design from a micro view or reflect back and view the entire quilt from the macro view as gestalt. I position the digital Memorial Quilt within the centrifugal theory of the grid and thereby consider it as necessarily incomplete structure. This perspective allows us to highlight the millions of unspoken names that are in excess of the frame of the grid. Furthermore, it demands that we think outside of the confines of a conventional formalist visual analysis and towards a certain «beyond the frame attitude.» I propose a certain queer politics of spectatorship that operates in pursuit of this very outside. This level of spectatorship opens up an alternative to the «cultural evidence» paradigm that has largely guided our thinking about the Memorial Quilt as an authentic archive and emblem of the AIDS crisis.