Pat Binder

Voices from Ravensbrück

Voices from Ravensbrück, the Internet project developed by Pat Binder and partly funded by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, makes use of the Internet's expressive possibilities to offer audiences, especially young people, a new way to deal with the Holocaust. The project seeks to give a voice to poems written by women imprisoned at the Ravensbrück concentration camp. The Web site enables visitors to hear the poems through sound files and to experience their aesthetic qualities through images.

The project has garnered much attention worldwide, a testimony to its ability to transcend categories such as Web art, Web documentary or educational publication. For example, the project is granted a permanent link on the Ravensbrück Memorial Web site and was spotlighted within "Women and Holocaust," the second issue of Querelles-Net, an e-zine published by the Central Office for the Promotion of Women's and Gender Studies of the Freie Universitaet Berlin. Meanwhile, the project was selected for presentation at Studio XX's Maid in Cyberspace Web art festival held in Montreal, Canada, from February 7 to 11, 2001. The project also won the Bantamweight Category in the Lite Show Competition for flash and low-bandwidth projects within the Boston Cyberarts Festival 2001.

As well, Voices from Ravensbrück was presented at the 2001 edition of the World Wide Video Festival in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and featured in Net_Working, an on-line exhibition co-presented at the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol, England, and the Fourth International Conference on Modern Technology and Processes for Art, Media and Design in Bangkok, Thailand, in November 2001.