Lana Pericic
About the researcher
I’m an artist and PhD researcher working at the intersection of digital photography, family identity, and heritage. My practice spans traditional and digital forms, including drawing, photography, and interactive digital installations. Alongside my academic research, I have experience teaching, curating student exhibitions, and leading community engagement projects. I’m interested in how creative practice can spark dialogue and build connections between people.
Research interests
My field of interest is digital photography, family, heritage and archives. The connection between memory and place, and narratives that come with that. The importance of adapting archiving methods.
PhD abstract
Thesis title
Exploring preservation of digital photographs in digital spaces and its effects on family heritage and identity
Abstract
This study explores how digital technologies are reshaping the ways family archives are created, experienced and preserved. It explores their role in a digital culture setting and the effect visual abundance has on memory and heritage. Drawing on Foucault (1972) and Derrida (1995), it questions the control and authorship roles within digital family archives and importance of erasure and selection. Following Barthes’s theory of the punctum, an emotionally piercing detail, it challenges the emotional value of digital photographs. Yates (1966) and Massey (1994) further position archives as spatial entities, connecting places with memory and identity.
The methodology is separate into three phases. In the first phase I got to understand the importance of family archives in my own family though a participatory workshop where we discussed the most important concepts of this research. In the second and third phase the discussion is taken to the wider audience, young families, where through making artifacts, participants will be discussing their relationship with family archives at home. Third phase consist of semi-constructed interviews with photographers, heritage specialists and archivists to understand the institutional notions of archives.
The relationship between visual abundance and archives is also explored through a series of practice-based experiments using methods such as programming and photogrammetry to critique and question our interaction with these notions. The projects mostly act as critical provocations for reflection on how digital tools shape the act of remembering and the construction of family identity.
The research proposes more intentional and spatially grounded approaches to digital archiving. By combining theory and practice, it contributes to the fields of digital heritage, visual culture, and photography studies, reimagining the family archive as a spatial and emotional construct.