Nothing More Than Feelings

Public memorials often have ospectacularo forms: visitors' feelings are affected primarily through relatively passive, distant reception of visual depictions and symbols. At London's Lady Diana Memorial fountain and Berlin's Holocaust Memorial, the visual message is intentionally reduced to almost nothing. Instead, these designs present visitors' bodies with intense and varied stimuli to hearing, touch, temperature and kinaesthesia. This undermines contemplation or introspection. Visitors explore a variety of physiological feelings, both pleasurable and unpleasurable. These physical feelings are intended to stimulate emotional ones; people should feel the purpose of the memorials rather than think them. But they come away with different impressions; most visitors' actions appear hedonistic rather than mournful.