Pertaining to Memory: How Technology has Changed the Way We Remember

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/09/13/clive-thompson-smarter-than-you-think/
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/10/11/as-we-may-think-1945/

Sarcasm that I really like (II)

David Fullarton

Sarcasm that I really like (I)

Danse Macabre

My research has brought me to the notion of death and the universality of it. I am both fascinated and fearful of death. I constantly question existence and death; It comes from a personal place.

Christian Boltanski talks about it in his book "The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski" (p. 136), mentioning how he thinks one has to befriend death since one cannot avoid it, even though he has an unhealthy fear towards it ultimately; a pathological fear that made him fear even visits to the hospital.

There is a kind of satire that I did in my 'Ephemera' project previously that I would like to highlight. It employs dark humour and the trivialization of life and death (a so-what, we-work-consume-die type of attitude). Death is also the common denominator of all life on earth. Death does not discriminate.

Danse Macabre is an artistic genre of late-medieval allegory on the universality of death: no matter one's station in life, the Dance of Death unites all. The Danse Macabre consists of the dead or personified Death summoning representatives from all walks of life to dance along to the grave, typically with a pope, emperor, king, child, and labourer. They were produced to remind people of the fragility of their lives and how vain were the glories of earthly life. Its origins are postulated from illustrated sermon texts; the earliest recorded visual scheme was a now lost mural in the Saints Innocents Cemetery in Paris dating from 1424–25. The apparent class distinction in almost all of these paintings is completely neutralized by Death as the ultimate equalizer, so that a sociocritical element is subtly inherent to the whole genre.

The Dance of Death (1493) by Michael Wolgemut, from the Liber chronicarum by Hartmann Schedel.

Mnemonic

Reading:
"Archival Obsessions: Arnold Dreyblatt's Memory Work" by Astrid Schmetterling

(Source: Art Journal, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Winter, 2007), pp. 70-83 
Published by: College Art Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20068568 JSTOR access is required)


Interesting concepts:

1. Mnemonic (noun):
learning technique that aids information retention. 
Mnemonics aim to translate information into a form that the human brain can retain better than its original form. E.g Drawing links from what you already know to remember something (like when learning a new language, you try to remember the new language by relating it to languages you already know), stimulants of mnemonic activity (Knuckle mnemonic for the number of days in each month of the Gregorian Calendar. Each projecting knuckle represents a 31-day month)

2. The way we remember is shaped by the very technology we invent for the external storage of information. (Douwe Draaisma)

 .

Christian Boltanski: No Man's Land

No Man's Land, 2010

At 65, Mr. Boltanski has spent a career producing vivid reminders of life’s inevitable passing. His engagement with both death and survival has drawn glowing comparisons to the poetry of John Keats, and also been denounced — particularly when his fascination with the Holocaust is most evident — as pornographic and exploitive.

Boltanski's "No Man's Land" (2010) comprises of 25-foot-tall pile of used clothing, a mechanical claw on a crane and the sound of heartbeats reverberating in the background. 

Boltanski in 2 separate interviews (here and here)

Clothes and death:

"It’s used clothing. I’ve always imagined that used clothing and a photo of somebody and a dead body are nearly the same. They’re all objects related to the missing person. On the floor there are mostly coats, which more clearly take the form of people. On the “mountain” are other types of clothing that are all mixed up. You can’t imagine these people. There is no more individuality."

" If you have lost your father, what are you going to do with his clothes? You know that the clothes belonged to the man, and you don’t know what to do with them. And also, the fact that we don’t know if we are going to survive until tomorrow, especially for people who are older—we are just walking, in a way, with mines, and the mines can go [makes sounds mimicking an explosion], and you see plenty of your friends dying, and you don’t know why you are not dead and if you’ll die tomorrow."The crane is a little like the finger of God, or like destiny. It moves a bit like it’s choosing someone, but it really moves at random. It grabs a clawful of clothing, lifts it into the air and drops the clothing back onto the pile."

"I’ve always been interested in trying to understand why one person survives and someone else doesn’t. Most of the time you don’t find answers, but what is important is to ask the question. A big issue for me is the uniqueness, the importance of each person, yet, at the same time, after two or three generations you disappear totally."

Hearbeats and death:

"...for five or six years I’ve collected heartbeats for a library I’m creating on an island in Japan, and I already have 60,000 heartbeats from a lot of countries. We will collect more here in the Armory. On July 18th my library will open, and it will be possible to go there and to say “I want to hear the heartbeat of Mrs. Smith.” After some time, all the heartbeats will belong to dead people, and this will become an island of dead people, in a sense. You can collect heartbeats but you can’t preserve people." 

Memory and death:

"In fact, it’s like when you see a photo of somebody, you feel more that this person is dead."

(Interviewer): The secondary presence makes you feel the absence even stronger.

Arnold Dreyblatt: Ephemeris Epigraphica

Video Description:
The texts are derived from online epigraphic databases of ancient inscriptions maintained by European and North American Archaelogical research institutions. Commentaries to thousands of papyrus, stone, clay and wax inscriptions were collected from these databases, specifically chosen for content refering to readability and fragmentation. Lenticular technology was chosen as an perceptually interactive means of display. Each work contains up to five text layers, which are viewable as text fragments from varying viewing positions, and which seem to "overwite" each other as in a "palimpsest"*.

*palimpsest: A manuscript, typically of papyrus or parchment, that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing incompletely erased and often legible.

Arnold Dreyblatt: Wunderblock

Video Description:

"The Wunderblock" by Arnold Dreyblatt; Table, Chair, TFT display, Computer; 2000. In 1925, Freud wrote a text that compares the faculty of memory to a child's toy known as a Wunderblock. It consists of a wax slab stretched with cellophane, upon which a text may be inscribed, and just as readily erased by lifting the cellophane layer up and away from the wax slab. In contrast to Freud's model, in which the pressure of the act of inscription onto the cellophane surface continues in the direction of the underlying layer of wax, in „The Wunderblock, the original selection and entry of data has been concluded in the past. The movement originates from ROM and is held in RAM, before travelling up towards the surface. Quite independently of our own states of presence or absence, the installation searches and inscribes autonomously. One has the impression that the underlying textual sources can never be perceived in their entirety. Because the many texts fragments are inscribed and erased simultaneously, one can read a given fragment only with difficulty before it vanishes. The model of memory demonstrated here is at once highly unstable, fragmentary, incomplete, perishable and ephemeral. The sentence fragments appearing and disappearing on the screen describe a process of finding and loss, safeguarding and destruction.

Article on it here

Sigmund Freud's Wunderblock

According to Freud, the wunderblock represents the way in which the psyche records material. He adopts the metaphor of the wunderblock, which is a child's toy, also known as the mystic writing pad, consisting of a thin sheet of clear plastic covering a thick waxed board. The user can write or draw on it with any pointed instrument, pressing through the sheet of plastic, making traces in the surface below. As soon as the sheet is lifted up, the image above disappears, while traces of it remain on the wax surface underneath. Thus, the wunderblock alludes to the way the psychic system which, having received sense reception from the outside world, remains unmarked by those impressions that then pass through it to a deeper layer where they are recorded as unconscious memory. Therefore, it illuminates the mechanism by which the repressed becomes the prototype of the unconscious.


Taken from here

Arnold Dreyblatt: An Introduction

On Arnold Dreyblatt (taken from here):

I was born in New York in 1953. I am a composer and visual artist. 18 years ago, I came to Europe for the first time on a work stipend. Since then, I have lived here most of the time, with my principal residence in Berlin. In recent years, I have developed projects linking text, image, and space with one another. These projects have been realized in a variety of forms, for example, as a contemporary opera, an interactive performance, an art installation, and in book form.

My work has grown out of several found historical texts which I have deconstructed and reconstructed repeatedly over the past 15 years. My focus has also been on processes of "archiving and storage," on modes of "inscription," as well as on the technologies and methods that make possible the external preservation of our histories and memories.

Afterthoughts:
His works deal largely with the idea of archiving memory and how we remember. I like that he touches on the ephemerality of memories even though we have all the technology to make them "permanent". I derive a "or-so-you-think" attitude— you might think you are capturing them and cementing this memory but it is not actually the case.
Works are very tech-driven, not a fan of the aesthetics.

Reflection

My interest lies in the state of existence, of being, which is why I am highly interested in the way humans behave— how each individual is vastly different but at the end of the day similarities are drawn from observing the way we behave.

Existence also largely deals with death— they go hand in hand. I always question death, which in turn, questions existence.

My exploration started with ephemera and forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is pegged to memory (a cliche?) and I think if i were to tie memory and ephemera together, it would mean dealing with memory archiving/ the obsession to record/ mark-making. So right now I am doing readings on archival obsession, lifelogging and memory. And looking at artists who deal with these themes (Arnold Dreyblatt, Christian Boltanski)

Anne Fadiman: Ex-Libris: Never Do That to a Book

Excerpt: Never Do That to a Book

Essay: You Never Know What You’ll Find in a Book

By Henry Alford
Published: December 19, 2008

The relevant ideas raised were:

• (Book)stuffers are trying to create an aide-mémoire (memory aid) for themselves. “I have filled books with flowers I’ve received, to save the ­flowers in dried form and to remember the happy moment of receiving them,"
• Anne Fadiman (whose book excerpt I will link in another post) says that these aides-­mémoires are often specific to the book owner’s profession. Fadiman writes about a landscape architect who “savors the very smell of the dirt embedded in his botany texts; it is the alluvium of his life’s work.”

Full Article Here

Paul Connerton's 7 Types of Forgetting

According to Paul Connerton, a sociologist and a scholar at the University of Cambridge, there are seven types of forgetting. He argues that 'forgetting' is not necessarily a failing, but it is a combination of actions that lead to one term - forgetting. The seven types of forgetting, in his view, are:

Repressive erasure
This is the type used by government or states to remove the image or an event from someone's mind by completely getting rid of every artifact that reminds anyone of the image or the event.[citation needed] It does not need to only be used by government or states, but can be used by anyone to remove all memories from people of a certain event.

Prescriptive forgetting
This type of forgetting is an act of state. It does not depend on one person's forgetting, but acts as a collective forgetting, where all members of a party decide on forgetting a specific memory in order to continue to function more efficiently. An example of prescriptive forgetting is when the entire student body forgets an event of breaking and entering into the school to continue to have a sense of a safer atmosphere during school time.

Forgetting that is constitutive in the formation of a new identity
This type refers to the idea of forgetting the past identity in order to continue to live with a new one. For example, if a person has discovered to be a homosexual, they can use this type of forgetting to their advantage in order to limit their confusion as they will have no recollection of their past heterosexual lifestyle. This type of forgetting can be used to discard memories of past identity that serve no real purpose within the context of new identity.

Structural amnesia
This type states that a person only remembers those people who are socially important. This was discovered by John Barnes in his writings of genealogy.

Forgetting as annulment
This type of forgetting results from a surplus of information, where useless information is discarded.

Forgetting as planned obsolescence
This type of forgetting happens when a product or any type of good has a limited functionality and is not meant to last long, and so, the product keeps being bought by customers who use planned obsolescence forgetfulness. For example, buying a microwave that lasts only two months, and when it is not functioning anymore, going out to get the same microwave which lasts two months, forgetting its previous failure.

Forgetting as humiliated silence
Humiliated silence takes place when a mishap occurs, resulting in embarrassment that is favoured to be forgotten.

Full PDF Here