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