MEMORY RELEASE

Human memory, cultural memory and digital representation

(from process notes and public talk transcript)

Memories surface in diverging ways depending on where they have been stored, what level of consciousness they belong to and what triggers their release into our internal visual screen – the mind’s eye.

Memory Release focuses on three distinct types of memory:

Firstly those belonging to the pre-conscious: these are very early memories such as the first exposure of the nervous system to light.

Secondly flash memories: untraceable moments, where an image assails our present consciousness without warning. It is impossible to inhabit these memories, they are gone as soon as they appear, leaving nothing but an afterimage.

And finally what we will call catchable or inhabitable memories. These belong to the conscious and are therefore less abstract, more like near narratives which offer a space the self may enter and roam in.

As we know it, memory is an intensley subjective experience, so its representation poses many challenges:

-    Do we all compress memories in a similar way? – how much have the photo album, the home movie and cinema itself influenced and overlayered our experience of memory, stimulating conscious reconstruction rather than direct access?

-    What do memories look like after they’ve been held in the darkness of the self for a long time? Have they been eroded, over saturated, fragmented from their original context? Are they decodeable by anyone other than the ‘me’? These questions are maybe a little beyond an arts practice... Whatever the memory, we know that the subjective process of what we call “encoding” does compress the experience and in doing so, somehow saturates its aesthetic.

To gain a little more access into the syntax of a memory, we have compared it to a dream:
So, what was the lighting state, the composition and camera movement of the dream I had last night? How was my emotive state reflected in the colour range, the rhythm and the actual events? – what happened? Was it a point of view dream or did I appear in its space, external to myself?

The challenges of representing memory as a subjective, yet shearable experience, are at the heart of  our research. During our process we found that we are indeed conditioned by the media to recognise and therefore represent memories in specific ways (through variable frame rates, extreme lighting and short duration clips). It would seem that anything longer than a minute acquires the experiential feeling of a dream. Although it is near impossible to represent a memory as a universally received experience, the performative art installation context of our work provided enough of a framework for the viewer to fictionally connect to the dramatic journey of the protagonist (the suspended body) as it moved and remembered.

The psyche of place

The original drive for Memory Release was centred around the experience of image flashes, mostly of chosen places. In researching what we have called “the psyche of place”, two areas became of particular interest:

Firstly the concept of psychogeography: when a physical experience of a place or landscape becomes inextricably linked to an emotion. The combination of place and emotivity creates the experiential content for the memory. The aesthetic, hue, saturation etc… of a memory will then be dependent on the emotive experience attached to it.

And secondly the collage nature in which some memories present themselves to us (see image on right above). Sometimes memories appear as a collage made out of an amalgam of two or more aspects and perspectives of a location, indoor and outdoor side by side, achieving the aesthetic of a superimposition. It’s like those different zones co-exist in one - as though 3D space had collapsed or been flattened.