----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Simon has closed the discussion, but I hadn't finished this set of musings on
some of the recent performance works brought up remotely...
Memory, then, would seem to be primarily corporeal, inhabited, and
particular, not easily out-sourced to an off shore account, or transfered to
affectless place holders (in terms of kinetic affect, it would interest me
how Kirk, and the audience with hand-held devices, experienced the virtual
dancers and their transformed gestures off the streets of Brighton?). What
would the avatar remember?
Some meta-commentary (as we watch performances of elswehere and elswhen on
youtube...this past month)
The biggest problem with externalized memory (to the avatar!) is that when
memory is disembodied from the Self, we may no longer feel its effects – in
recall, in re-living. we may only simulate the feeling of it, or, at most,
resonate with the symbolic values represented in its reproduction. individual
embodied memory is directly experienced as a changed body state. externalizing
memory is a particular and collective phenomena which arises when the pain of
actual experience and its associated memory is too much to bear. externalizing
is available from the same technologies (tele) which cause the pain to begin
with — dislocation and the pain of separation. perhaps technological development
may not proceed fully until the relevant memories are externalized to begin
with, then the pain of alienation is transferred to a painless place.
Memory is the trace of energies from the surrounding situation that literally
impress (on) the embodied self. Making the radical assumption framed by the
words of physicist David Bohm, that
" ..there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be
known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and
shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal
flux."
Phenomenal events and configurations of these energies pass through the body (as
simply another manifestation of this flux), leaving altered states of be-ing.
These embodied traces persist in time, but as with all life and being, are
transitory. They exist as change, and are often experienced as a fundamental
awareness of difference — “I originally felt like that, but now I feel like
this, having experienced this event.”
External memory storage situations via digital technological mediation are, by
nature, material, reductive, and transitory. They are subject to decay and loss
as with any other external (and internal) means.
Three significant issues arise in the process of externalized memory storage.
The first is in the process of creating the artifact. As with any pre-digital
artifact, making a “memory” artifact requires that the Self (or someone) step
out of living and mediate their presence in the operation of the device that
creates the artifact. This stepping out applies not only to the making of the
artifact but also to the (onerous) process of archiving. This process radically
changes the experience of a life-trajectory by an individual. And, as suggested
by Quantum ideas, the observer affects that which is observed, the act of making
memory artifacts actually affects the scenario that is being recorded.
A second major issue occurs when any of these processes are taken over by
extensions of the Techno-Social System, they subject the Self to a loss of
autonomy. (i.e., cloud computing as one example of a centralized architecture
that removes the trace of the digital artifact wholly out of the purview of the
individual (creator, participant).) The levels of loss of autonomy exist on a
sliding scale — loss occurs whenever the individual is not in control of the
mediatory storage (its provenance, creation, organization, archiving,
sustenance, distribution, demise, destruction). Any externalization falls under
this regime.
The third issue lies in the maintenance of archive. As a fundamentally ordered
system (timely retrieval is critical for a functioning archive), the archive
requires an essentially constant energy influx to maintain that order. That
energy source is, at base, the human being. How much personal energy will humans
participating in a Techno-social system be willing to dispense of or
provide/support in order to maintain an ever-growing energy burden of either a
collective or individual archive? Is this why the Library of Alexandria burned?
etc etc etc....
So it goes, from the Monsoon season in the Arizona desert highlands...
Cheers,
jh
--
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Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
grounded on a granite batholith
twitter: @neoscenes
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
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