To remember and forget: lecture 1

for class at NYU ITP
9.8.2014

Transcript

1. To remember and forget: Memory and machine Lecture 1 Taeyoon Choi NYU ITP 9.8 2014
2. What is the earliest memory from your childhood? Is there a moment that comes up in your mind?
3. Childhood Moment
4. Earliest Memory
5. elastic plastic
6. Alexander R. Galloway at the Public School New York, 2010
7. to remember
8. photograph memory archive
9. Imperial Panorama
10. There was no music in the Imperial Panorama—in contrast to films, where music makes traveling so soporific. But there was a small, genuinely disturbing effect that seemed to me superior. This was the ringing of a little bell that sounded a few seconds before each picture moved off with a jolt, in order to make way first for an empty space and then for the next image. And every time it rang, the mountains with their humble foothills, the cities with their mirror-bright windows, the railroad stations with their clouds of dirty yellow smoke, the vineyards down to the smallest leaf, was suffused with the! ache (dull pain) of departure. Walter Benjamin, Berlin childhood around 1900
12. to forget
13. “Forgetting… not only attacks the essence of Being, in as much as it apparently distinct from it. It belongs to the nature of Being.” Jacques Derrida, Spurs, 1979
14. Proust’s handwriting
15. Funes Jorge Luis Borges, 1942
17. “Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed, lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass or organized past reactions and experiences (i.e. schema), and to a little outstanding detail which commonly appear in image or in language form. Bartlett, F.C. Remembering: A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology. ,1932
18. Mystic writing pad
19. pen on paper chalk on blackboard
20. Unlimited reception
23. Perception-consciousness Ego - I - executive agency, both conscious and unconscious - interface with the outside world. Logic and reality ! ID- total unconscious- hedonistic pleasure and avoiding pain - only mental structure after birth ! Super ego- unconscious moral agency - embodiment of our aspiration
25. Pcpt-C’s receives perception and retains no permanent traces of excitation - infinite stack of white paper,
26. protective shield perception consciousness celluloid wax paper wax slab unconscious
27. stimulus protective shield unconscious
28. write protect origin of the concept of time. Foundation for memory comes about in other adjoining system.
29. Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, 1972
30. archive memory
31. Image of Archives from Wikipedia
32. Walter Benjamin’s archives
33. One can dream or speculate about the geo-techno- logical shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, Freud, his contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to MCI or ATT telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E- mail.
34. Freud’s handwritings !
35. I would have liked to devote my whole lecture to this retrospective science fiction. I would have liked to imagine with you the scene of that other archive after the earthquake and after the "apres-coups" of its aftershocks. This is indeed where we are.
36. this archival earthquake would not have limited its effects to the secondary recording, to the printing and to the conservation of the history of psychoanalysis. It would have transformed this history from top to bottom and in the most initial inside of its production, in its very events.
37. …the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was (to exist) or will have been (existed).
38. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archival content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.
39. The archivization produces as much as it records the event. This is also our political experience of the so- called news media. p. 17
40. because electronic mail today, and even more than the fax, is on the way to transforming the entire public and privates space of humanity, and first of all the limit between the private, the secret (private or public), and the public or the phenomenal. p 18
41. This should above all remind us that the said archival technology no longer determines, will never have determined, merely the moment of the conservational recording, but rather the very institution of the archivable event.
42. It conditions not only the form or the structure which prints, but the printed content of the printing: the pressure of the printing, the impression, before the division between the printed and the printer.
43. Steve Mann, Wearable computer
44. Gordon Bell, My Life Bits http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mylifebits/
46. Boyhood, 2014
47. One can dream or speculate about the geo-techno- logical shocks which would have made the landscape of the psychoanalytic archive unrecognizable for the past century if, to limit myself to these indications, Freud, his contemporaries, collaborators and immediate disciples, instead of writing thousands of letters by hand, had had access to MCI or ATT telephonic credit cards, portable tape recorders, computers, printers, faxes, televisions, teleconferences, and above all E-mail.
48. Emily Jacir, ex libris, 2010 - 2012
54. Jon Rubin, The Lovasik Estate Sale, Shanghai 2012
55. Francis Alys, reel-unreel, 2011 http://www.francisalys.com/public/reel-unreel.html
56. Thus, we should begin to see all documentation as intervention, and all archiving as part of some sort of collective project. Arjun Appadurai, Archive and Aspiration
57. Rather than being the tomb of the trace, the archive is more frequently the product of the anticipation of collective memory.
58. collective access http://www.collectiveaccess.org/