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To remember and forget: lecture 1

Taeyoon Choi
September 09, 2014
230

To remember and forget: lecture 1

for class at NYU ITP
9.8.2014

Taeyoon Choi

September 09, 2014
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Transcript

  1. To remember and forget:
    Memory and machine
    Lecture 1
    Taeyoon Choi
    NYU ITP
    9.8 2014

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  2. What is the earliest memory
    from your childhood?
    Is there a moment that comes up in your mind?

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  3. Childhood
    Moment

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  4. Earliest
    Memory

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  5. elastic plastic

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  6. Alexander R. Galloway at the Public School New York, 2010

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  7. to remember

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  8. photograph
    memory
    archive

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  9. Imperial Panorama

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  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

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  12. to forget

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  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

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  14. Proust’s handwriting

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  15. Funes
    Jorge Luis Borges, 1942

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  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

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  18. Mystic writing pad

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  19. pen on paper chalk on blackboard

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  20. Unlimited reception

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  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

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  25. Pcpt-C’s
    receives perception and retains no permanent traces
    of excitation - infinite stack of white paper,

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  26. protective shield
    perception consciousness
    celluloid
    wax paper
    wax slab
    unconscious

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  27. stimulus protective shield
    unconscious

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  28. write protect
    origin of the concept of time.
    Foundation for memory comes about in other adjoining system.

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  29. Jacques Derrida, Freud and the Scene of Writing, 1972

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  30. archive
    memory

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  31. Image of Archives from Wikipedia

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  32. Walter Benjamin’s archives

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  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.

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  34. Freud’s handwritings !

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  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.

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  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.

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  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).

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  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.

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  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

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  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

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  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.

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  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.

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  43. Steve Mann, Wearable computer

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  44. Gordon Bell, My Life Bits
    http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/mylifebits/

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  46. Boyhood, 2014

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  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.

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  48. Emily Jacir, ex libris, 2010 - 2012

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  54. Jon Rubin, The Lovasik Estate Sale, Shanghai 2012

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  55. Francis Alys, reel-unreel, 2011
    http://www.francisalys.com/public/reel-unreel.html

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  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

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  57. Rather than being the tomb of the trace, the
    archive is more frequently the product of the
    anticipation of collective memory.

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  58. collective access
    http://www.collectiveaccess.org/

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