Mnemonic Devices
multimedia performance, 20 minutes
2000
This collaborative, cinematic performance explores notions of remembering and connection in a technological landscape of play. The interactive teeter-totter is wired with sensors to serve as a video switching device to control the projection of collected and constructed film segments. As the two artist-performers rock the mechanism across the fulcrum, pairs of juxtaposed film segments cut back and forth, or individual segments swing between forward and reverse directions. The footage includes super8 home movies from the artists’ personal archives depicting modes of game and play; vintage film of early communications technology; and super8 footage created by the artists to suggest the long history of augmenting individual and communal memory by storing and transmitting information, from Native American knot games to the written word to sending email. The performance text weaves meaning into these media streams with conceptual explorations on the effects of mnemonic devices and the evolution of data storage technology, not just on memory but also on our sense of identity, place, and human connection. Toying with the use of rhyme and meter as memory aid, the text also re-imagines children’s rhymes for the cyber-age:
If 8 bits fit in a byte,
and a thousand bytes in 1K,
we can remember all we need to remember
until our data decays.
A million bytes in a meg,
a billion make up a gig,
if we upgrade our hard drives to fit them
our files won’t seem so big!
credits:
Christa Erickson: Installation design, website and online game, super-8 cinematography
Isa Gordon: Performance text and direction, web animations, super-8 cinematography
Richard Metzger: Engineering and programing
Kelly Phillips: Fabrication
Patricia Clark: Video documentation
Funded in Part by a Creative Research Fellowship from Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts
Below: excerpts from the live performance