Architectures of Memory
p. 4-11
Texte intégral
So, just as in the preceding discussion we installed some sort of contraption in souls that we’d moulded out of wax, now let’s make a sort of aviary in every soul, containing birds of all different varieties, some of them in flocks separate from others, some in small groups, others flying about wherever it might be on their own in among them all.
- Plato, Theaetetus1 -
1The new memory palaces assume the form of complex architectures. They are our libraries, archives, and museums, constructed to conserve and enhance our heritage. They are also computing structures, databases made into ecosystems or server farms which feed the data flow on the network. While the practice of memory palaces is old, with their first mention found in Cicero’s De Oratore, the idea of structuring memory has never been more alive, and never more urgent. As beings of forgetfulness and distraction, we have surrounded ourselves with machines that call us to order and attention, with mobile devices that partake of our explorations by pairing us with a living encyclopedia, one that is easy to consult and always available. We now live like insects equipped with an exoskeleton, even if ours is not made of chitin but of bits of information, data that identify, inform, distract, and, increasingly, define us.
2Without entering into apocalyptic scenarios along the lines of Terminator or The Matrix, we are evolving within an electrified universe where information has become the preeminent commodity. Information technology is a singular development of the electrification of our lives. And we are now, it seems, on the threshold of a digital culture utterly dependent on the effectiveness of architectures of memory. Unsurprisingly, this topic comes to fore as soon as we reflect on the forms of the contemporary imagination and its cultural and artistic practices. For there is an ever-growing number of projects that rely on this shared information, on databases made public, that put the latter to use in their work, that interconnect, manipulate, reroute, and even reappropriate them. These are the complex symbolic forms born of multiple, and at times divergent, aesthetic endeavors.
3All memory involves an architecture. All memory is constructed. Without interconnections, without signposts, there can be no recollection. This is at the very heart of what defines us as subjects. How do we remember? How do we organize the elements of our memory? Do we use a diary, notes, photo albums? Do we follow the interwoven threads of our past experiences hoping they will put us on the right path to the engram we seek? Do we practice free association, attuned to the meanders of our own musement (a term first defined by C. S. Peirce)? Do we tap on our keyboard hoping our computer’s, or Google’s, search engine will provide us with our longed-for answer?
4Pascal Quignard, in a short book entitled Le nom sur le bout de la langue [The name on the tip of the tongue], recalls the well-known - and quite funny - scene of forgetting a word one was getting ready to use. He shows, however, that failures of memory even of the most basic kind can open the way to the greatest abyss and despair. To have forgotten a word, to have it on the tip of one’s tongue, is, he says, “an experience in which the forgetfulness of our humanity assails us.”2 The word on the tip of one’s tongue reminds us that memory is not a given, like breathing or sight, but a construction, with its limits and gray areas, its central pathways, its back alleys and dead ends, an architecture prone at any moment to recede into itself and reveal its failings.
5What is more, for Quignard, the function of memory isn’t storage but, above all, “the election, deduction, recollection, and return of a unique element from the lot of things stored. […] Memory is first of all a selection of what is to be forgotten and only then a retention of what one intends to remove from the grip of forgetfulness in which memory is grounded.”3 In other words, memory is less a container than a series of operations that organize and structure content.
6If forgetfulness is the threshold of rationality and consciousness, the purpose of architectures of memory is to give this threshold a role, to transform it from a mere boundary separating interior from exterior into an actual passage, into a space that can be explored and that leads to a place that is itself structured. Architectures of memory make data accessible, they insure the readability and therefore the meaning of data. Indeed, getting data to say something is one of the functions of architectures of memory. What has been retained and recorded, how has the integrity of the data been preserved, how do we structure the data so as not to lose them, so as to determine what they mean? Because data do not mean anything by themselves; they must be scrutinized.
7Databases are the new memory palaces, an active mnemonics that has gone from imaginary structures such as Plato’s aviary to actual architectures, whether their presence is implied or explicit. Databases are visible when we record documents on a disk, a hard drive, or a server. The development of microcomputing and graphics-centered computers has made handling information user-friendly and sometimes even enjoyable. Databases have become much less visible as they have become more numerous, complex, and disseminated over computer networks. Entering the term “architecture” on Google’s search engine returns around 3 billion results in 0.60 seconds. What does this figure represent? What kind of IT infrastructure is needed to carry out such a feat? The efficiency with which the results are given makes it easy to forget the data architecture at work, its peculiar structuring of information, its biases, or even its ultimate purpose. The glass palace has transformed into a black box whose inner workings are inscrutable. The current transitional period, which puts us at the crossroads of book culture and screen culture - or more specifically, networked screen-culture, in other words, the screen of a computer connected to a network - is gradually moving us from a graphic reason, as the anthropologist Jack Goody described it,4 to a computational reason, the counterpart term proposed by Bruno Bachimont. Just as writing engendered a particular mode of thought, where lists, tables, and graphs played a primary role in modeling forms of knowledge, Bachimont wonders if we aren’t observing a similar phenomenon with digital technology:
Graphic reason produced a classifying reason; computational reason produces thinking in networks and in predictive time. For graphic reason, the network is not a structure of intelligibility: the network, which because of its complexity withdraws from spatial synopsis, is a labyrinth where one loses oneself. It is a figure of the irrational, and not a way to think the world.5
8The rise of the network, of a vast cyberspace, brings about a particular kind of rationality that is based on calculation rather than writing. That is the only way to make the network intelligible. According to Bachimont, “calculation enables one to reduce complexity and to examine the whole set of possibilities created by the networks by means of programs that specify their behavior.”6 We can thus understand why architectures of memory, in their contemporary, essentially digital iteration, are at the core of a transformation of the human mind. It is still too early to determine the exact nature of the transformation, but it is important that we already sketch out the contours of the situation and explore those avenues that might enable us to delineate certain of its most salient features.
Structuring memory
9Speaking about architecture necessarily means speaking about construction, about a structure that was built, that exists and serves a function. This architecture was first imagined; it was projected onto a surface of inscription; it was created as a plan, which served as the starting point of a project. When this architecture brings a material like memory into play, we know that, beyond the machine, the servers, and the server farms that aggregate them, we are dealing with virtual, digital constructions. The edifice isn’t made of concrete and steel, wood and glass, but of information, computer data. It is an edifice of the intellect, maintained in electronic form. Information technology is electricity transformed into signifying matter.
10Now, once built, this imagined architecture becomes a living environment, a place for experience and creation. Projects multiply, endowing computational reason with virtual reality. Databases respond to functional and practical objectives, but they are also increasingly perceived as symbolic forms, at the heart of the representation and mobilization of knowledge. We increase their number, use them in artistic and cultural contexts, and put them to work to find new ways of telling stories or explaining phenomena. We also explore the vast architecture of memory that is the internet, sometimes looking to reappropriate its devices or platforms. And we also try to actively reflect on this architecture, seeking to understand how these new symbolic forms bring about change, how they transform our ways of being, behaving, and thinking. In what direction is screen-culture’s computational reason leading us?
11The structure of the present collection of essays is a product of this reality, of an architecture imagined, then constructed, used, even reappropriated, and ultimately put to the test and analyzed. On the one hand, these essays encourage us to think about the technology underlying architectures of memory, on the other, to reflect on the uses and consequences of these architectures. More specifically, their conceptual movement is threefold. For, first of all, it is a question of reflecting on the concrete technology that opens up certain possibilities, then of exploring artistic practices that actualize versions of these possibilities, and, finally, of offering analyses that endeavor to find a meaning in these practices through codes and interpretants.
12In the first section, “Elements of an Architecture,” we have brought together contributions that focus on certain aspects of this architecture of memory from a historical perspective in which the archeology of media provides the central framework. This type of archeology is less a formally constituted discipline than a field of research concerned with the economic, technological, social, and cultural developments in, and sometimes constraints on, the evolution of media. As Vincent Puig notes from the start, it is important to analyze the epistemological upheavals produced by digital technology on knowledge, skills, and ways of life. He calls for a new, digital episteme, developed on the basis of an archeology of media. Larisa Dryansky continues on the theme, also within the context of an archeology of media and space, as she explores Woody Vasulka’s pioneering work, in particular his Art of Memory, a video from 1987 that employs archival images with the help of then-new technological processes.
13George Legrady retraces his own explorations with digital photography, identifying certain milestones in the history of image processing. Throughout his artistic career, he has sought to explore the relationship between noise and signal and to incorporate noise as an aesthetic element. Emmanuel Guez, who has made the conservation and restoration of digital arts his primary object of study, playfully offers eleven summaries of forthcoming articles that are as many propositions for rethinking our relationship to technology in its many forms.
14The second section, “Guided Tours,” explores a series of projects for exhibitions and databases produced in physical space or online, sometimes in real and sometimes in virtual form. The first two texts comprise a diptych, including the contributions of the art historian and philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman and the artist and researcher Arno Gisinger. The authors revisit the genesis and stages of their joint project, which originated in the exhibition “Atlas: How to Carry the World on One’s Back?” created by Georges Didi-Huberman for the Reina Sofía Museum in Madrid. Their texts consider the historical and theoretical stakes related to image montages as a type of architecture of knowledge. The notion of Atlas features in their writing as a guiding light, its presence owing as much to Aby Warburg, whose atlas of images, Mnemosyne, was the source of their project, as to the dialectical thought of Walter Benjamin - whose notion of “dialectical images” was the driving force behind the exhibition.
15This diptych is followed by Frédéric Curien and Jean-Marie Dallet’s contribution. Working together as part of the artist collective SLIDERS_lab, they produce work that reimagines ways of writing and storytelling. They discuss the principles that have guided their practice, in which interactivity and hypertextuality play a preeminent role, and in which databases and algorithms represent two salient aspects of a new kind of aesthetics, an “info-aesthetics,”7 whose originality lies in envisioning new ways of shaping or modeling clickstreams within databases. In her essay, Marie-Laure Cazin explains how she developed emotive cinema. The latter is an interactive project wherein a film’s storyline changes according to viewers’ brainwaves, which are recorded by EEG (electroencephalogram) headsets and analyzed in terms of emotions. The author details how emotive cinema works and the effects of viewership. Finally, the section ends with a surprising figure of memory, the Japanese monster Godzilla, which first appeared following the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Patrick Nardin researched the various cinematic iterations of Godzilla and created a montage, Godzilla Reloaded, which is a truly apocalyptic memory palace.
16The third and last section, “The Use of Space,” offers more specifically aesthetic or critical analyses of the architectures of memory that currently frame our experience of the world. First, Olivier Asselin examines present-day methods for localizing memory. As he reminds us, memory is located within the architecture itself, and is accessible from an interface, but it is also located within a building complex, in a processing center or server farm, as well as in institutions that have converted their cultural assets into data. All these apparatuses combine to create a memory monster, the term at the center of Marie Fraser’s study. From the ancient ars memoria to today’s big data, the art historian provides an account of the schematization of memory to which memory’s representations have been made to conform. Imagining architectures of memory in digital culture must make time for Google and its research engine, as Bertrand Gervais does in his essay. The company enjoys a hegemonic position and the entirety of its projects may eventually redefine humanity itself.
17The final text of the collection, Pierre J. Truchot’s essay, turns to the question of memory and its unique architecture in the light of Henri Bergson’s writings. Truchot convincingly shows that the philosopher’s ideas remain highly relevant in the way that they conceive of memory in time and duration rather than space. This does nothing to invalidate the notion of memorial architecture but rather complements it by opening it up to a fourth dimension: time.
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18The essays of this collection also developed over time. If the book or the ebook are now their final iteration, the ideas communicated in it, prior to converging in a space constructed by the books’ pages, were at first words spoken during meetings and workshops. “Architectures of Memory” thus initially took the form of a series of academic and artistic events that took place in Montreal in November 2014 and later in Paris in December 2014 and November 2015. A colloquium of “resistance” was held for the final three-day meeting that took place just after the unspeakable attack at the Bataclan, November 13. Those responsible for the present work would like to thank the Labex Arts-H2H of Université Paris 8 for their support, as well as the library of Université Paris 8, the French National Archives, which supported the project from the beginning, the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de la Ville de Saint-Denis, IRI (Institut de Recherche et d’Innovation, Centre Pompidou), and Laboratoire AIAC (EA 4010); the Canada Research Chair in Digital Arts and Literature, Laboratoire NT2, as well as Figura, the Centre de Recherche sur le Texte et l’Imaginaire, all three part of the Université du Québec à Montréal.
19We would also like to thank Benoît Montigné, who oversaw the organization of the events in Paris and online communications, Emmanuelle Leduc, who handled a portion of the editorial work, as well as all of the participants who greatly enriched our discussions but were unable, for editorial reasons, to find a place in the present work.
Notes de bas de page
1 Plato, Theaetetus and Sophist, ed. Christopher Rowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 78.
2 Pascal Quignard, Le nom sur le bout de la langue (Paris: Gallimard, 1993), 57.
3 Ibid., 63-64.
4 Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
5 Bruno Bachimont, “Formal Signs and Numerical Computation: Between Intuitionism and Formalism. Critique of Computational Reason,” trans. Benjamin Carter, Theatrum Scientiarum, Vol. 2. Instruments in Art and Science: On the Architectonics of Cultural Boundaries in the 17th Century, eds. Helmar Schramm, Ludger Schwarte, and Jan Lazardzig (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 376. (Translation modified.)
6 Ibid. (Translation modified.)
7 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001), 217.
Auteurs
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Bertrand Gervais
Canada Research Chair in Digital Arts and Literature as well as Director of NT2, a research lab on hypermedia art launched in 2004. Founder and director (1999-2015) of Figura, Research Center on Text and the Imaginary, he is a professor in the Department of Literary Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal. He has published essays on reading, American literature, the imagination, and digitality, as well as novels and short stories. His latest essay, Un défaut de fabrication. Élégie pour la main gauche, published by Boréal (2014), was a finalist for the Canadian Governor General’s Award. In 2018, he released an essay, cowritten with five other researchers, entitled Soif de réalité. Plongées dans l’imaginaire contemporain. His latest novel, La Dernière guerre, was published in 2017 by XYZ in Montreal.
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Jean-Marie Dallet
Artist, theorist, and curator, as well as Associate Professor at Université Paris 8 Vincennes and a researcher in the research lab AIAC (EU 4010). His theoretical and artistic work examines the fundamental issues and key figures of interactivity (La Notion de figures dans les arts interactifs, Université Paris 8, 2001), placing technology and its critique at the heart of his aesthetic and intellectual interests (Labex Arts-H2H, program “Architectures de mémoire,” 2013-2016). He has supervised the production of the CD-ROM La Troisième Biennale de Lyon (RMN, 1995) and recently served as editor to the book Cinéma, interactivité et société (CNRS & Université de Poitiers, 2013), which contextualizes new forms of the movement-image within broader technological and societal changes. In January 2019, he was the curator of the exhibition “Living Memories,” which focuses on early video art by observing how experimentations by pioneers of the form still nourish present-day artists, sometimes unwittingly.
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