ProseThetic Memories
Description
Artist Statement
ProseThetic Memories is a collaborative, fictocritical and cross-genre text which combines prose, poetry, cultural theory and philosophy. It challenges traditional ideas about memory as a process of storage and subsequent retrieval. Instead memory is seen as a dynamic process, in which the present constantly transforms our impression of the past and vice versa. In this way the very division of time into discrete past and present components is called into question. Important to the genesis of the piece was Freud's notion of Nachtraglichkeit, "afterwardsness", the idea that what is continually rewrites what has been. The concept of prosthesis is also central to the piece because collaboration is itself a prosthetic process, involving the adoption of others' memories and preoccupations, and because memory is always collective as well as individual.
Source of Artist Statement
ProseThetic Memories is a collaborative, fictocritical and cross-genre text which combines prose, poetry, cultural theory and philosophy. It challenges traditional ideas about memory as a process of storage and subsequent retrieval. Instead memory is seen as a dynamic process, in which the present constantly transforms our impression of the past and vice versa. In this way the very division of time into discrete past and present components is called into question. Important to the genesis of the piece was Freud's notion of Nachtraglichkeit, "afterwardsness", the idea that what is continually rewrites what has been. The concept of prosthesis is also central to the piece because collaboration is itself a prosthetic process, involving the adoption of others' memories and preoccupations, and because memory is always collective as well as individual.
Source of Artist Statement
Creator
Smith, Hazel
Brewster, Anne
Dean, Roger
Date
2001
Rights
Copyright Hazel Smith, Roger Dean and Anne Brewster. The copyright of images posted on the ADELTA Website belongs to third parties and is included on this website by permission from copyright holders. Apart from any use permitted by the Copyright Act 1968 (including fair dealing) the images may not be downloaded, adapted, remixed, printed, emailed, stored in a cache or otherwise reproduced without the written permission from the copyright holder.
Genre
Live coding/Performative multimedia work
Platform
QuickTime/Virtual reality modelling language
Citation
Smith, Hazel , Brewster, Anne, and Dean, Roger, “ProseThetic Memories,” ADELTA, accessed April 27, 2024, http://adelta.westernsydney.edu.au/items/show/213.