Presentations:
In Situ Multi Arts Festival: The Lost Edition. (Commissioned Artwork) March 2024
“so put your head near my temple and listen.
my head is like a stone at the cosmic
crossways
or of the cosmic torrent
here they are
the great silent black chariots of Meditation
are going to pass by. . .
and all will be silence “
Milosz, 1924
Memory machines: Tuning is an archival project exploring the entanglement of oral narratives and the physical storage devices within which these exist, age and percolate. Beyond an ornamentation of the archive, the project considers ways they move in the new machinic present and speak (again) within emerging systems of aesthetic immersion and poetic exchange. In an age that moves increasingly away from analog storage, what might a recalibration to the slowness and depth of ’vintage’ media reveal as treasured portals for the imagination in situ?
For this exhibition, we considered forms of ‘lost’ technologies as places where stories are rediscovered. Voice machines, tape recorders and cassettes collected from thrift stores, marketplaces, auction houses and donations are revived and brought in acoustic conversations with other machinic elements. Radios enacting a never-ending auto-tune attempt to locate stations in the ether that approach childhood memories of our urban space.
At the installation venue, the video plays a recorded conversation with ChatGPT over the backdrop of a drive through the Toronto neighbourhood, a place where the artist has recently relocated to. Questions such as “Find me a radio station that reminds me of conversations around the weather, growing up, and the future”, “Tell me about a radio channel that combines early morning journeys with dreamy memories of the day or night before” and “Do you feel nostalgia” probe at the existential tensions between personal memory and real-time processing of crowd-sourced data. In a society that increasingly outsources archives to AI-driven systems, how might we define bodily systems of retention and attune ourselves once again to our own multi-modal memories?
