Prótesis de memoria

On november 2023 I was invited by curators Marco Valtierra, Mayra Vineya and Manuel Vázquez Ortega to present a piece for an exhibition called “todo lo visto, todo lo hecho” which dealt with ideas of contemporary archive and the ways we produce visual matter on times of an ever-increasing ocular saturation.

 

With this in mind, I created a device intended to listen and to archive. To mimic the ways in which we remember: in non-linear ways, with blank spaces and interpretation biases.The device takes a continuous stream of audio samples, analises them, transforms and rearranges them, and creates a processed texture that is then returned into the soundscape. Parallel to this process, based on the analysis and cross referencing the audio samples with fixed data sets inside the device, this machine starts printing a generative poem around these ideas.

 

It was built with both a short-term and a long-term memory. The former is programmed for the continuous and immediate analysis of samples with information being overwritten constantly, while the second one is programmed to archive and backup 1 minute of audio for every hour that the device remains on. Thus, the device generates a sound file documenting its own existence.

 

On one hand, I was thinking about data mining and the consent (or lack of) to be mapped into an algorithm. On the other, I thought about the materiality of the contemporary archive, the ways to encode and safeguard the data, the access to the information, and how the landscape is rearticulated based on the data. Computing systems create banks of collective and decentralized memory, of holographic quality and replicative capacity.

 

Presented at the Raul Anguiano Museum (MURA), Guadalajara, México.

November 2023.