| Most art is about memory in a way that doesn’t deserve elaboration. Art simply records. But there is a more profound truth at work. Art elevates aspects of life to make it unforgettable. This memorial Memory though becomes a troubling social and personal domain when we can alter |
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Haydn Shaughnessy on Scott Kildall
Most art is about memory in a way that doesn’t deserve elaboration.
Art simply records. But there is a more profound truth at work.
Art elevates aspects of life to make it unforgettable. This memorial
function is becoming obsoltte as the machine, the computer, rememebrs more and more for us.
Memory though becomes a troubling social and personal domain when we can alter
segments of our lives by reliving them virtually.
When the machine remembers everything for us
what impulses remain to elevate life and
to engage in the memorial activity that stimulates creativity?
Artists that use computing technology in pro-mnemonic ways inhabit a
uniquely intriguing space. Nathaniel Stern, whose compressionist
works captured by a mobilised scanner, restored in Photoshop and then
output to paper via a growing variety of print techniques explicitly
references Impressionist and post-Impressionist masters in his work.
Apart from providing new insights into the shape and structure of
physical objects and the fragmented chain of reason between data and
light, Stern clearly believes it is time for technology to serve the
cause of continuity rather than disruption, ironic given the
technologists’ mantra is to creative disruptive forces.
Scott Kildall is equally the new poet of memory. His Uncertain
Location series, an interactive installation that begins as a re-
enactment of the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar landing, is an explicit
statement about who controls memory and how we can intervene to first
play publicly with memory. This device is reminiscent of oral poets
whose verses simultaneously pay homage to a specific social order and
subvert it, and then to restate events and put into circulation a
false but allegedly accurate record.
Kildall created Uncertain Location directly after his Paradise Ahead
series of prints and the link between the two is this link between
allegations concerning the historical record and the new ability to re-enact history
virtually. Paradise Ahead is a series of enactments of iconic moments
in the history of contemporary art through the lens of Second Life.
Kildall’s play with memory is compounded by these performances taking
place in Second Life, the virtual online community where people
become their avatars. The idea of recreating moments in the history
of art is a step further along a line of inquiry that asks how people
might use the increasing opportunities that now exist for rewriting
one’s life by living in imagined worlds – but not just in imagined
worlds.
Though Kildall re-enacts the history of contemporary art in Second
Life there are now abundant opportunities for people to become
narrators and the novelists of their own altered biographies. It is
possible for example to set up Wikipedia pages that gloss one’s past,
to create blogs that give an allegedly accurate view of ones views
and activities but which can be wholly untrue yet be surrounded by
the ephemera of credibility and there is Second Life itself where
people are deploying various strategies to be what they are not, not
least men who are becoming women and women who are now virtual men.
Considerations about altered memory are important for a number of
reasons: politically – Governments routinely manage memories and now
we have a similar power; socially – agreement on common memory has
always been difficult to reach and disagreement is therefore critical
to social dialectics; artistically – what role do artists want to
claim in modern memory management; phenomenologically – are we
reaching the stage when the fantasy of ourselves, our dream, is the
reality; even economically – in the creative economy developing
fantasies and allowing people the means to engage in fantasy is of
critical competitive importance.
With these many parameters ahead of him Kildall has made an important
start with Uncertain Location in signaling that memory is a contest
between competing powers among whom we can now count the average,
educated, creative citizen.
With Paradise Ahead he also laid down a marker by pointing to a
future where the historical record becomes a thing of play, an
integral part of the future economy of ideas, a creative distraction
but also a gainful one.
To understand the importance of this it is worth reflecting briefly
on accounts of the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Rarely has an
area of memory been so hotly contested between Governments and
interest groups; rarely has that contest created so many credible
alternatives. In the Vietnam War there was an official account of how
American forces were progressing which gradually suffered diminution
and then finally lost credibility. In Iraq there is not so much a
question about the veracity of anybody’s account, more a contest over
whose account matters. The result is a kind of stalemate as we
accustom ourselves to multiple, mutually coexisting narratives.
What this signals and Scott Kildall’s work illustrates is that when
you can believe what you want the plain truth the truth will never be
simple again.
—
Haydn Shaughnessy
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